Common sense submerged

The waters of the River Avon, recounted the vicar of Bengeworth, outside Evesham, ‘reached almost to the keystone of the arch of the bridge, and extended up Port Street to the public pump on the south side of the street, so that inhabitants were compelled to pass out of their houses through the upper windows, and were thence conveyed by boats along the street’. The year was 1770, though it might equally well have been 1793, when the water ‘reached ye parlour of ye Unicorn and Mr Stickley’s oven’, 1799, when ‘Mr Lunn was drowned’, or any of the many other years when the Avon burst its banks. So assiduous was the Reverend Thomas Beale, vicar of Bengeworth in the late 18th century, at recording flood levels that his diaries are still used as source material for students of river flooding in Britain.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

What the Reverend Thomas Beale never sought to do, on the other hand, was to apportion blame. There is no mention in his diaries of climate change, nor of the failings of the burghers of Evesham to foresee what was coming: all was assumed to be an Act of God. In our own more secular society, of course, Acts of God have long been abolished, which is why over the past few days newspaper columns and news bulletins have been awash with attempts to shift the blame for floods upon ministers, quangocrats and developers who build houses upon flood plains.

It is perfectly right, of course, that public agencies, and private developers too, be held to account for their actions.