Introduction

Summary

This volume presents a collection of documents concerning the 1953 east coast sea floods, prepared by P.J.O. (John) Trist, who was employed by the National Agricultural Advisory Service (NAAS) of the Ministry of Agriculture (MAF) as county advisory officer (CAO) for East Suffolk from 1946 until his retirement in 1971. Following the 1953 sea floods, Trist planned and organised the recovery of agricultural land in East Suffolk. In June of that year, he was awarded officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in recognition of his ‘services during the recent floods in the Eastern Counties’.

In 1962 the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) compiled an internal report on the effects of the 1953 sea floods on agriculture, prepared by a working party set up by the main advisory committee on sea flooded land. Written in two parts, the report first discusses the disaster: the impact on agricultural land, emergency measures, and government assistance for farming. The second part records the work undertaken to measure, monitor, and mitigate the effects of sea flooding and to restore land to productivity. The report (which was not in public circulation) is the only record for agriculture that covers all six counties that were significantly affected by the 1953 floods.

Trist was a prominent member of the working party responsible for that report. He wrote the first part and he collated national statistics for livestock and farm stock losses, and for acreages of flooded agricultural land. By way of introduction, he described the storm that disturbed the state of the sea and caused the unprecedented surge tide in 1953. He wrote that:

The floods of February 1953, which inundated large areas of land on the east coast of Britain, were the outcome of an exceptional combination of meteorological conditions. Abnormally low barometric pressures developed off the north coast of Scotland and were centred in a depression which on the last day of January, moved in a southeasterly direction reaching Denmark by nightfall. During this time a northerly gale of record severity developed, and combined with a moderate spring tide, produced a surge of water in the North Sea which bore down on the coast of Britain and the Netherlands, breached the sea defences and invaded the coastal land.