ABSTRACT
Men, women and children were engulfed, timber houses and trucks were swept away, and horses were drowned. At that moment a violent storm broke and a bolt of lightning struck the house, killing the doctor’s sister and a servant. A hill had been excavated for chalk, leaving a sharp drop of some one hundred metres to where a row of houses stood. By Christmas Day it had stopped snowing but was freezing hard, and the wind-driven snow on the hill was a great frozen mass poised over the houses. Two adjoining houses were demolished and because the site was low-lying nearby cellars were flooded. An improbable item of rubbish tidied away almost led to a serious fire at the House of Commons in 1792 and raised suspicions of sinister intent. Viscount Palmerston wrote to his wife on the 10th May: ‘A strange incident happened last night at the House of Commons some hours after it was adjourned.
