A uniquely high tide and severe gales caused the River Thames to burst its banks in the early hours of January 7th 1928.
Some areas were flooded and 14 people drowned in their beds. Four of these were the young Harding sisters, who were trapped in their basement bedroom in central London.
These and many other subsequent deaths caused the Thames Barrier to be proposed and eventually built to help prevent such disasters from happening again.
I am wondering whether the deaths of the sisters could have been prevented at the time.
I first heard about this sad incident years after the Thames Barrier opened, and I made some notes about it. Some floods in the Thames area earlier this year brought the memories back, and I decided to do some research online.
The Harding sisters were aged 3, 6, 16 and 18; their names and ages can be found on a website that holds details of births, marriages and deaths. They had three young brothers; these boys were sleeping elsewhere and survived.
I have not been able to find the source of something that I wrote down many years ago, but I must have got it from somewhere: it would have been my reason for recording the incident. Apparently the girls’ father had very recently moved them from their attic bedroom down to the basement room so that they would be warmer when the expected bad weather came.
If he had not had this ‘good idea’ the girls might not have died.
This incident reminded me of four of the Brontë sisters and the terrible school they were sent to: two might have lived and others might have lived longer if their father had not had the ‘good idea’ of sending them there.
Many people report having saved themselves from an unpleasant experience, perhaps even death, by listening to inner warning voices and taking premonitions of danger seriously. For example, people sometimes cancel a flight because of such forewarnings and avoid dying in a plane crash.
Unfortunately, these things can operate in reverse. I once obeyed an inner prompting at a time when I was very worried about something, and very stupidly got off the bus two stops too early. ‘By chance’, someone I had not seen for more than 10 years and did not want to see again was waiting at the stop. This encounter ended with a lot of ill feeling on both sides, and it took me a while to recover.
The death of E. Nesbit’s youngest son Fabian comes to mind here: he died at the age of 15 after a routine operation at home to remove his tonsils. ‘By chance’, no one in the household had remembered to tell him not to eat anything on the night before the surgery, and this error of omission caused him to die of asphyxiation at a time when no one was watching him.
Where do such mistakes, malign promptings, ‘good ideas’ that have harmful effects and result in much suffering, originate? What, if any, unseen influences are behind them?
Who or what benefits from orchestrating these tragic incidents?
Is it all just down to accident and coincidence?
The Thames Barrier today:
Some areas were flooded and 14 people drowned in their beds. Four of these were the young Harding sisters, who were trapped in their basement bedroom in central London.
These and many other subsequent deaths caused the Thames Barrier to be proposed and eventually built to help prevent such disasters from happening again.
I am wondering whether the deaths of the sisters could have been prevented at the time.
I first heard about this sad incident years after the Thames Barrier opened, and I made some notes about it. Some floods in the Thames area earlier this year brought the memories back, and I decided to do some research online.
The Harding sisters were aged 3, 6, 16 and 18; their names and ages can be found on a website that holds details of births, marriages and deaths. They had three young brothers; these boys were sleeping elsewhere and survived.
I have not been able to find the source of something that I wrote down many years ago, but I must have got it from somewhere: it would have been my reason for recording the incident. Apparently the girls’ father had very recently moved them from their attic bedroom down to the basement room so that they would be warmer when the expected bad weather came.
If he had not had this ‘good idea’ the girls might not have died.
This incident reminded me of four of the Brontë sisters and the terrible school they were sent to: two might have lived and others might have lived longer if their father had not had the ‘good idea’ of sending them there.
Many people report having saved themselves from an unpleasant experience, perhaps even death, by listening to inner warning voices and taking premonitions of danger seriously. For example, people sometimes cancel a flight because of such forewarnings and avoid dying in a plane crash.
Unfortunately, these things can operate in reverse. I once obeyed an inner prompting at a time when I was very worried about something, and very stupidly got off the bus two stops too early. ‘By chance’, someone I had not seen for more than 10 years and did not want to see again was waiting at the stop. This encounter ended with a lot of ill feeling on both sides, and it took me a while to recover.
The death of E. Nesbit’s youngest son Fabian comes to mind here: he died at the age of 15 after a routine operation at home to remove his tonsils. ‘By chance’, no one in the household had remembered to tell him not to eat anything on the night before the surgery, and this error of omission caused him to die of asphyxiation at a time when no one was watching him.
Where do such mistakes, malign promptings, ‘good ideas’ that have harmful effects and result in much suffering, originate? What, if any, unseen influences are behind them?
Who or what benefits from orchestrating these tragic incidents?
Is it all just down to accident and coincidence?
The Thames Barrier today:
