For a few weeks in February 2014 our village was the centre of media attention. The Thames burst its banks and flowed through the Main Street. Life took on a surreal quality. The media descended on us, the army and the fire brigade pitched in and ev...
I've focused so far on the village where I live Datchet and particularly on our street. This is largely as you'll appreciate because it's where I live and what I saw. It's not meant to diminish or underestimate what happened elsewhere particularly in nearby Wraysbury where the anger of local woman Su Burrows helped goad the authorities into action. If Datchet, with boats paddling up and down it's picturesque high street, made the best pictures there is no denying that Wraysbury, where firemen told us some of the properties were chest high in water had the worst affected households.
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Su Burrows became for a while the face of the floods when she gave Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, such a dressing down live on television when he visited Wraysbury that within hours the Army had been called out, David Cameron announced that he was cancelling a trip to the Middle East to oversee the crisis, and called a press conference to say that "money will be no object" in repairing the damage. The volunteer flood warden, confronted Mr. Hammond her frustration boiling over. "We need the Army, we said that yesterday. You don't take us seriously. What will it take for you to understand we are seriously in need?"
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Some of the news crews decamped to Wraysbury the next day which we didn't mind at all.
Ed Miliband got equally short shrift when ex headmistress and parish council chair Margaret Lenton took exception to him appearing with a TV crew and demanded he leave town.
Wraysbury residents were as adamant as we were where they placed the blame; on the Jubilee River. One newspaper article inspired by a Wraysbury Resident talked about Datchet and Wraysbury being sacrificed to protect the 'gin and jag' set in Windsor, Maidenhead and Eton.
