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Search forFlood was night I will never forget
Monday, July 21, 2008, 00:00
Our house backed on to the Dundry slopes in Withywood.
The rain just wouldn't let up and as we looked up at our garden all we could see was a torrent of water coming down over the clay soil like giant rapids, bringing all the topsoil with it.
Our dad was working nights at Albright and Wilson in Avonmouth, so it was left up to mum, my sister and I to do all we could to stop the water from coming into our home.
While mum got as much furniture and whatever was of value upstairs, my sister and I took it in turns leaning out of the dining room window holding the wooden garden gate open with a broom so that the water would go down the steps and through the arch and bypass the houses.
It was wet, very cold and very, very scary for an 11- and 13-year- old trying to fight against the strong currents in the pitch dark.
The water was flowing faster and faster.
Our poor neighbours didn't stand a chance of escaping the torrent going into their home.
Everyone was trying to work together, except the odd few who could only think of themselves.
We somehow managed to get a message to dad to come home and help us.
Hours passed and we were getting tired when he finally came through the door, drenched, cold and visibly shaken.
He changed into dry clothes and dried out his cigarettes under the grill, something that made us chuckle for the first time in what seemed like days, but was in fact only hours.
He then told us that he'd had to walk all the way from Avonmouth as no transport could get through Ashton, Bedminster or the surrounding areas.
He'd fallen down a manhole and only stopped himself from going right under by putting his arms out.
When daylight finally arrived we could see the damage done by the worst storm we'd ever seen.
The devastation in our neighbour's house was awful, it looked as though the whole of Dundry was outside our back doors.
Not long after, the council put a big drainage ditch in the fields behind our houses.
But every time there was a big storm we dreaded the great flood happening again.
Corinne Davey (nee Teague), by email.
● THE feature about the floods of July 1968 prompts me to ask if any readers were involved in the computer department at Wills tobacco at that time?
The British Computer Society is trying to chart the history of all the English Electric KDF9 computers made in the Sixties, and Wills were using one when the floods hit Bedminster.
I know that they continued running their systems on a KDF9 owned by Rolls-Royce (although housed in BAC's premises) and the society is now trying to find out whether the Wills computer was rebuilt or scrapped.
If it was rebuilt then when was it finally switched off?
Alan Freke, Frenchay. Tel: 0117 957 0942. email: frenchaymuseum@hotmail.com
Al least it keeps one-or-two crazy people off the streets if nothing else!
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