Skegness Magazine

THE lions in Butlin’s Amusement Park, near the Skegness seafront, were unusually noisy as we boarded the Skegness Town FC coach bound for Grimsby. Their roaring could be heard all over town.
As a very young reporter working for a local weekly newspaper at that time, it was my special privilege to accompany loyal supporters who travelled with the team to away matches.
The match this day was with a Grimsby Town X1 – the host club’s third string – so the venue was not the grand football stadium of Blundell Park but a less attractive practice pitch in the outlying area of Peake’s Lane.
On arrival in Grimsby, the long walk down a path to get to the ground was
uncomfortable in the teeth of a gale-force wind. I had arranged to meet my 80-years-old grandfather, who lived in Grimsby, at the football ground; we watched the match together. The day was to live in the memory for well over 50 years, and for more than one reason.
I learned later that granddad developed pneumonia from those inclement weather conditions and was laid low for a while. But he was a tough octogenerian, used to working on Grimsby docks in all weathers, and he recovered to live another ten years.
The result of the match is forgotten by me, the strength of the wind probably made whatever it was unfair…in any case it was to pale into insignificance by later events.
The best thing about going to Grimsby on football jaunts was the fact that it was the best fishing port in the world. Coach passengers were guaranteed a first class fish and chip supper after the match. We therefore set off on the journey back to Skegness with tums feeling full and their owners well satisfied with at least one aspect of the trip.

It was well dark by the time we got home and the coach took us along the seafront as it stopped at various points to let people off. The shock came when we reached the resort’s famous Clock Tower on the seafront. It was then realised the evening’s tide had come in several hundred yards further than usual.
The date was 31st January 1953 – an earth-shattering date, never-to-be-forgotten by a 17-years-old journalist who during the following morning, when January tipped over into February, had to galvanize himself to witness sights he had never seen before.
I cycled the four miles to Ingoldmells Point and watched police and council officials loading bodies into rowing boats requisitioned from the Boating Lake and covered by tarpaulin. There were so many tragic stories to follow up, not least one about an elderly woman who returned to her bungalow to put more coal on the fire in her grate, just at the time the tide swept in and drowned her.
The death toll mounted with every hour, to total more than 300 along our own East Coast and four times that number across the other side of the North Sea.
My editor, a former Royal Navy Lieutenant Commander and chairman of the
Skegness Lifeboat Committee, had wartime experience of minesweepers and was an expert on tides. He knew all about tidal surges and predicted that this could happen one day, just the way it did. I remember him saying that the tide that night was not unusually high, but was backed by strong south-westerly winds.
With today’s technology in communications, most of those deaths could have been prevented by warning and evacuation.
Among the many questions being asked after the event was how a holiday camp managed to open to visitors two months after the floods, rumours circulating suggested that tide marks in the chalets were painted over.
For the record: Skegness Clock Tower provided the high water mark for the resort that evening. Only the foreshore was under water, so Skegness was lucky compared to other areas on the East Coast. Not so lucky Ingoldmells, where the 17 people drowned were among 41 who lost their lives between Mablethorpe and Skegness. More than 5,000 people were made homeless in the same area.

And what of those lions? Did they know and understand something that we didn’t?

Written by, and copyright of,  Peter Hopper, Ipswich.

Videos of the 1953 Floods in Skegness and Lincolnshire – password ’skegness’

We are again indebted to Peter Hopper for sharing his memories of the Skegness Floods 1953 with us. Peter was a journalist for the Skegness News in the 1950s and reported on the Dambusters Filmed in Skegness news story.