Nigel Cook
There now follows
a plug for The Candleclub,Southampton
This is a very popular amateur performance show held Monday evenings at the
Talking Heads pub,Portswood Rd. Now with top notch sound system .I don't think
any act has been refused but is usually singer / songwriter /guitarist.
Any
Petomanes out there? or Zapadnyj Sajan Tuvan throat singers?.
It is
non-profit,free entry for performers (just turn up on the night,early,to book a
10 minute slot) and free entry for audience. By consensus and audience reaction
the most appreciated act is invited to a monthly half hour showcase. There is
easily an audience of 180 and 12 to 15 acts. No one is ever booed off
stage, those first timers who make a hash of it usually get a resounding
applause for effort and not sarcasm or derision.
Soon after they started it
Clive and Simeon were running into problems with acts going over their alotted
time slot. I said they should install a bank of 3 coloured lights as used on the
podium of political conferences. Clive said his brother had hanging around a set
of traditional traffic lights. So I said I would convert them with adjustable
timers for an unmistakeable stage reminder. Adjustable times because about 10
minutes on the Mondays and 30 minutes on the Sundays. No more disapointments for
acts squeezed out at the end of the evening.
An inside tip for anyone
wanting to increase their chance of a halfhour session - turn up on a Bank
Holiday Monday as few acts turn up on those days.
And a puff for a duo from the Bournemouth area , I'm surprised the search-engines
have grabbed their site as it is all graphics and absolutely no text
Bang Lassy or is it Jo & Karen or Doris & Dotty or Rose-Anna and Deardrie or now even Sister Bernadette and Sister Agnes
they could at least put some of their inventively disgusting comic lyrics on the site - the down-side of
reincarnation - Dolly the Toilet Roll Cover, Larry Takes it All or the twisted homage to Marilyn Manson's doting mother or the love paean to Alan Titchmarsh or Never Been a She (transvestisism) or the Transylvanian delights of a necrophiliac marriage, Kate Bush's Withering Tights (from fungal infection). Now political satire as Maggie Thatcher and John Major
and even a 'ventriloquism' act of sorts and more dodgey puppetry
with The Killing of Zippy and George new for 2006.
a professional review of Bang Lassy
Keywords that have landed at this Southampton Graffiti file
The quirky word combinations that people have put in search-engines and end up at this file,
updated monthly, or until it gets boring , " two foot long personel wind mill set" ?, "shoes with graffiti " ?
Even gets a mention on a French Wiki page
Tunnel under Southampton Water and Bog Bodies
Good internet fare , little known tunnel, aliens,
men in white coats, conspiracy, cover-up and bodies,
Firstly from
www.fld.org.uk/pdf/full_report.pdf
The Scope for Undergrounding Overhead Electricity Lines
Table 2.1
Southampton Water Tunnel, 400kV, 1962,
a 3.2km section of line was undergrounded under
Southampton Water, preferred to an overhead
crossing by the CEGB for amenity, engineering and
system security reasons. Just about large enough to walk along standing upright,
alongside the HV cable racks.
Cut down pic of one bog body
Fawley/Cadland Bog Bodies, full picture
"Mr Dunn, a neighbour of Alan Murray, worked on the foundations of
Fawley Power Station in about 1965. The Transmission Tunnel for electricity
lines under Southampton Water and the Outfall Tunnel for discharge of
cooling water into the Solent were being excavated at Fawley at this time.
Mr Dunn remember that as they dug down they went through some sand and then
through a "peat bog". He claims that in the peat they found some bodies
which seemed to him to look like "alien figures". A sketch by Alan Murray
based on what has been remembered by Mr Dunn is shown here, but
should be treated with caution because it is not meant to be accurate but
only a representation of the general appearance of the remains. If bodies
did exist then the strange appearance of the bodies may have been the result
of effective mummification in the peat. When the find was made the workers
were ordered to stop work. Quite soon some people in white coats, whom Mr
Dunn thought came from Southampton University, took away the bodies.
Excavation work started again. He says he has enquired about these bodies,
but has never been able to find out where they are or anything about them.
No-one from Southampton University seems to know anything about them, and
Ian West was in the Geology Department then and had not heard of them."
Tunnel under Southampton Water and Bog Bodies
This story also explored further in the Southampton Daily
Echo / Heritage section p11 & 12, 15 July 2006 but never
appeared in their web archive, the new material only
from that report is
Strange case of Dicky Dunn and the bog bodies
By Sally Churchward
It is one of Hampshire's great mysteries. It has it all- strange alien-looking bodies, mysteri-ous people in white coats, a possible cover-up and a lot of unanswered questions. It could have come straight out of The X-Files. More than 40 years later the truth about the Fawley bog bodies is still not known. Unconfirmed stories have been circulating in the Hampshire archaeological community and in pubs for decades about two alien-like bodies that were supposedly found by men excavating at Fawley power station. The actual facts of about what really happened are as sketchy as they are tantalising. Reportedly a man called Dennis "Dicky" Dunn from Shakespeare Avenue, Totton, was working on shafts being tunnelled at Fawley in about 1965.
Having dug down about 75 feet they came to a layer of peat.
Here they were shocked to discover what appeared to be two small bodies, about four feet long, of alien-like appearance.
Work was stopped and some people in white coats came
and removed the bodies -and they were never heard of again.
Later on Mr Dunn asked the foreman what had happened to the bodies and was told that no bodies had been found - they had just been tree trunks.
He then contacted the Daily Echo to see if anyone had heard anything and
spoke to a gravedigger at Fawley Church to see if the bodies had
been reburied but no one knew anything.
Sadly Mr Dunn died in February but his wife Doreen still vividly
remembers when he came home from work and told her what he had seen.
"He said there were some fingers from the bodies that had broken
off and he wished he'd kept them," she said.
"He was always convinced that he'd sen the bodies. At the time
lots of the men he worked with used to come to our house and they were all talking about seeing the bodies."
There were lots of Irish workers in Mr Dunn's team and he and his wife suspected that the bodies may have been taken to Ireland where they were
subsequently "discovered".
On the Horizon documentary about Lindow Man
there was reference to a lot of these bog bodies disappearing
soon after moder-times discovery but not enlarged upon.
More cultural achievement in Southampton
2019 I got talking to a SSE electric power engineer, who had been a friend of Dennis Dunne and heard the story from his friend. He would have been born about 1930 and worked all his life as a groundworker, many years so doing before this fawley incident also. Any wood they would have come across would have been thrown away , as of no consequence. He was certain they were mummified bodies, hence the contact with the authorities . Two people found the bodies and called over the rest of team to look at them, so the find witnessed by many. The term he
used was the "men from the ministry" who would take them away and identify them .
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/630747.stm
Friday, 4 February, 2000, 11:39 GMT
The 2,700-year-old bike rack
Eyptian statue Staff leaned their bikes against the statue
Archaeologists used to treasures from far-away temples are hailing one unearthed rather closer to home - behind the staff bicycles in a Hampshire cellar.
A 2,700-year-old statue of the Egyptian king Taharqa has reportedly been found in the basement of the God's House Tower archaeological museum in Southampton, after being ignored for a century.
Staff used it to lean their bicycles against - but no-one realised the 27-inch statue's importance until two Egyptologists came to visit the museum.
A plug for local bike enthusiast, repairer, maintainer and seller of
all sorts of second-hand bicycles : contact Mark Brummel ( unfortunately he died in 2012) in Shirley
A modified post box , July 2011, corner Foundry Rd and Edward Rd, Shirley
An unusual conventional postbox at the old school in the centre of Hedge End ,
yes blue not red
On Ibsley Common on the other side of the
new forest is an octagonal brick building, something to do with the WWII
airfield and radio/radar mast. inside it is the usual collection of
peoples names and dates, plus the graffiti 'The night conceals the world
but reveals the universe' in big white letters. Quite unexpected. Pictures here:
'The night conceals the world
but reveals the universe'
Octagonal building
- JC
Which naturally segues into this odd octagonal brick construction
on St Denys Road directly opposite Portswood Police Station.
Built when the present bus garage was constructed this
construction encloses the air handling filters for the fallout
shelter - but for who ?. Access is under Portswood police
station and via a 7 by 7 foot connecting tunnel under the road, not from the
bus garage. Should make life interesting for
the conveyancing solicitors exchanging ownership from First Direct to Sainsbury's
before building their new supermarket on the site. June 2009 the
planning consent public notices are out . Retained in the Sainsburys site under the car park
, including the air shaft, but what will happen when Portswood cop shop is closed down .
October 2011 and the roof of the bunker revealed, Dec 2011 this octagonal vent demolished to
the ground level only and all covered in soil. Just a plastic pipe presumably for air pressure
balancing. The bucket of the HiMac resting on the roof proper, out to where the
blue shipping container and beyond, and the same level as revealed between the octagon of brick
and the odd shaped added protrusion above the main roof line, is for mounting an area electricity
transformer covered by a green housing. Apparently the access arrangement under the cop shop
was not known to police inspector level , so "need to know" OSA clearance level is higher than that.
As the ventillation system was never maintained, it would
seem, then perhaps it was abandoned as built well after the end of the cold war.
If you go to aerial view/map site
http://local.live.com/
and put in postcode SO17 2GN
its what appears as a small black circle at that resolution, and looking
directly down into the vent,
about a roads width NE of the KEEP CLEAR marking in St Denys Rd.
Something to do on a wet afternoon - find the postcodes of UK police stations and
look on aerial view sites for other black holes associated with them.
Feb 2011 the tunnel, vent and area down to Belmont Road is going
to remain , reused as a carpark for Sainsburys, so someone has a continuing or future
use for this secure access facility.
November 2015, a metre of soil laid over the top. I hope they don't
build the houses on top of that as no pneumatic hen-pecking of the underlaying
concrete roof so an ideal slippage plane when saturated.
Southampton police have managed to mislay the access under their station, going by the sag in the road surface there ,2015, they will soon be falling into it, presumably not designed for all those Sainsburys lorries going over it.
Other Southampton bunkers Roman Drive/ Sports Centre Bassett;
Wyndham House, near the central railway station, access from the underground carpark;
undercroft under the old student union building of Southampton University;
under the Prudential Building and tunnel extending under Above Bar, of all crazy
places under the now converted-use gasboard tower block St Marys road and
under the guildhall carpark towards the new complex at the civic centre.
2013 something must have gone wrong with the roof of the Above Bar one as the pavement opposite the Prudential Building started dropping as a hollow
The "big daddy" of them all, the 400 yearold or so giant can be found just NNE of
postcode DT2 7LS in a rectangular fence? border, his feet to the west.
at postcode location SO15 7QU
http://education.guardian.co.uk/schools/story/0,,2002927,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=1
http://map.live.com/default.aspx?v=2&ss=yp.school&cp=sgn9p8gwf5nt&style=o&lvl=1&tilt=-90&dir=0&alt=-1000&scene=4316486
Schoolyard penis seen from space
Press Association
Wednesday January 31, 2007
EducationGuardian.co.uk
Two pupils who drew a giant penis on a school lawn using weed killer two years ago can still admire their work from satellite photos now posted on the internet.
Despite the school re-seeding the area, the penis has turned up on satellite image search engines because a photo was taken before the new grass could conceal the appendage.
The unnamed pair of year 11 pupils from Bellemoor school for boys in Southampton, burned the 6-metre (20ft) phallus into the grass as an end of term joke.
The world's first
graffiti well worth a visit
Some home-grown buried on this site
Maes Howe ,Orkneys, Viking runic graffiti
Banksy - stencil graffiti artist ,note
his handle had to be a scriptform that could be cut into stencil
Defaced Southampton Banksy of 24 November 2010 at the Blackberry Terrace/Bevois Valley Rd triangle on Mount Pleasant Rd,
postcode for you satnav people SO14 0ED
The BBC kneeling in obeisance to Banksy
A local ice-cream seller apparently saw this one being created about 3 am on a Saturday night ,
requiring laying on the ground to do it.
From internet "chatter" , since 12 Oct 2010 I was aware of a Banksy + Mount Pleasant connection but not exactly what and the part
of Mount Pleasant Rd I rarely go along.
Brickwork in cutway next to ganaways and concrete of subways , July 2011, first marked Korupt. I could not find the
trio of coppers and nude man one, nor the three blind rats on some brickwork somewhere between Woolston sewage works
and Netley Abbey.
Asylum Rd (road to nowhere), a stencil work, Have a Nice Day
A "Non Prophet" stencil work of a slapper between C&G and HSBC, London Rd - nice touch the
technicolour yawn made from leaf litter.
A rather cardboard performance above Boscombe railway station. Well I preferred it to the official mural along the wall of the platform
One place I did not expect to see graffiti is scratched into the stone-work in the cloister/quad/chappel
area of stiff-collared Winchester College, obviously not expunged over the centuries. Also in Winchester, the Westgate
some very ornate 17th century prisoner graffiti.
Some high-brow 1843 graffitti
celebrating the eureka moment of mathematician William Rowan Hamilton inventing quaternions at Brougham Bridge on the Royal Canal, Dublin
More scientific graffiti on the Island of Ternate,
translates from Pidgin as something like Alfred Russel Wallace, Ternate scientist, born English
A celebration of street culture - including links to the like of the
Japanese museum of man-hole covers
Exploring another street mystery - the single lost shoe
And a few eclectic sites
Extreme Ironing
A different slant on the hoax moon
landing conspiracies or
http://web.archive.org/web/20030602181024/http://www.dc8p.com/html/moonhoax.html
HMG - Preparing for Emergencies
The Joy of
Socks
Not exactly Sotherby's
The
Pilchard Museum
2B or not 2B
The loneliest phone booth in the world (Mojave Desert ) and here photos
The gentrified bus shelter on Unst
If you ever doubted Asperger's Syndrome and maleness were synonymous
How to build better sandcastles
How to build the best paper airplane
human pedal-powered hovercraft, www.steamboatwilly.org, because I would not have thought it was possible
Ballooning about
Wish I thought of it first
The original Shakesperean Insult Kit , on archive
The garden Gnome Liberation Front
Anyone any pics of the house at the corner of Alma Rd and
Portswood road when it was infested with gnomes ?
The Barbie Liberation Organisation
yarnstormer urban guerilla knitters
Naughtie Harry Potter Broomsticks
or http://web.archive.org/web/20031207011003/http://methodshop.com/fun/sexy/PottersStick/index.stm
What you didn't know about treehouses and perhaps related
The "Mornington Crescent" of Usenet
group uk.rec.sheds
Talking of sheds, this person (known to the writer ) and the delivery
of his glorified wendy house. My shed required the labour of
myself and a girl to move into the back garden. This one
was a 2.1 ton, including crane hook, lift costing 800 quid.
Full jib reach required so jib could be poked up through
a gap in the phone wires, hook dropped and shed
lifted, off the lorry, through another gap in the wires a long way down the
road

Outriggers on pavements with 6 inch space to garden wall

No wheels on the ground

Another crane pic, just seemed a dramatic cloudless night time scene, en garde, towering over Southampton city centre at night , like a pair of
jousting knights , with red warning lights, unfortunately no tripod with me or anywhere nearby
to place the camera on a surface for a long exposure shot.
The day the media circus descended on St Denys to doorstep
the husband of the Luton MP, Margaret Moran, with a supposed dry-rot cured second home at the "seaside" in Southampton,
one crew doorstepping from 06.45 to 15.30 in the afternoon.
Finally if anyone knows the wherabouts of the following website could they tell me.
Apparently somewhere on the internet is someone who has created a
collection of pictures of women standing in puddles. Nothing sexual or scatalogical
just ordinary circumstances but women standing (not walking ) in puddles.
It could only be on the internet.
Now because of overwhelming number of contacts from people
October 2006, presumably due to the excessive media publicity
about what was falsely deemed the highest tides for 25 years.
Amazingly, apparently nothing on the internet, this sort of local flood info or
even nationally when future high tide days occur through the
year, presumably because companies want to sell their tide tables.
Hardly anything of any use on http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/subjects/flood/
5 metre tide covering the path , Janaway Gardens, St Denys
And because you can easily find the tide times for Dover in national newspapers
and national TV teletext but not the times for Southampton and
I could not find the conversion factors on the internet.
For Springs - First High Water at Southampon Dock Head is about 15
minutes earlier than Dover and about 2 metres less than the heights expressed for Dover
For Neaps - First High Water at Southampton Dock Head is between 10 and
45 minutes earlier and 1.5 metres less, beware of any GMT/BST differences.
Second High Water is about 1 1/2 hours later and lower height
Corrections (highly weather dependent ) for Redbridge is about 5 minutes
earlier than Dock Head HW, and Woodmill about 10 minutes earlier than Dock Head HW.
Low Water is about 6 hours after first High Water. And the general tidal advance on corresponding
tides about 50 minutes per day.
A useful facility , predicted and near actual from tideguages around the country but not Soton
near real time National Tide Gauge Network
View the following with caution
Bramble Bank water-level was always "higher" than Dockhead spring, neap, high or low ,
any barometric, wind direction/strength
or any other time. Was, May 2006 average 0.7m higher, June 2006 average about
1.1m higher. Where was all this water continually flowing downhill into
Southampton Water going - isn't technology wonderful.? July they corrected the system.
Then it got really bad in August a tide high enough to get a ship to Winchester, 55.7 metres
Southampton - Dock Head - 17:41 19/8/2006
Wind
Mean Speed 15 kts (F4)
Highest Gust 19 kts (F5)
Direction 236°
Sea Conditions
Tidal Height 55.7 m
For anyone interested this is part of a chart of
1698 (before the 1703 great storm) showing "The Bramble"
the Solent of 1698
" The River of Southampton (with? ) the situation of Bursleton Beauley &
Lymington"
I made it 11.3 sea miles from Hurst point to Calshot Castle on a modern
chart and 12.64 miles on the old map. Converting 11.3 by 6000/5280 gives
12.84 so it must be land miles , so Bramble was then 1.65 miles long.
It would seem to be an accurate map of coastal and marine features, with a
scale in miles, probably land miles. The drying height shapes/extent around
the shore are much the same as a modern chart. The drying bank/ island?
marked Y as the Bramble is about 1.65 miles from X to X. In other words
about the 2m depth (below datum) line on a modern chart, not the current
small patch with a drying height maximum of 1m above chart datum. Was it
ever an island , with brambles perhaps ? lost in one of the earlier great
channel storms. As no second contour at Y then probably no island then.
With a high tide measuring 5.0m at Dock Head via
near real time VTS met and tides info
the corresponding level of water at Priory Road Hard/slip , St Denys was 0.53m
below the top level of the concrete ramp of the hard.
About 4 bays of railings down on the down-stream side and
about 3 bays on the up-stream side. Each bay of railings on the down-stream side corresponds
to about 0.13m difference in height on this hard. With a predicted 4.8m tide but 5.0m at
Dock Head because air pressure was 1004mB. The level at dock head, at high water, that corresponds to
over-topping at Priory Rd hard would be about 5.5m.
The next 4 photos are for 5m tide
Priory Hard with a 5.2m tide (Dock Head) on 05 Dec 2006 at about 10.30,
with the drift line 3 barriers down the ramp, 0.5m higher than 4.7m
prediction probably mainly due to severe SW gales in the channel,
Plymouth and Dover did not show surges due to the low off the
north of Scotland.

"millionaire row" with a 5.2m tide

The tide-mark for 5m is actually the brown twig line to the left of
the life belt rack. The 5m line at this point at Pettinger gardens ,
the concrete structure just upstream of the house boats is 0.17m
below the ledge marked with 2 red lines in the next pic.
Pettinger Gardens wiith a 5.2m tide, with life belt point in the water.

Dyer's Boatyard at Cobden Bridge with a 5.2m (Dock Head) tide

Riverside Park under a 5.2m tide, also slippery road sign that has been there about 10 years.

27th October 2012, relatively minor low passing to the west, predicted 4.9m tide at
Southampton, 5.35m at Dock Head. Pictured taken half an hour and .1m down from peak, fine sunny day, no rain.
Bournemouth peak .4m higher than its predicted about 2.5 hours before Soton, so good short-term predictor again.

I've seen a high tide across the river path and grass up to
about where the small tree is , so substantially more than 5m.
Cobden bridge must be near unique for
having allowed car parking along its length for most of the day. I assume
because it was built wide with a tram-line across it but only
to Bitterne Triangle as of a 1910 map.
Part of this St Denys Rd tramline emerged at the railway bridge works,
Nov 2009, including the original cobbles (C) between the rails (R)
and tiebar (T). Four inches of tarmac laid straight over the top.
Another aside - the "new" Itchen Bridge was built in the mid 1970s. The pier
second in towards Woolston, from mid-stream, was built at the height
of the 1976 drought.
Despite bringing in large water pumps and spraying the formwork,
the concrete , already exothermic,
was still getting far too hot for proper strong concrete.
Someone made the decision not
to demolish that pier. Anyone know the date, for the floating bridges
were still operating, what day there was an extremely low low
water in the Itchen. One "bridge" bottomed-out and the other,
when at the land had to be continually edged into stream to stop
it grounding too. There was so little water left in the Itchen that
not only the slab section below the tarmac on the hards was exposed but
perhaps 40 foot of mud to tramp through. Exposed in this mud just where the bridge ramps
would smash it normally, was a Cod's Wallob marble stopped bottle buried in the mud,
presumably undisturbed for decades.
Unfortunately the level at which
water comes up the storm drain system, immediately, no time lag, into the gutter in Priory Rd at
the hard is only 5.1m, not many people realise that. The picture below is for
a 5m tide, the leaves are nothing to do with the situation, as soon as the tide
goes down then so does the water in the drain. According to the highways dept this road drain system is connected to
a flap-valve river outfall just upstream Cobden Bridge and 3 at Saltmead so the river water probably
enters at those points.

Doing the Priory Rd shuffle with a 5.2m tide at the hard, also evidence of the leaves
piled on the pavemnent that one of the locals still believes that
this sort of flooding is due to leaves blocking the drains - wrong.


I would have thought it was an easy internet task to couple this pic with
one of the far better examples from Bosham. The Anchor Bleu on Shore Rd has
dozens of such pics in the pub but a paucity on the net. This is
the only one I could find.
Bosham marine car park
If atmospheric pressure drops to
965 mBar then the water height can increase by 0.8m. Tide table heights are expressed for a standard atmosphere of 1013mBar, from that there is
a neat correction that for each 1mBar drop in air pressure then tide
height can rise (not fall) 1 cm. Those heights also relate to above lowest astronomically
predicted local low water heights so not a countrywide correspondence
between tide height and Ordnance Survey land spot heights. The corresponding land-based spot heights from the
1:1250 scale OS map is 2.4m for Priory Rd crown of road adjascent to the hard, 3.0m at nearest 2 road junctions of Ivy and Adelaide roads,
only one bench mark remains at the railway bridge on the
north side, 3.28m so by as bit of trig the lowest gutter level
under the bridge is 2.43m .
5.2m tide level coming up through the drains at this railway bridge.

For the 5.6m tide of 10 Mar 2008 the water under the bridge reached level 0.48m below the benchmark. So 5.6m tide at dock head correlated to OS heigt of 2.80m. For 5.2m tide correlated to 2.48m OS. Not knowing which would be more accurate , unknown wind effects between Dock Head and St Denys, lag in sewer system etc then taking average of these 2 results, then subtract 2.76m from tide height gives Ordnance Survey spot height (about ).
Anyone curious about all this - position yourself at
the dip under the railway at Kent Rd. With a high tide of only 4.5m
you can hear and see the water flowing in the road drain system.
It will not rise up and overflow the drain (requires about 5.26m )
but is flowing on, into and below Belgrave rd road level etc.
2013 someone has been altering the local drainage system as the 03 November 2013 flooding to VTS height 5.53m 20minutes before predicted high water of 22.40. The Itchen flowed around the lowest houses into the dry Priory Road and then filled up the drains, presumably all the way across to Saltmead and the far end of Priory Rd. Standing at the Kent Rd spot on an ordinary spring high tide , there is no longer any water flowing towards Belgrave. This process starts with the Itchen at about 5.3m and now the water in Priory Rd hangs around , despite frantic leaf clearing of the drains - the drainage engineers must have put a block on any water flowing
from landward to Itchen for any Itchen heights above 5m or so.
If Priory Rd flooded from rain water then it makes no difference with a high spring tide as nowhere to go anyway .
I'm researching historical extreme tides in the Solent area. I visited the Vectis Tavern to take pics and measurements of what remains of the tide marks on the pillar
probably 17 Dec 1989 and 22 Oct 1984 and
battern part obscuring the lower one Date, probably 02 Dec 1909
Anyone got an Infra-red camera to borrow to non-destructively discover the covered mark/s?
It's reported to me by 3 different people that there used to be a mark at chest high, but no one can remember the date , probably 27 Nov 1924 or 14 Nov 1931 or even 01 Jan 1877. Anyone aware of pictures showing the inside of the Vectis Tavern before the bar was moved and anaglypta wallpaper covered over the higher markings? (or IR camera and heat source)
Or other info concerning Cowes or IoW or Solent area dates/heights (indirectly from pics) of flooding before 1989?
Google images surprisingly shows no functions / events inside the Vectis.
Second pillar in from the High St and on that face facing the High St, inside the bar counter.
I've recently been researching in newspaper archives for extreme marine floods around the Solent, ie Solent-wide , surge-type, not very localised events. With depth overland of inundation as a measure of sea "storminess", less now than centuries back. Two academics have come to the same conclusion , from a different direction and different records. The Vectis Tavern pub, Cowes, IoW used to have the levels of extreme tides reached when it flooded the pub, marked on a pillar in the bar. With renovations in the last 10 years or so only the bottom marks can be seen now under the counter. The present landlord let me take these pics a month ago.
It is of academic significance , because of confusion over measurement datums, what these historic tide levels were, linked to one specific site.
It's reported to me by 3 different people that there used to be a mark at chest high, but no one can remember the date , probably 27 Nov 1924 or 14 Nov 1931 or even 01 Jan 1877.
The floor of the pub has been there since 1400s (scheduled buildings register, before becoming a pub in 1700s, why you have to go down steps into the main bar area) and this pillar since the Victorian era .
The floor is at the level of the normal astronomic tide height of spring tides. This central south region is supposed to be sinking (balancing north rebound after the ice age) plus sea level rise would suggest more extreme marine flooding.
The 1860s 25 inch scale OS map shows the VT as not including the Town Quay half then, presumably a wall dividing then rather than a pair of pillars , so the earliest dates noted below could not have been recorded on the pillar.
The 1909 mark is 0.64m above the floor and the 1984 0.74m and 1989 0.95m but which date is the topmost covered-over/erased one and its height, should be about 1.2 to 1.4m off the floor.
An expanded page on this reconstructed epigraphic historic extreme tide "record" of the Solent area now on
Solent Extreme Tide Gauge
Theoretical set of marks with heights determined from newspaper reports, so only approximate
19 Jan 1804, 1.35m (reported in 1804 newspaper as highest tide for 30 years )
27 Nov 1924, 1.25m
14 Nov 1931, 1.2m
01 Jan 1877, 1.1m (Mr John White newspaper quote of Cowes tide-height reference and 1818 one)
04 Mar 1818 , 1.05m
17 Dec 1989, 0.95m (actual mark, VT landlord comment in local press)
27 Nov 1954, 0.95m
25 Dec 1912, 0.9m
26 Dec 1999, 0.85m and 10 Mar 2008 and 14 Feb 2014
08 Oct 1960 , 0.8m
22 Oct 1984, 0.74m (actual mark, VT landlord comment in local press)
02 Dec 1909, (actual mark) , 0.64m
22 Oct 1909, 0.55m and 10 Jan 1993
12 Jan 1978, 0.45m
Hampshire Advertiser, 03 Jan, 1877.
So far I have more faith in the 1877 reported statements of Mr John White of Cowes than local wrongly ascribed datums "official" historic extreme tide records , which place the tide height reached in the 1924 flooding as being the same as 1999 flooding , when there is a 0.4m difference, and no mention of the 0.1m higher tide in 1989 , just because their tide guage was out of action then .
As he or his family must have had daily contact with tide and ground level for more than 59 years he was probably the "John White of Cowes" who built "specialised lifeboats " at Cowes and founded in 1805 what became John Samuel White shipyard of Cowes. A lot of JS Whites records ended up at the Beckford Rd , Cowes Library, whether this tide record probably not, not at the Newport Record Office anyway.
Also Beken photographs of flooding , PV98 catalogued as 1899 date
has the wrong clothing for that time and no blurring of the rowers in the boat in the High St outside the National Provincial Bank, probably 1920s to 1930s and another with Morris J van maybe 50s is undated totally, PV117 dated 1920, number 42734 of 1960 and other
flooding pics in their catalogue of Medina Rd, sea front etc 42733,PV102,PV71,PV99/100/101, PV56,PV71.
Useful tabulation of flooding events recorded in the Times on
http://dro.dur.ac.uk/1072/1/1072.pdf
Echo 27 Nov, 1924 and Hampshire Advertiser 29 Nov 1924.
For anyone who thinks the 1924 tide height was the same as 1999, you need a goodly amount of flood water to cause domestic furniture to float around, stop people leaving upper stories of houses and no reports of houses in Adelaide Road , St Denys, flooding in living local memory.
I dropped in Southampton Archives and the "Fundamental " Fundamental Bench Mark, shown elsewhere on this page.
From 1868 Series 1 252 scale map, only to 1 decimal place placed on maps, height of bench mark then 75.6 ft, FBM at the then OS headquarters ,at the red line ,still in
this position and green line to the printed height .
Later height on the brass plaque screwed over the original bench mark
74.35 ft (no one has tried unscrewing these screws, perhaps because of the notice saying damage to this is a
criminal offence).
Then the Penna Liverpool - Newlyn height difference of about .02m
from analysing the colouring, gives the error picked up in newspaper reports as 0.40 +/-0.02m until OS reveals a 2 places of decimals First Geodetic Levelling height for this bench mark .
http://www.cage.curtin.edu.au/~will/GJI_ODN_slope.pdf
I find it very disturbing that this error in the record is not stated anywhere that I've found. I can only assume
the same error applies to other ports around the UK as it is independent of Southampton using their own
local PLWD datum, as that is stated in the contemporaneous record as being 7.48 ft below the then Newlyn
datum. So the1924 flood was 6.0m +/-0.02m , not the 5.6m recorded in the official tide-height history of Southampton. They would not have been using the Second Geodetic Levelling height in 1924.
No reason to believe the situation of wrongly recorded flood histories does not apply to other ports and historic
tides.
Southampton Archives image,
, as "SC/E/6/24/156" is indexed as flooding in Clarence St,
Northam. From another image showing what is called New Liberal Club, Northam, shows the club
and a shop , and general house forms that match , behind the cart in that image, and then
from street directories it is probably housing blocks, shop and Evan's Liberal Club, 6-8 Belvedere Terrace,
Northam. Two boys in sunday best and Eton Collars, girl moved head quarter of a turn in exposure, no ripples in the water, 10 foot away poor focus, and people hanging out of each upstairs window on the right.
Was the interest because no one had seen a camera before and the date was much earlier, say 1877?. Gas lighting been in southampton since
1829, same lamps were shown in a dated 1921 picture of that area. The archivists have suggested dates of 1900 or 1910.

An example of Southampton street lighting 2015, or is it arboriculture,
as no light was getting to the road surface, by what was St Denys railway station.
Then from OS street spot heights and this FGL-SGL OS correction of 0.4m , the flooding was to 6.0m +/-0.3m , the errror range because OS maps of the time only gave integre spot heights in feet.
If the cart in the Belvidere Terrace pic , viewing the original sepia postcard in Southampton Central Library, shows the name CHaMberS
and larger letters below fishmonGEr (discernable placed as large letters here, although brushes and pans on it) then John Chambers was at number 10, 1897 to 1900, maybe a bit longer but not a continuous set of Kellys. As postcards like this were produced by professional photogtraphers , there was a commercial photographer AG Butler, 25 Northam Rd at that time. So now 2.5 of 3 different pointers to
the historic datum correction for Southampton being 0.4m, if
not 1924 then another , unknown date, of similar flooding extreme height.
Another image out there of the Cooper' Arms Clarence St, William St, shows only about a 5.6m flood
of 25 December 1912 , quote from the Echo
"Priory Road the unusual sight was witnessed of a small boat ferrying stranded pedestrians to and fro like a gondola in Venice"
Using a 14m long ,1/8 inch bore clear polythene tube manometer.
Check for lack of bubbles in the water first, by positioning open ends together
and suspending over a long drop , bigger than 1/8 inch would give
quicker response time.
Assuming uniform slope for Ivy Road then that slope from South Rd to Priory
Rd is about 8.1 in 1000. I was not the only person to think that despite
many mentions of global warming/sea level rises, there is less flooding now than in past years.
Does anyone have any photos of this local flooding ?
Is anyone aware of a locally organised
flood warning system for this area ?, separate from Environment Agency flood warden system ,
as I suppose with melting Antartica/Greenland etc this area is more
likely to flood than just the odd rare tide. Flooding in Priory Rd on
Sunday 17 Dec 1989 was
to OS height of about 2.9m. I've not found an official record of this flood
height other than "southwesterly storms combined with a surge of excess of 1 metre"
but was higher than
the 10 Mar 2008 flooding by 0.1 to 0.2m so 1989 tide height about 5.7m.
It is often stated that the historical highest tide at Southampton
was 27 November 1924.

Apologies for my choices of colour, the purple and red are not too
different. The blue line is what the 1953 Canvey Island surge would
be and the 30 January 1607 Bristol Channel inundation surge of 7.5m would
be half way up the hill between Osborne Rd and Belmont Rd.
That day (1989 ?) Lymington had 5 foot of flooding, 70mph winds locally and
115mph in Cornwall. Predicted tide was only 4.1m but barometric was a
very low 968mB, nearest depression was about 956mB in channel
approaches 340 miles away at noon 17 Dec and 972mB 220 miles away noon
on 18 Dec.
Also local flooding
on Sunday 4 Dec 1994 when Hamble had 2 foot of water, barometric was high at about 1008mB
but 4.9m predicted tide height. Nearest depression was about 972mB 740 miles
away in sea area Rockal. Incidently believed lowest recorded tide
in 20 century up to that date was on 9 March 1993, of 0.1m and HT of 4.9m.
In the days of the floating bridge, about 4.30 in the afternoon one day after 1973 , before July 1977
and probably the colder part of the year there was a very low tide in the Itchen.
Very little water in the Itchen at Woolston, well below the tarmac and then blocks
of the hards.
So far down that a codswallop bottle was poking out of the mud, that would have been
smashed by the ramps. The city side upstream bridge grounded as the remaining water was going out
so fast.
Odd coincidence the worst maritime flooding in living memory was
the Canvey Island flood again on Sunday, Feb 01 , 1953 when tide was mid spring-neap
but a severe depression of 968 mB.
More flooding Monday 27 Dec 1999 when there was 4 foot of water in Waterloo
Rd, Lymington , Fulmar Rd , Hythe and half submerged cars at Hurst Spit car park,
mid day , Selsey and Pevensey sea defences breached,
predicted pressure was 992mB and tides of 4.5 and 4.3m. Associated with
a bad storm in N France, nothing untoward
predicted by the French Met service, 107mph wind and 31 people
killed in N France, just a low over Poland, their equivalent
of Oct 1987 English storm. According to an old boy of Northam
extraction , the Coopers pub had a dated tide-mark for
when the pub flooded numerous times. When I went to see in
2007 it was closed and for sale. The new owners had not seen any such record, so lost or
covered over.
Locally highest spring tides are 1 to 3 days after new and full moons.
Moon Date http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/phase/phase2001gmt.html
Running freeware tide calculator WXTide32 from July 2006 to Oct 2007 the
highest predicted tides for Pompey setting, with usual caveats about taking independent advice and
that low barometric pressures can easily over-ride such predictions. For 5.1m on
07 Oct 2006 11.57 GMT, 08 Oct 12.35, 28 Sep 2007 12.48, 26 Oct 2007 11.43, 27 Oct 2007 12.24
and for 5.0 m tides in 2006 08,09,10 Sep; 08,09 Oct ; 05,06 Nov;
and 2007 18,22 Mar ; 27,28, 29 Sep; 25,27,28 Oct . Portsmouth 5.1m
tides correspond to about 4.9m Southampton First High Water height, about
30 minutes earlier than Pompey for such extreme spring high tides. In fact running the program from
2006 to Nov 2020 shows no higher predicted tides than 5.1m .
I've checked this WXTide32 calculator against some old south coast
tide tables of 1985,1987 and 2002 and some current newspaper
predictions, consistent
to within about 10 minutes and 0.1m .
A Tide Calendar/calculator for Dutch ports is on
http://www.getij.nl/index.cfm?taal=en, for selecting Vlissingen (Flushing) ,GMT
and LAT, then deduct about 2 hours 35 mins (variation 2 hours 20min to
2 hours 50min extreme times not coincident with extreme tide range ) and deduct about
0.4 metres (variation 0.1m to 0.7m)
from the Vlissingen times and heights for Southampton first High Water times and heights.
Using WXTide32 with offset is more accurate.
Predicted Tide Heights for 2006 to 2007, using WXtide32
and Pompey settings.
For 5.1m in
2006
07 Oct 2006 11.57 GMT,
08 Oct 12.35,
2007
28 Sep 2007 12.48,
26 Oct 2007 11.43,
27 Oct 2007 12.24
and for 5.0 m tides in
2006
08,09,10 Sep;
08,09 Oct ;
05,06 Nov;
2007
18,22 Mar ;
27,28, 29 Sep;
25,27,28 Oct .
Portsmouth 5.1m
tides correspond to about 4.9m Southampton First High Water height.
In fact running the program from
2006 to Nov 2020 shows no higher predicted tides than 5.1m.
Spreads of days when the predicted heights for Portsmouth
have at least one tide greater than 4.7m. Add a simple pop-up date reminder /
calendar alarm like the freeware J.M. Falcao one on
http://www.webxpace.net/software/software.html
to flash up a reminder on your pc on the relevant days
to check local tide times, . Save or even create the
DateRemind.DAT file as a text file consisting of
High Tides check
07/10/06
High Tides check
08/10/06
etc, etc if you should manage to erase the calendar file by
clicking Exit rather than Minimise. Then outside of the
running application just change the file name to DateRimind.DAT
Also monitor local atmospheric pressure (get a
barometer and tap it daily), and port say http://www.pol.ac.uk/ntslf/pltdata_tgi_ntslf_v2.php?code=Portsmouth&span=1
for nearby ports giving the signature of increasing difference
between the blue and red ( actual tide heights and predicted )
Snapshot showing a storm surge 0.5m elevated peak at about
22.00 on 21 Sep 2006 when the Portsmouth atmospheric pressure was
1002mB and rising and had been locally that +/- 3mB for the
previous 24 hours. So that increase was due to an
effect at a distance - the final gasp of Hurricane Gordon
passing to the west of Ireland. Closest approach about noon
on 21 Sep 480 miles distant. A good tidal bellweather for
Southampton would seem to be monitoring the pol.ac.uk tide gauge
for Bournemouth as their first high water precedes by about 2.5 hours
and any excess over predicted at Bournemouth is likely to affect Southampton
even if the Plymouth and Dover gauges show nothing untoward.
eg 18 Jan 2005 (high SW winds in the English
Channel ) we can usually assume that barometric pressure
at Bournemouth is much the same as Soton, that day 990mB, a 0.5m
surge at Bournemouth evident at about 04.00 ,4 hours before their high water
and 6 hours before
first high water at Soton, predicted 4.4m at 10.03, turned out to
be 0.6m over predicted, 6 hours later.
At end of October 2006 a fairly minor 980mB depression tracked N of Scotland
to Norway and back into the North Sea.
Analysing that tidal surge that killed a beach angler at Kessingland and seawater flooded the main A12
Tracking around the SE approximate readings and times
Whitby ,excess over predicted of,
1m 20.00 , 31 Oct to 06.00 , 01Nov 2006
Cromer 1.2m 0200 to 1000 , 01 Nov
Harwich 1.4m 0000 to 0900
Felixstowe 1.5m 0000 down to 1m 1000
Sheerness 1.8m 0000 to 1.5m 0500
(Not far from Canvey Island, scene of the 1953 flood about the same time of night)
Dover 1.2m 0000 to 1m 0300
Newhaven 0.7m 23.00 ,31 Oct to 0100 , 01 Nov
Portsmouth peak of 0.7m at 0200
Bournemouth .7m 0100 to 0300
Weymouth 0.6m 0100 to 0300
The Thames Estuary seems a good place
for anomalies "anti surge" anti-residual at Sheerness of maximum (minmnimum
?) of 1.4m below predicted at 0700 Sunday 20 Nov 2006.
That by then -0.9m antisurge peak/trough? passed Dover at 1000 , 20 Nov and
Portsmouth of about -0.7m at about 1200 , 20 Nov.
The strongest winds for the greatest duration over that period seemed to be
along the South Coast but the anti-surge effect occured strongest and
earliest in the Thames sea area.
Does anyone know if there was extreme currents going NE through the Dover
Straits causing some sort of Venturi effect in the southern North Sea. ?
SW Winds at Chichester Bar were averaging 30 to 45 mph from 1900 of the 19th
to 0700 on the 20th.
Cliffsend / Margate averaging 20 to 35 mph 2100 on the 19th to 1000 on the
20th.
Ipswich 15 to 20mph 2100 19th to 0600 20th Nov
Atmosheric pressure was fairly stable between 1010mB and 1014 mB
Looking at the BODC data for Sheerness station 1990 to 2002.
Not unusual for large anti-residuals
for more than -2m
1997/02/19 22.00 to 0830 next day with peak/trough of -2.26m
1990/12/25 17.00 peak/trough of -2m
and loads more >1 , <2m
Those two events are too early to have archived synoptics on
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/tkfaxbraar.htm
The next , in severity, Sheerness anti-surges
34310) 1999/12/24 09:15:00 -1.9m peak/trough
from the archived chart
time 00.00 12/24 a 957mB low about 60N, 10W and 1008mB at Thames and isobars
running up the English Channel
28753) 2002/10/27 12:00:00 -1.8m peak/trough
time 00.00 10.27 975mB nearer low at about 53N, 10W and 1004mB at Thames and
isobars running up the English Channel.