The Great Sheffield Flood 1864
I knew a little about the Sheffield Flood of 1864 but until the Sheffield Flood Claims Archive was published online a few years ago I had no idea that any of my ancestors had been affected. When the site came online I went along and decided to put in the surname “howgate” just to see if anything came up and there it was, the compensation claim submitted by my great-great-great-grandfather, Samuel Howgate.
This wasn’t a small flood caused by bad weather, it was a catastrophic flood that happened on the night of 11 march 1864 when the newly-built Dale Dyke Dam, situated near Bradfield on the outskirts of Sheffield, burst unleashing millions of gallons of water onto the sleeping city below. The magnitude of the flood is eloquently summed up on Mick Armitage’s excellent Sheffield Flood site :
For two hundred and fifty people who lived in Sheffield and the hamlets in the valley below the dam, this was to be their last night on Earth. Six hundred and fifty million gallons of water roared down the Loxley valley and into Sheffield, wreaking death and destruction on a horrific scale.
According to Samuel’s claim his home and business on the night of the flood was situated on Green Lane. This is very close to the centre of Sheffield and several miles away from the dam however whilst the momentum of the water must have subsided somewhat it was still very dangerous and by then full of silt, mud and the debris of the buildings destroyed on it’s way down into Sheffield. Mick’s site goes into great detail about the path taken by the flood with both photos taken at the time and contemporary photos plus accounts recorded at the time of individual people’s experiences. There are several vivid descriptions of how the flood affected the Green Lane area:
‘In a yard in Dun Street, Green Lane, an old man named Dennis M’Laughlin was drowned in his bed. He lived alone in a room on the ground floor, which was flooded up to the ceiling. In an adjoining room lived the old man’s donkey, and there it died by the same calamity which overwhelmed its master.’
In the Green Lane area – not far from Dun Street, ‘the six children of the Wells family had been left to face the unexpected deluge alone in their little cottage . . . As usual, their mother had left them to collect from their father the bunches of watercress that he had been gathering during the week from the clear Pennine streams miles away, so that she could sell them for a penny a bunch at the Saturday market in Sheffield. It was now, as the flood water was at its height at about one o’clock, that she returned only to find that she couldn’t get anywhere near her cottage for the swirling water. In frustration and distress she flung the basket of cress into the waves and the leaves spread and bobbed along the surface. The group of onlookers tried to comfort her and prevent her from wading in but through her shrieks and sobs they discovered that two of the children, her thirteen year old son and his three year old sister, had been left sleeping in the downstairs room, and that they, at least, must surely have been drowned. The agonising wait for the water to subside is all too easily imagined and all must secretly have imagined that there was little hope of finding any of the children alive despite their reassuring words to the frantic mother. As the level gradually dropped the crowd inched forwards down the devastated lanes, slipping on the thick layer of glistening mud and holding their cloaks in front of their faces against the nauseous stink. At last Mrs. Wells got within calling distance of the cottage and waded through the slime to shout to the children. To her immense joy and relief the frightened faces of the children who had been sleeping upstairs appeared at the window. “Are you all safe, is everyone there?” “We’re alright up here,” her daughter shouted back tearfully, “but we don’t know what’s happened downstairs to Emily and Frank. We heard a scream and we tried to get down the stairs to them, Mamma, but there was water coming up and we couldn’t get past.”
Her joy had now turned to horror on hearing that the two children from downstairs were not with them. Picking her way through the debris she pushed her way into the house, expecting to find the bodies of the two children in the mud on the floor. Casting her eyes frantically round the dark room she couldn’t see any sign of the children until, looking up, she spotted the two still, naked bodies huddled together on the top shelf of the cupboard in the corner. She let out a horrified shriek, thinking that they were dead, and to her amazement, the children woke. Their mother lifted them down and as she tried to warm their shivering bodies they began to tell her about their frightening ordeal. “The bed was floating about and we thought we’d be thrown off into the water. We didn’t know what was happening. We tried to get upstairs but it was blocked so we stood on the chair and climbed onto the shelf.”‘
There is also a collection of newspaper extracts relating to the flood which make for interesting reading.
