David Mckie: Elsewhere

Recently, while establishing my irrefutable case for the county of Essex to be divided into two parts, I stumbled across an earthquake. Not by international standards a massive earthquake - compared with Krakatoa just a year earlier, this was little more than a sneeze - but by the modest and geologically stable standards of Britain, a substantial event even so. It occurred on the morning of April 22 1884, at 9.18 GMT. If you wanted to observe a minute's silence for those who died, 10.18am this morning would be the appropriate moment.

People sensed it as far away as Cheshire, Somerset, Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight, where Hallam Tennyson, son of the poet, felt his bed oscillate and saw the bed hangings swinging. Ostend felt the tremors, too; so did Boulogne. But the heart of it was south-east Essex, between Colchester and the sea. One investigative professor located its origins under the villages of Abberton and Pelton, another beneath West Mersea "or thereabouts."

The story is told in a book that I found by chance in a second-hand bookshop days after I first heard of the earthquake - The Great English Earthquake, first published in 1975 by an author and journalist who lived in the area, Peter Haining. He was just in time to trace a handful of those who, as small children, had experienced the earthquake, and marry their testimonies to those that appeared in the newspapers of the day.

The most lurid effects of the quake were seen in the waterside village of Wivenhoe. "The village was apparently lifted bodily up," said an aristocratic observer, whose boat was just putting out to sea and found himself sprawled on the deck, "and as I fell I saw part of the church steeple, which towers over the village, sway and then topple into the mass of the devastation." In Wivenhoe, in Fingringhoe, in Langenhoe, where the church took a fearful punishment, and right across Colchester, chimneys toppled, roofs were ripped out, houses crumbled, spires were destroyed and towers left tottering, and huge cracks appeared in the streets.

"The wreckage, which meets the eye on every side, is heart-rending," the Times reported next morning, "especially as most of the damage is done to tenements occupied by poor persons, many of whom are now completely homeless." But at least, people told themselves, nobody died. Or as the Essex Herald put it: "Divine providence has seen fit to refrain from taking a single life." But that, according to Haining's research, was untrue. At the very least, two people died: a child at Rowhedge, and a bed-ridden woman at Wivenhoe. There were other deaths at the time, including a suicide, which may also have been attributable to the earthquake.

At first, there were rumours that the devastation was the work of dynamiters and Fenians. That suggestion was swiftly disposed of as newspapers throughout the area got to work on special editions, which sold in astonishing numbers. Sightseers flooded in to inspect the wreckage, arriving on special trains put on by the railway companies. Disasters are always exploitable, and the newspapers and the railway companies were not alone in seeing a chance to profit. Some sought profit for reasons of altruism, others for reasons of greed.

A Colchester doctor recommended leaving the scenes of devastation untouched for the next few months. Visitors could then be charged for admission and photographs and souvenirs could be sold to them. Bricks and stones might be sold as relics, with all the proceeds channelled to those who had suffered. Salesmen of every kind descended on the area, some offering lucky charms or potions to steady frayed nerves, others - architects, surveyors, insurance companies - advertising their professional services.

Still others saw these events as an awful warning. One architect claimed that such devastation would not have happened had the buildings employed the uniquely safe constructional methods devised by him. "This earthquake, like all Divine visitations, has a grand practical teaching," he opportunistically added. There were others who blamed the calamity on the sinfulness of south-east Essex, though one pastor dared to suggest that if so, this divine visitation had been somewhat off target. "We all know," he said "that the sins of Colchester are great ... but we must all see that if this had been intended as a punishment it has been misdirected, since it has fallen upon the steeples of our sanctuaries, and not upon houses which I dare not name, nor on persons who trade upon immorality."

No doubt some in his congregation shuddered at this hint of criticism of the Almighty, which must have seemed to the ultra-pious to invite further divine retribution. But 120 more quake-free years having passed, it seems that he got away with it.