As the first anniversary of the June 25, 2007 flooding arrives, Cathy Spence takes a look back to Driffield's other great flood as recorded in a souvenir booklet produced by the Driffield Observer.

Coincident with the passage of Halley's Comet between the earth and the sun, and whilst the earth was enveloped in its tail, one of the most violent electrical storms ever remembered broke over Driffield and part of East Yorkshire.

The storm broke a little after four o'clock on the Friday morning, and for nearly an hour flash after flash of lightning of terrible vividness followed one another with awful rapidity, while the thunder kept up a continual roar, causing the houses to vibrate.

The hailstorm

About 4.20 there was a merciless downfall of hail, and soon the streets of the town were several inches deep with hailstones larger than cubes of loaf sugar, many as large as pigeons' eggs, and this drove horses and cattle in the fields frantic with fear and pain. Glass was broken in all directions. Rain also fell in torrents, and soon the streets of the town were running like a river, the water running through numbers of houses to make its way to the stream which runs through a slight valley intersecting the town.

The inhabitants were all roused from their beds, and were to be seen white-faced and panic stricken standing at their bedroom windows viewing the awful raging of the storm or were trying to make their houses secure against the inrush of water.

The muddy flood

Bad as this was, worse was to follow. About 5.30pm word was brought by Mr Kirby, farmer, Elmswell Wold, to the town that water was coming down the valley from the Wolds in a raging torrent scores of yards wide and 15 or 20 feet deep, just as it did from the same direction on the 3rd of July 1892, when there was the historic cloud burst at Langtoft.

About seven o'clock the water laden with yellow earth from the hillsides, which must have been washed pretty nearly bare, came upon the town with a mighty rush, sweeping away walls and fences and everything that impeded its mad fury.

Fortunately the people in the lower parts of the town had been roused from their beds by the earlier storm, and some took measures to secure their furniture. This was well for soon hundreds of houses had water half-way up the lower story. The majority of people, however, treated the warning either as a joke or did not think the water would rise to their houses, so did nothing. One disbeliever who went to see for himself whether the flood was really coming, had, on his return to wade waist deep to get into his own house.

Bridge Street

All the streets crossing from Middle Street to Eastgate were soon flooded nearly their entire length. At Bridge Street the flood would not be less than 200 yards wide, and must have been most of 15 feet deep from the bed of the beck, the houses nearest the stream having the water, muddy yellow water, half way up the doors and the water in their drawing rooms to an equal depth.

Exchange Street was similarly flooded and here shops and solicitors' offices were invaded by four or five feet of water.

In Bridge Street men were rowing about in two boats, which had been dragged from River Head, rescuing people from the houses and ferrying others across the flood, the east side of the town being separated from the west by the great flood of water.

The Cattle Market was flooded over its entire area, and the water in Exchange Street, where it was confined by the Congregational schoolroom and the furniture warehouse of Mr F Purdon, gushed out with a roar as if from a huge mill sluice.

In Providence Place where there are a number of tenements of the poorer inhabitants, the occupiers had to get out of their houses as hastily as possible to save their lives.

The flood bore with it to the river articles of furniture and drowned animals.

On thousands of acres of land the greatest devastation has been done, especially on land where turnips had just been sown, thousands of tons of earth containing seeds and manure being washed into the town of Driffield. On the hill sides, all up the dale great lanes are washed through the fields where the water has come down, but even this does not account for the enormous quantity of water that came down, the primary cause of all the trouble being a cloud-burst, higher up the dale, like that at Langtoft, in the same neighbourhood, some years ago.

The gasworks flooded

The flood invaded the gasworks at Driffield and extinguished the fires in the furnaces. The Urban Council issued notices asking the consumers to be careful in the use of gas, as no more gas could be made for some time, the flood having cooled the furnaces.

The parapets of all the bridges over the stream in Driffield have been overturned and some of the brick arches blown up, and hundreds of pounds of damage must have been done to these bridges alone.

Child drowned in house

In Providence Place the inhabitants had to make a mad rush out of their houses, the water rushing through the houses from the cattle market.
In one of these, occupied by a maltkiln worker named Thomas Whitehand, the wife rushed upstairs for her baby, which she placed upon a couch in the lower room, whilst she went upstairs to rescue her other two children.

A 12 year-old boy named Oliver Johnson came in and took the child from the sofa into an adjoining house. This house was speedily flooded, and the child appears to have been forgotten. When it was missed a man named Hodgson threw off his clothes and went through the flood into the cottage and found the child floating under a couch. The child was taken to a Wesleyan mission room and medical men tried to restore respiration, but without success.

In Bridge Street, where there are some splendidly furnished houses great damage has been done. Pianos and sideboards were floating about in many of the houses. Councillor Gage suffered great loss and had many valuable papers and plans destroyed.

Altogether hundreds of houses have been flooded and in these after the waters subsided, mud has been left to the depth in some cases of nearly two feet.

All the land on the side of the River Hull for miles beyond Driffield in the direction of the city of Hull was under water. So great was the rush of water into the canal at Driffield that a dredger was washed into a field, where it stood high and dry.

Water up to the neck
At Cranwell a little farther down the stream the havoc has been great, hundreds of yards of walling, 12 or 14 feet high, on each side of the stream, being washed down. Here stands an isolated house in a garden, occupied by Mr Randall and his wife.

The water rose so high that they were afraid the house would be overwhelmed, and they made their escape, the water coming just up to their necks. Fortunately, both Mr Randall and his wife are tall people, or they could by no means have got through. They went in their wet and filthy clothes to the house of a journalist on higher ground, and he had them put to bed.

In Cranwell the marks on the wall show the water to have risen quite seven feet above the footpath.

The water went with a rush into Mr Railton's coal yard and thence into Mr Potts' garden, filling it with mud and coals, and bursting out the walls. On the opposite side the high, strong and substantial wall bounding Mr Botterill's property was topled over like a house of cards.

The torrent
An eye-witness who saw the water coming down Cowlam Dale declared that the stream was quite 150 yards wide and from 15-20 feet deep in the centre. The edges and gates in many places were washed away, and in some places where the hedges remained standing, drowned rabbits were to be seen hanging.

• The rainfall at Driffield on Friday morning was phenomenal, 2ins falling in less than an hour. This gives a weight of 200 tons of water per acre. This is 50 tons on a rood - a small allotment plot - or 128,000 tons on square mile.

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