Things You Find In Books - Hurricanes and Destruction

The county directories issued by White's and Kelly's are a great source of information for anyone wishing to study local history in the nineteenth century, so I was pleased recently when a couple of 1960's facsimile copies turned  up in a large batch of books.

Both counties are local to me, which made them particularly interesting, and as always the content was fantastic to read. However as these are large and heavy books they also had plenty of little cuttings stored within the pages, along with the normal pressed flowers.

One article in particular provoked a few memories as it was a local newspaper report on the great storm of 1987 and the destruction that it caused to the local forest.

Undoubtedly the storm is most famous for the unfortunate comment from the weather forecaster who declared that a hurricane was not on its way, which as we all found out the following morning was somewhat inaccurate. However in my locality the destruction of Rendlesham Forest is the event that most of us remember. Certainly there was plenty of other damage to property and huge disruption on the roads, but the forest was something else entirely.

I remember standing on the roadside and being amazed at the change in landscape as it was now possible to see clear across an area which had previously been thick with trees. The article describes 'hundreds of thousands of trees' being blown over and while I am not sure how accurate this estimate was, the destruction was terrible to see.

However in the years following this example of the force of nature the Forestry Commission has put a tremendous amount of work into the area, clearing dead trees and planting new ones. The extent of this transformation is as dramatic as the damage caused by the storm, it did take slightly longer obviously, but unless you were to see pictures such as the one above, it would never enter your mind that twenty eight years ago the forest had practically been destroyed.

Andy

Things You Find In Books, Continued.

I may well make this into a regular post as there seems to be a never ending supply of interesting pieces of documentation that turn up within the books that I purchase. Often it is just an old piece of correspondence, or maybe a picture, but this week something particularly interesting turned up.

It may be creased, marked and have plenty of splits, but I really do like this as it is a genuine piece of Second World War history. 

When I was young, so long ago, a friend of mine actually still had an air raid shelter in their garden. I have no idea why it was still there in the seventies, perhaps they were not aware that hostilities had been concluded, but that seems unlikely as Suffolk is a bit more mainstream than some tiny island in the Pacific.

However I am digressing from the subject in hand, which as you can see is an Air Raid Precaution document giving directions on how to build an air raid shelter. It is the sort of interesting piece which would look nice in a frame, a good talking point no doubt, but part of me hopes that it will eventually go to someone who decides to follow the instructions and actually construct their own shelter, I mean you never know when it will come in handy, which is probably the answer to why my friend's parents had one in their garden.

Andy