Newton Abbot 27th December 1979
The threat title is called places to remember for a Newton exile, and I started it for ex Newton boys like merse and others. My family go back many generations in Newton and as it’s my home town and I spent the first 25 years of my like living there, I do have so many memories.
But I also have one day in those 25 years I will never forget, not just because of what I lost that day, but because it was a very frightening day for myself and young family. In a post above I talked about my move to Linden Terrace, my house was up a lane near the bottom of the terrace and backed onto the gardens of the houses that run down the side of Bakers Park.
Christmas 1979 was our third Christmas in the house, unlike our flat in Courtney Street, it was rat free, but there was no heating and it was a rather large house. I would spend most of my days on a Sunday making 20 plus trips into Bradley wood collecting what wood I was able to carry on my shoulders back to the house.
The wood was for the only fire we could afford to ever light in our front room, but I could never collect enough and by Thursday it was back to having no fire at all until Sunday when I could fetch some more wood.
But things were better than when we first moved in, we had got rid of those six hairdresser chairs and had a second hand three piece and all but one room upstairs had carpets in them now. We still sometimes had to put a foreign coin in the electric meter as our money had run out until we got paid from work.
Everyone was paid weekly back them and in cash, mind you the meter man when he came to empty the meter always gave you that look he did, when he found those foreign coins and never would accept your story that the electric went and it was dark, so you did not see what coin you were putting in.
You were always glad when he did come as he would count up all the money on the kitchen table and then bag up what he was going to be taking and leave a pile of coins behind as you always rebate. It meant you would be able to have a bit of spare extra cash for a few weeks at least.
Christmas day was a good day, Ant was three and a half years old and we had been able to afford to get some coal in, so the house, well part of it anyway, was nice and warm for a change.
Little did we know what was waiting in store for us just two days later. We woke up on the 27th December 1979 and it was raining very hard and there was no way we were going to be going out on the walk we had planned for sure.
At the bottom of our garden was a five foot high wall and over the wall was the river lemon. The River Lemon is a 16km long river.,It rises on the south east side of Dartmoor near Haytor, joins with the River Sig and the Langworthy Brook at Sigford, then passes the village of Bickington. Lower down it is joined by the Kestor Brook and it then flows through the woods in Bradley Valley, past Bradley Manor and through the town where it flows through a 400 metre long tunnel below the town centre. Just below the town the river joins the River Teign near the head of its estuary.
Around 11am I decided to take a look over the wall and see how high the water was, most days the water was a good 20 feet below the hight of the wall, only today at 11am, it was now just only five foot below. I decided to walk along the path beside the river toward the entrace to the covert, this is near where the Asada store now is.
As I walked along the path the river was very close to breaking over the path and I think looking back I was a bit foolish walking beside the river.When I got to the covert entrance I saw many men there, some were from the water board and others must have been from the council.
They looked at their watches and declared the tide would now turn at Teignmouth and the river Teign would start to flow the other way and the danger of a flood was now past. How wrong they were for the tide did not turn and the river Teign kept backing up and up and the river Lemon had no where to go and soon the covert could no longer handle the water trying to get through it.
But I did not know this at first, I went home armed with the imformation that those men had told me and said to my then wife, we might as well get some dinner now as its all going to be OK.
We were in the kitchen and when I looked out of the window, I could not believe what I was seeing.Floating past the bottom of my garden was first a green house and this was followed by a caravan. I then noticed the garden was under a few inches of water.
As it was winter it got dark early, so before that happened I decided to make sure the electric meter would not run out, this was housed in a room under the stairs, the door was a full size door and was in the kitchen, the floor in that room was about a foot lower than the kitchen floor.
I stepped in and discovered it was flooding in there and I laugh now when I think back to what happened next, but I did at first think what I was doing would help.I only went and got a bucket and was filling it up with the water in that room and then tipping it out of the kitchen window.
It never went down, but then it was never going to go down as this was the river flowing just under the floorboards in the rest of the house.Soon the whole of the down stairs of the house was under a foot of water and this went up to five feet by the early evening.
There was a knock on the door and there were three policemen up to their waists in water telling us we had to leave the house and they were going to get us to a safe place as it was feared it was going to get even worse.
In the end the tide finally turned and the lemon was able to get through the covert and so the water levels started to drop. In total 664 properties were flooded. We came home the next day and I could not believe that there was not one single puddle in the garden, but then it was covered in six inches of mud.
We opened the front door and nearly died, six inches of mud were also covering the ground floor and you could see the tide mark on the wall that was five and a half feet from the floor.
A fund was set up and the council did so much for the flood victims, we went to Forde House to choose some new carpets for the house, not the best quality but new and once the mud was cleared up and the place dried out we could have them delivered and laid for us. The smell took some time to go mind you and sadly the tortoise that was under the stairs hibernating drowned
The first flood on record was in November 14 1894 it was known as the memorable floods The second flood was on the August 6 1938 some 44 years later and was caused by ‘worst storm’ in living memory. That summer was very dry and the river was low but huge thunder and storms resulted in the floods which damaged the town centre. Resulted in the building of a culvert to take access water from the river under Newton Abbot.
Then came the flood on the 27th December 1979, after this a holding dam was built called Holbeam dam and since it was built no further floods have occurred. As flood victims we were taken by coach to watch the opening of the dam.
I too will never forget that day as I had been down in the Commercial Offices at Plainmoor reconciling the previous Boxing Day's takings in readiness for banking the cash as soon as the banks opened on the ending of the extended Christmas weekend.
