The great floods of 1947
Britain is no world-beater when it comes to flood prevention and control, but the country has few equals in putting up memorials to great soakings of the past. Everywhere from York to Gloucester via London, notched poles mark the riversides, engraved with historic high-water levels. Prominent on them all is the date 1947, the benchmark year in living memory for every subsequent flood.
Back then, the country, still dazed by the aftermath of war, was gripped by an iron winter and the biggest snowfall anyone could remember. Hundreds of villages were marooned, trains were buried in drifts and queues formed at gasworks during powercuts to fill sacks with coke for fires at home. Then, on March 7, a thaw began in the least helpful way possible. An inch of rain fell in a few hours and could not soak into the still icy ground. Snowmelt followed rapidly and the big rivers rose by a foot an hour. At Windsor, where water streamed off the Great Park "as if off a slate roof", according to royal officials, the borough engineer Geoffrey Baker lamented bluntly, "We could only cope if we had a spare Thames, or two."
Flood defences were pitiful by today's standards and this summer's victims, such as Gloucester and Tewkesbury, became rivers almost at once. Valleys turned into lakes in 40 counties and East Anglia's fens were a sandbagged inland sea. More than 100,000 properties were damaged - at least twice this year's toll - and, then as now, heroic battles were fought by the military to keep water-pumping plants and power stations dry. There was no internet but the sense of crisis was felt worldwide. Canada sent food parcels to stricken villages in Suffolk; the prime minister of Ontario even offered to help dish them out. Relief work in Gloucester was aided by volunteers from the Australian Red Cross.
The floods hit north, south and the flatlands in between, where towns such as Long Eaton, near Nottingham, had just seen furious recriminations about flooding the previous year. No sooner had the town council agreed on warnings from loudspeaker vans and the purchase of six punts and a store of disinfectant for future crises, than the river Trent was rising by a foot an hour. Down the railway line at Nottingham, trains docked like tramp steamers at the city station, taking passengers from platforms which were islands in the flood.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/jul/25/weather.flooding1