Charlotte Cane, Malcolm Saville and the floods of 1947

Charlotte Cane, the Liberal Democrat MP for Ely and East Cambridgeshire, has been elected chair of the all-party parliamentary group for sustainable flood and drought management, reports the Ely Standard.

And it's no wonder that she takes an interest in such matters. As Cambridgeshire Live once described, the freezing winter of 1946/7 was followed by something worse:

Swollen by torrential rain, the onset of a rapid thaw, and unusually high spring tides, all the major rivers burst their banks, inundating farmland, roads and homes.

A vast area of land was swamped, half of it prime arable land desperately needed to supply a population only just freed from the grip of war. Sowings of winter wheat and vast quantities of potatoes were submerged.

In the low lying areas close to the Great Ouse, Welland and Nene, the floodwater tore huge breaches in the river banks, and hundreds of families were made homeless. The sheer force of the water smashed fences, knocked down doors and destroyed walls, even those made of brick.

Thousands of pigs, cattle, sheep and poultry were swept away too – but miraculously no human lives were lost.

Local people were joined by Army men – and prisoners-of-war – in battling to keep the water at bay, but could do little to prevent further damage. Many of the embankments had been established way back in the 17th century by the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden as part of the vast fenland drainage project.

Perhaps because of this miraculous preservation of human life, I sense that the floods of 1947 have faded from popular memory in the way that the East Coast floods of 1953 haven't.

But those of us who grew up on Malcolm Saville will know all about them, because his book The Luck of Sallowby was set in the Isle of Ely against the background of these floods.

So here is Saville in mid-season form:

Now they were close against the wall they saw it was only a few inches higher than the rising water which stretched before them in a turbulent brown lake, whipped into waves by the gale. And these waves beat against the wall ceaselessly and the spray from them blew over the top and drenched the bags and settled in pools on the tarpaulins and made the blue clay slimy and almost unmanageable.

The sky was full of rain again but they knew now that even if it did not rain in the Fens the danger was coming from the water which fell many miles away in the Midlands and in Bedfordshire, and that the swollen rivers were still rushing down to the plain while the wind which fretted these floods into the banks, made a menace which it was very hard to fight.

So they worked on with them men, laughing and joking with them, until a shout and disturbance about fifty yards away broke the rhythm of their toil. They looked round to see that the water had found a weakness in the wall and was gushing through the cracks between the bags like a fountain. There was another similar leak nearer to them on their other side, and now the gangs plastered these leaks with clay without waiting to bag it.

Reader's voice: Have you by any chance written something about Saville's books recently?

Liberal England replies: Funny you should ask. You can read my Malcolm Saville and the children’s holiday adventure over on Lion & Unicorn.