I went somewhere I had not been in a good, long while - Dale Dyke Reservoir to the north west of the city. It takes about twenty minutes to drive out there. The last three miles are narrow lanes where meeting vehicles need to slow right down to get past each other.
The unremarkable reservoir sits peacefully in the cleft of a valley but once its name was infamous across the kingdom.
The torrent thundered to the nearby village of Low Bradfield before surging down The Loxley Valley towards Hillsborough and The Wicker in Sheffield city centre. Along the way, 600 homes were destroyed, fifteen bridges and several work places. More than 240 people were killed, many through drowning.
The Great Sheffield Flood was the biggest civilian disaster of the Victorian period in Great Britain. It occurred on the night of March 11th 1864. In its aftermath, many changes to reservoir and dam construction occurred. Important lessons had been learnt.
Today, with boots on, I circled Dale Dyke Reservoir. In places the perimeter path was muddy as hell and I had to pick my way carefully through those sections. However, it was a delight to walk beneath a blue sky once again.
The duck reflection is so perfect, with the water as still as a mirror.
ReplyDelete240 plus deaths, 600 homes destroyed. Poorest people in Sheffield.
ReplyDeleteNo compensation. The poor had no lawyers.
Marian Pallister's book *Not A Plack the Richer - Argyll's Mining Story*
described the death by drowning of her great-grandfather and a coal mines'
inspector, when their pit was flooded deep underground.
Our ancestors worked till they dropped or died prematurely and are forgotten.
Pretty sure there was a scheme for compensation, but the kicker was that it was funded by permitting the company to increase the water rates by 25% for 25 years. So the people of Sheffield chipped in to fund their own compensation. Otherwise the water company would have gone bust.
Delete(https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukla/Vict/27-28/324/enacted - section 104)
What a tragedy that the dam broke. Your walk around the present day reservoir gives us a good reminder of the tragedy,
ReplyDeleteThat's a sad bit of history to know about. The duck picture and the reservoir pics are nice.
ReplyDeleteIt's horrible to think that every safety measure we have today came because of the deaths of those who came before us.
ReplyDeleteIt is a wonder that the flood hasn't been covered by one of the YouTube disaster channels. The reason could be a dearth of official paperwork. Ok, I've just looked and it has been, but not by anyone I follow. 240 people killed is rather a lot.
ReplyDeleteThat weak dose of vitamin D will do you a power of good.
It seems strange that I did not comment on your 2010 post, as I was sure you'd written about this catastrophe before, and I knew about it from another post of yours and from my Uncle Brian who took my sister and me on a day out to High Bradfield, from where we walked to the reservoir in 2014. That old post of mine is here:
ReplyDeletehttps://librarianwithsecrets.blogspot.com/2014/08/sunday-in-bradfield-part-ii.html
Looks like a glorious day!
ReplyDeleteA great walk and an important reminder of history. Always live on the high ground.
ReplyDeleteThat duck picture is amazing. The color on the reflection is so different than the sun-drenched duck sitting above. Terrific!
ReplyDeleteA walk remembered ….2002
ReplyDeleteI've read loads on the Great Sheffield Flood but I too am constantly surprised as to how many have never heard of it. Maybe if there was something in the city centre to tell the story?
ReplyDeleteThere's a great chapter (chapter 8) in A W Simpson, "Leading cases in the common law" in which the Sheffield disaster features as the worst of a number of burst dam cases in the nineteenth century. (There is also a fascinating chapter about duck decoy ponds - the owner of such a pond successfully sued a neighbour who was letting off guns to scare the ducks away.) I can recommend the book as a whole as an accessible book about legal history (often pretty boring) in its wider factual context.
ReplyDeleteYears ago I picked up at a rural second-hand book barn the autobiography of one Victor Heiser which starts with an arresting account of his experience of the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania which caused circa 2,200 deaths. I've often thought it should have been anthologized for use in schools, and who knows, maybe it has been. Heiser has a kind of folksy style which reminds me of Thurber in his autobiographical mode (though without the humour).
And then there's Eric Coates' jaunty and popular Dambusters' Marcht. It is maybe too easy to overlook, while whistling and tapping along to it, that (relying lazily here on google AI) "The May 16-17, 1943, Dambusters raid (Operation Chastise) caused an estimated 1,200 to 1,600 civilian and prisoner-of-war deaths, primarily through flooding in the Ruhr Valley. The breaching of the Möhne and Eder dams caused widespread devastation, killing hundreds of forced laborers from the Soviet Union, Poland, and Belgium."