The New Murrey and Blue blog

Today, 16 October, in 1987 something happened that most of us who are old enough will remember very clearly. Overnight we’d endured the raging of a terrible storm (see here, here and here). The resultant destruction of property and trees meant that Sevenoaks in Kent no longer had its famous seven oaks!

In the Country Life link above I found the following from Bob Ogley, editor of the Sevenoaks Chronicle: “…The night before, the landlord of my local pub had showed me his barometer and told me not to walk home through the woods. I didn’t realise then that I was going to be the last person to see trees standing on Toys Hill. By morning, they were all gone….In the morning, I climbed and crawled the four miles to the newspaper office in Sevenoaks, the town completely cut off by fallen trees. My reporters greeted me with ‘Welcome to One Oak’….”

Well, it wasn’t the only time the oak trees of this part of England (not Sevenoaks specifically) had been blown down like skittles. Back in 1390 there was another storm and on that occasion one hundred oaks were obliterated at Eltham.

Now, I knew of this earlier storm of 1390 because the recollection was lurking in the recesses of my increasingly dodgy memory, and I needed to find the information again. Why? Because of my quest to find out precisely what Chaucer happened to be doing in that year. So I decided to dig out all I could about the 1390 storm. I knew the necessary information was somewhere in all my “stuff”, but the actual whereabouts proved elusive. Believe me, such searches are exercises in how to drive yourself ga-ga pdq.

The first thing I found was the following brief mention in this link: “….[The storm] caused damage along the Thames and he [Chaucer] was appointed to a commission for walls and ditches….”

Well, I eventually ran the main storm information to ground in The Life and Times of Chaucer by John Gardner: “….[On 5 March 1390] a violent freak storm struck before dawn, terrifying the populace and smashing in houses, barns and hedges. It had blown down more than a hundred oaks at Eltham, just south of Greenwich, and caused extensive flooding and damage to bridges, walls and drains. The business of Chaucer’s commission was to determine what landholders were responsible for repairs, and to bring judgement against any whose careless upkeep of their waterways had contributed to the damage. Chaucer’s appointment to this job of inspecting damaged waterworks, determining such matters as which ruined watergates were rotten before the storm struck, shows plainly that he was considered an authority on these things….”

I imagine there were a few people in a sweat about what he’d find! Anyway, from the above extract you can see that Eltham in 1390 must have resembled Sevenoaks in 1987.

Eltham was once one of the most favoured royal palaces, much resorted to by the likes of Edward III and Richard II. Its situation was convenient and its atmosphere peaceful. It remained popular, so that by the end of the Tudors it had become a considerable huddle of tall buildings squeezed into the same moat-enclosed site, as you can see below.

It’s hard to imagine that by 1781 all that remained was the great hall, as painted by Paul Sandby:

I took both above images from this site which has some excellent illustrations.

Footnote: My personal memory of the 1987 storm was lying awake t through the night of 15/16 October, listening to the fearsome racket outside and wondering if the house would emulate the one in The Wizard of Oz. My husband slept like a baby, perhaps because I’d closed the bedroom window that he always wanted open. He woke up next to me and grizzled about the closed window. Enough, I thought, having listened to him snoring contentedly all night. So I flung the window open and nearly blew him out of the bed. When I closed the window again he didn’t say a word.

But someone with a very different memory of that 1987 night was the BBC weatherman Michael Fish, who on the evening of 15 October had gone to great (and rather amused) lengths to reassure the nation not to worry about a possible hurricane. Oh, dear. Living it down proved impossible for him. You can read about his blooper here.

No doubt in 1390 there was some cheerful medieval chappie whose pain-free big toe led him to pooh-pooh the storm moments before it hit!