Tooting’s Great Storm Of 1914
June 14, 2024
By Paul Homewood
110 years ago today, much of SW London was hit by what was called The Great Storm.
Tooting was hit with floods, as the above photos show, an event still remembered today.
The Met Office report for the month highlighted how much rain fell in such a short period over much of London. There was also extreme rainfall in other parts of the country.
Note also the serious railway accident in Inverness four days later.
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The accident, which killed five people, occurred when a bridge collapsed over a stream following heavy rain:
https://www.railwaysarchive.co.uk/eventsummary.php?eventID=83
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Impressive thunder storms in North London too. When I lived in Newington Green Road (late 70s) I remember a river flowing down Essex Road after one such.
Off on a bit of a tangent Nigel, but recall that record breaking temperature at Brogdale back in 2003? I found a Met Office report about it here.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/uk-past-events/interesting/2003/hot-spell—august-2003—met-office.pdf
Leaving aside the skullduggery that was well known at the time locally! I find it very enlightening that they chose to compare Faversham’s data with some quite remote units and totally failed to even mention a very well sited and maintained one just under 6 radial miles away. The University of London former Wye agricultural college had a site running from 1907 to 2006. You can still see it on the latest google streetview image. The site was probably CIMO Class 1 with no artificial structures, roadways, shading or anything problematical at all anywhere near it. Now having managed to get access to its data I found the big problem was that it recorded a temperature 4º cooler than Faversham. Quelle surprise!
Maybe it is down to something like sandy soil (Faversham) and grass (Wye), or maybe a South facing slope at the former.
Records will always be statistical soundbites, they need to be put in context by statistical analysis.
Not much sandy soil at Faversham, brickearth, London clay, silt, chalk mainly (hence artesian well at brewery).
https://geologyviewer.bgs.ac.uk/
Thanet Formation – Sand, silt and clay. Sedimentary bedrock formed between 59.2 and 56 million years ago during the Palaeogene period.
and
Head – Gravel, sand, silt and clay. Sedimentary superficial deposit formed between 2.588 million years ago and the present during the Quaternary period.
I remember it well, fresh lime plaster at St Peter’s, Oare (Grade 1) cracked, I had to redo a day’s engineering calculations because my brain was so fried and the dogs refused to go out for a walk any later than 0600. Brogdale result probably dubious but we enjoyed sticking it to Gravesend (their site probably even more dubious).
To climanrecon, it was well known, locally, that the Faversham figure was “doctored”. Philip Eden of the RMS personally investigated concluding that it was too dubious to be considered a record stating intervention by “persons unknown” could not be ruled out. Photographs in his report from the site visit a few weeks later still showed much of the building materials that a few local rascals had deliberately wheeled around the screen to “warm” it up a bit for a laugh. This explained why the high was recorded later in the afternoon than elsewhere. The figures of the days before and after were of quite a different order to the 10th August and bore no relationship to the previously compared sites.
It seems to me that the Met Office really did not want the Gravesend (Broadness) site to hold the record. Why? Because that site was an out and out abomination of a Met Office site and it was easily visible to be queried. The screen was co-located in a compound with the cooling exhausts from the Thames Radar transmitter. It was quietly closed down in 2018 to hide any more embarrassment.
I know the site at Brogdale well, there was a Leylandii (conifer), windbreak only a few yards away on the westerly side. These type of windbreaks were to make the microclimate warmer.
Looking back to historic weather events like this does rather show how generally benign the current range of weather actually is. Rather than the continual drip feed of catastophism we are currently being subjected to, it rather seems it’s more like we’ve never had it so good.
I remember the Lewisham flood of 1968. https://qwag.org.uk/remembering-lewishams-1968-floods-and-lessons-50-years-on/ It came suddenly.
The storm appears to have been caused by an Atmospheric River.
They are always observed during periods of higher temperatures, and the Central England Instrumental Temperatures Data Set shows a spike in temperatures between 1913-1915. (Hadcrut5 shows an increase of 0.3 deg. C for that period).
An interesting fact: since most rivers remain fairly constant in their water flow it must rain roughly the same flow of water, plus the net amount lost to evaporation before the water gets to the rivers.
“Atmopheric Rivers” are just that. They are discrete bands of water vapor in the atmosphere, and show up in satellite images. The moisture is released in apparently random torrents of rain.
There must have been a hell of a lot of cars on the road at that time to cause such devastation!
Fake news!!
Tooting, the gateway to Balham.