Lyme Regis man warned of the Great Gale of 1824 in Dorset

This hurricane force wind and accompanying storm surge devastated the Dorset coast. The county's coast was hardest hit, but the storm’s impact stretched from Land’s End to Dover

The communities of west Dorset were among the many affected by the 1824 storm, a storm that was so severe and so destructive that it has become legendary, certainly leaving its mark.

The Western Flying Post reported that “A tempest teeming with more frightful terrors is scarcely within the memory of man.”

In November 1824, though the weather had been fairly boisterous along the south coast, it wasn’t so unusual for that time of year. However on Monday evening, November 22, the wind had strengthened and was blowing at hurricane force from the south, and the customs officer at Lyme Regis noticed anomalies in the tidal level, which was apparently rising when it should have been low water.

At 3am on the morning of Tuesday 23, five hours before high water, the level was at the Neap Tide high - in other words about 3ft or so higher than would have been expected.

Within the hour “the sea had risen to great height” and the fierceness of the waves breaking over Lyme’s Cobb destroyed about 300 feet of its length.

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Elsewhere, in Weymouth, the quays were entirely inundated, and ships that had been moored against the harbour wall now sailed up through the flooded streets. The grand Georgian facades of the houses along the sea-front were assaulted by the deluge of seawater, the lower floors flooded by the surging tide, while the seafront houses at Melcombe Regis fared little better, their windows rattled by the relentless pounding of the waves, and the Preston bank overcome and Lodmoor flooded.

The flood height does not seem to have been so high as it was at Fleet however; one onlooker there thought that the sea had more or less come up level with the top of the Chesil Beach, another eyewitness exclaiming “Twern’t a sea - not a bit of it - twer the great sea hisself rose up level like and come on right over the ridge and all, like nothing in this world”.

As the storm continued to rage “The lower part of the parish of Chiswell on Portland was in a moment deluged by a most tremendous wave that swallowed up the greater part of it, and upwards of 30 souls were in an instant doomed to death.” 

By 6am, the storm still unabated, a tsunami-like surge washed up the valley at East Fleet towards the Church, some way inland, and demolished the nave of Holy Trinity and swept away five houses. Travelling “as fast as a horse can gallop” and carrying all before it, on the crest of the tidal wave, driven by the hurricane force winds, was an entire haystack!

The nave of Old Fleet Church was destroyed Picture: Jack Gritton

The towering seas whipped up by the “Tempest” also resulted in numerous stricken ships coming to grief along the south coast; in the turbulent waters off Dorset, three ships were wrecked off Chesil Beach, four in Weymouth Bay with a further five vessels lost off Lyme Regis. 

The ferry between the Isle of Portland and the mainland was also washed away. In the days after the storm, many bodies were washed up, and the death toll of those recovered from Chesil beach alone numbered almost one hundred souls. 

READ: The Dorset village with a long gone 14th century castle

All were given Christian burial, interred in graveyards nearest to their discovery. Though most were unidentified, one passenger aboard the ill-fated Colville, fearful that his beached body would be anonymously buried, and that his wife back in London would never learn of his sad fate, tore off part of his shirt, and wrote his name and address on the sodden fabric, tying the makeshift identification around his neck.

Though coastal communities bore the brunt of the storm, inland areas also felt the impact. 

At Dorchester: “The devastating effects of the storm were felt in every quarter of the town”; houses lost their roofs, windows were smashed and chimneys blown down, and at 6am on Tuesday 23, the time of the tidal influx at Chiswell, the Reverend HJ Richman and his wife were killed, in bed, both crushed to death by the fall of a heavy stack of chimneys, unseated by the fury of the gale. An unwelcome early morning wake-up call if ever there was one!

• If you haven't seen the Dorset Coast Forum's Great Gale Exhibition in west Dorset yet, there is still a chance to see it on Portland from today, November 21 to November 24. It can be seen at the Portland Community Venue, Three Yards Close, Fortuneswell, Portland DT5 1JN. It is open daily from 11am to 4pm apart from the Sunday when it is open from 1pm to 4pm.