Most of those killed were buried or crushed by the broken fragments and rubbish of falling stacks of chimneys or walls. The fall of brick walls made a serious item in the losses. At Greenwich Park several pieces of the wall were down for a hundred rods at a place; the palace of St. James’s was greatly damaged; the roof of the guard-house at Whitehall blown off, seriously hurting nine soldiers; the lead stripped off and rolled up like parchment from scores of churches and public buildings, including Westminster Abbey and Christ Church Hospital. “It was very remarkable,” Defoe notes, “that the bridge over the Thames [i.e., Old London Bridge] received so little damage, the buildings standing high and not sheltered by other erections, as they would be in the streets. Above a hundred elms, some of them said to have been planted by Wolsey, were blown down in St. James’s Park. Very fortunately the storm was succeeded by fine weather: for had rain or snow followed, the misery and damage to hundreds and hundreds of tenants would have been fearfully increased.”
At Stowmarket, in Suffolk, one of the largest spires—100 feet high above the steeple—was completely carried away, with all its heavy timbers and an immense quantity [pg 208]of lead. So in Brenchly and Great Peckham, Kent, the former doing damage to the church and porch as it fell, and entailing a total loss of £800 to £1,000, which would represent much more in these days. “The cathedral church of Ely,” said one of Defoe’s correspondents, “by the providence of God, did, contrary to all men’s expectations, stand out the shock, but suffered very much in every part of it, especially that which is called the body of it, the lead being torn and rent up a considerable way together; about 40 lights of glass blown down and shattered to pieces; one ornamental pinnacle, belonging to the north aisle, demolished; and the lead in divers other parts of it blown up into great heaps. Five chimneys falling down in a place called the Colledge, the place where the prebendaries’ lodgings are, did no other damage (prais’d be God!) than beat down some part of the houses along with them. The loss which the church and college of Ely sustained being, by computation, near £2,000.” Accounts of nearly irretrievable damage done to valuable painted church windows, for one of which—at Fairford, Gloucester—£1,500 had been offered, came from many points. In some cases the lead blown from roofs, amounting to tons in weight, was so tightly rolled up that it took a number of men to unroll it without cutting or other damage.
The Bishop of Bath and Wells was killed under rather remarkable circumstances. The palace was the relic of a very old castle, only one corner of it being modernised for his lordship’s use. Had the bishop slept in the new portion his life would have been spared; but he remained in one of the older apartments. Two chimney-stacks fell and crushed in the roof, driving it upon the bishop’s bed, forcing it quite through the next floor into the hall, and burying both himself and lady in the rubbish. The former appears to have risen, perhaps perceiving the approaching danger, and was found, with his brains dashed out, near a doorway.
One of the most remarkable cases of the power of the wind ashore was the removal of a stone of four hundredweight, which lay sheltered under a bank, to a distance of seven yards. On the Kingscote estate, in Gloucester, 600 trees, all about eighty feet in height, were thrown down within a compass of five acres. The storm was accompanied by thunder and lightning and waterspouts. A clergyman, writing from Besselsleigh, says:—“On Friday, the 26th of November, in the afternoon, about four of the clock, a country fellow came running to me, in a great fright, and very earnestly entreated me to go and see a pillar, as he called it, in the air in a field hard by. I went with the fellow, and when I came found it to be a spout marching directly with the wind; and I can think of nothing I can compare it to better than the trunk of an elephant, which it resembled—only much bigger. It was extended to a great length, and swept the ground as it went, leaving a mark behind. It crossed a field, and, which was very strange (and which I should scarce have been induced to believe had I not myself seen it, besides several countrymen, who were astonished at it, meeting with an oak that stood towards the middle of the field, snapped the body of it asunder. Afterwards, crossing a road, it sucked up the water that was in the cart-ruts. Then, coming to an old barn, it tumbled it down, and the thatch that was on the top was carried about by the wind, which was then very high and in great confusion. After this I followed it no farther, and therefore saw no more of it, but a parishioner of mine, going from hence to Hincksey, in a field [pg 209]about a quarter of a mile off of this place, was on the sudden knocked down and lay upon the place till some people came by and brought him home; and he is not yet quite recovered.” An earthquake is also said to have followed the great storm.
Enough has now been written to show how universal were the effects of this terrible gale. The details, as recorded by Defoe and others, would fill several chapters like the present. The author of “Robinson Crusoe” puts, as we have seen, the loss of life partly on land but principally by sea, at 8,000, but a French authority places it at the enormous number of 30,000! It can well be believed that a large proportion of the casualties were never reported or recorded.
A LIFE-BOAT GOING OUT.
GREATHEAD’S LIFE-BOAT.