James and Mary Ketley, aged 74 and 68, were at No 3, Meadow Way Emma Scott, 78, was at No 11. Herbert Law, 76, and his sister Margarita Law, 74, were at No 21, while Helena Bayle, 62, was at No 22 Nellie Burnett, 87, was at No 87. Lavinia Lambert, 71, and Florence Weatherburn, 69, were at No 95 Harriet Fox, 74, was at No 198 Maude Ryan, 69, was at No 202. No 278 contained James William Jew and Esther Jew, aged 86 and 89, and their visitors James Charles Jew, 60, and Sarah Dempster, 61, from Wood Green in London.

All died.By the time the North Sea had finished with Jaywick, 35 people had drowned. There were higher death tolls that night: 41 on the Lincolnshire coast, 66 at Heacham and Hunstanton in Norfolk, 40 at Felixstowe in Suffolk, 58 at Canvey Island in the Thames estuary. But proportionately, Jaywick suffered most: 5 per cent of its population lost their lives The other 95 per cent were homeless. (And the storm surge had still not finished its work: across the North Sea, it built up even higher, claiming 1,800 lives in the Netherlands.)Back in the bungalow at Seawick, Reg Arthur was battering a hole in the gable end of the roof. Eventually he peered out at a vast lake, lit by bright moonlight – the full moon had brought the spring tide – and the first thing he saw was a haystack, sailing past Then he saw a bungalow floating away He wondered if his would be next, but the foundations held He feared another tidal surge, but none came.

At midday the next day, a boat came, and he and his mother clambered out through the hole to be rescued, frozen, exhausted and thankful. (The cats made it, too; the chickens didn't.)He is 73 now, retired in St Osyth after a career as a nature-reserve warden, mainly in Wales. He is a naturally cheerful man, but he is under no illusions about the narrowness of his escape that night "We were incredibly lucky," he says. "At its peak the flood was very close to us, sitting in the loft. When you think what might have happened if we hadn't woken up in time... think what happened to Jaywick."Looking back, he says, the most remarkable aspect of the disaster, apart from the scale of the flood itself, was the complete absence of any warning, although the sea's invasion had begun further up the coast in Lincolnshire, many hours before, and had successively swept on to the coasts of Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex And it is true that the lack of warning was lamentable. In those days flood safety was the responsibility of individual river boards, who scarcely communicated; but the county police forces might have told each other much more than they did that night.Things are very different now.