A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1953: Sluice Gates

 

I'm sorry, Dutch people, "Watersnoosdramp" reminds me of Futurama. This is a picture of Oude Tonge, on the island of Goeree-Overflakkee, which has such a clumsy name because it is a relatively late formation, being carved out of the mainland of North Brabant and South Holland by flooding events in 1216 and 1421, per Wikipedia. Oude Tonge, first attested in 1420/1, is a village carved out of the "Old headland polder" in the manor of Grijsoord, which sounds like an exposed location, and proved to be so over the night of 31 January/1 February 1953 when a windstorm drove the spring high tides up over its embankments, killing 305 people in this village including 42 family members of poster-child survivor Jos de Boet. 

The reclamation history of these islands in the Meuse/Maass/Escaut/Scheldt/New Rhine estuary (I vote for bringing back "the Maze" as the geographic designator) is an interesting one for the historian of the Late Middle Ages/Early Modern Period, perhaps the clearest evidence that the economy and population of northwestern Europe was expanding during the "waning of the Middle Ages" and not contracting as the grand overarching "The Black Plague Kills Everyone Except One Person To Pass On The Message" theory of European history. But I'm never going to roll that rock up that hill, so let's not talk about it.  Let's talk about even older coastal defences, instead.

The narrowing of the southern North Sea had the effect of channeling the storm surge and producing the most severe effects along the southern margins of the North Sea realm. In the United Kingdom the worst damage was in Essex, with a great deal of flooding damage in Britain's brand new giant oil refineries, although there was considerable damage further north in Lincolnshire and in Scotland, where the (fairly recent) fishing village of Crovie, "the smallest and morst remote of the Buchan cliff-foot fishing villages," accessible only from the sea, and built on such a narrow ledge that there is no room for cars in front of the single row of houses, got it in the neck.

Engineering, caught off guard, had very little to say about the floods in their immediate aftermath, but it did have an article on file about a recent tidal sluice gate repair contract by prolific engineering writer E. C. Bowden-Smith, and so that is what we got. It is relevant in the sense that it is about flood defences on a sea wall of the kind that was breached in no less than 1200 places, inundating 65,000 hectares, says Wikipedia. 

However, Bowden-Smith is writing about a project on the River Ouse in the East Riding parish of Whitgift, North Yorkshire, where the flooding of 1953 does not come to the attention of the local historian. "Hwita's Gift" is first attested in 1080 as a possession of Selby Abbey, and, perhaps, originally, a ferry landing. Selby Abbey seems to have been a 1067 grant, since it is assumed to be a Norman act and the first recorded abbot was Benedict (1067--1097). On the basis of the information that the Abbey pulled Whitgift's Mary Magdalene Church down in 1255 and rebuilt it on the same location, Bowden-Smith believes that the land around the church was already in arable by the time the original sttrucutre was attested to belong to the Abbey in 1127, and thus was drained. this means that the sluice gates were already in use by that time, and perhaps as early as William the Conqueror's land grant to Selby in 1067. It is very tempting to conclude that the deed confirms an existing state of affairs and that the gate in fact dates to the original gift by Hwita, possibly pre-Conquest. A stretch, I know, when the unsubtle point of the post is "Look at this cool technology that is way older than we might think!" (A sluice gate has been found in an Iron Age Jerusalem context; the point here is pushing back the date of reclamation along the Yorkshire  coastline, not of the technology itself.) 

A sluice gate, I should explain, since God knows someone has to, is sometimes described as an "automatic flap valve." Now that's the true turbo-encabulator spirit. But while  you may need to resort to this kind of gobbledygook to describe the reduction mechanism on a controllable-pitch reversible, contra-rotating propeller driven by a free turbine, this is not such a thing. It is a   gated hole in a sea wall hinged so that it only swings one way. (Insert joke about culture war politics here.) The upshot is that it opens and lets excess water sitting on the land behind it, flow out into the sea, river or estuary at low tide, but stops the incoming high tide. It is a  handy location for industrial purposes or a pump for even more reclamation, but there is no such complication at Whitgift, which is in fact so boring that Bowden-Smith chooses to illustrate this very short article with diagrams and pictures from everywhere but Whitgift.

Blanket Nook is in County Donegal on Lough Swilly, and is best known for the seabird sanctuary created when the surrounding marshland was drained.

So, there you go, sometime between 1067 and 1125, someone built a seawall at Whitgift, put a sluice gate in the wall, and used it to reclaim 2000 acres of river front arable. Typical of many of the works overwhelmed in the flooding of 1953, it, in particular, came through just fine and would probably still be there were the coastal defences of the United Kingdom overtaken by huge investments in the course of the last half century to make sure that a disaster like 1953 can only ever happen again after we've got global warming well on. Early Medieval people sure were ingenious, and look at how precociously developed the market for Yorkshire grain was! 

. . . And if you happen to be in Brewster, Massachusetts any time soon, go check out the Stony Brook grist mill, sited on a Cape Cod sluice gate since colonial times. Notice that the link goes to another historic "Stony Brook" grist mill, this one in Suffolk County on Long Island, which has been there since the days of the Littlepages but which may not be associated with a sluice gate. 

How can we write the history of the Atlantic if we don't even know how and when we changed it? I shake my head at these uncontrolled transformations of our environment that we set in train with out technology without even knowing where we will end up.