112
THE GREAT STORM OF MIDSUMMER DAY,
1897.
[With Map.]
HAILSTORMS of considerable severity are by no means
infrequent in Britain ; a long list of such calamities
could readily be compiled ; but happily few are recorded in
our annals equalling in destructive effects that which raged
over Mid-Essex and in a small part of Bedfordshire on the
afternoon of June 24th last1. In Essex within the present
century two storms only can in any way be compared with it
—namely, the hailstorm of July 14th, 1824, which did damage
to the extent of £15,000 in the parishes of Hatfield Broad
Oak, Takeley, Tilty, Canfield, Broxted, Stanstead, Elsenham,
Little Easton, and Henham ; and the hailstorms which com-
menced on July nth, 1872, and continued in succession for
three days, inflicting the greatest injury in the neighbourhood
of Colchester, Tiptree, Messing, Easthorpe, Copford, Stanway,
Lexden, &c. : the whole of the crops (valued at £10,000) on
an area of 18,000 acres are stated to have been destroyed.
But these historical storms sink into comparative insignificance
beside our recent Essex disaster ; when the flourishing crops
of some of the most fertile part of Essex, growing on a band
of country of perhaps 8 or 10 miles broad, extending from
Epping through Ongar, Chelmsford, to Colchester, were in
some places utterly, and in others partially, destroyed, while
glass in greenhouses and window panes by thousands were
smashed, and great destruction wrought on trees, wild and
domestic animals and birds. As the Times special corres-
pondent remarked, "A more delightful pictures of smiling
plenty cannot be conceived than that which central Essex
presented a few minutes before 3 o'clock on the Thursday
afternoon. In less than 20 minutes the whole of that happy
prospect was utterly destroyed, and the crops were as com-
pletely gone as with last winter's snow. It sounds incredible,
but it is strictly and precisely true." Mr. Symons makes a
low estimate when he writes that over about 100 square miles
(one-fifteenth of the County) the prospects of harvest have
been swept away. "Granting that over only half that area is
1 But it is to be noted that the Bedfordshire storm may have had no direct connection
with the Mid-Essex one; see post.