It was a night when trees were flattened, boats were blown across roads, cars were hurled into walls and scaffolding was wrecked. And the odd house was destroyed. On its 20th anniversary, this is the story of ‘the hurricane’ EVERYONE who was in Guernsey on the night of 16 October 1987 has a memory of the freak weather that well and truly blew the cobwebs off the island, even if it is only to say proudly, ‘I slept right through it’.

The real surprise is to come across someone who has no memory of it because either they are too young or they were neither here nor in the south of England – the storm missed most of the British Isles.

Much of this was recorded by the late Val Renouf in her book, Hurricane.

Ask a Met Office man about what we refer to as ‘the hurricane’ and you’re politely asked not to use the ‘h’ word because there is a difference between a tropical storm that turns into a hurricane and what we had, which was caused by ‘a wave depression on a cold front’, if that means anything to you. OK, it was ‘the great storm’, which sounds rather medieval, but if it’s technically correct, fair enough.

The airport is as good a place as any to start, because it is where the Met Office is. One of the few people who was working there in October 1987 and is still there is Ray Plant, then an air traffic controller and now the manager of that department.

So, what was it like at La Villiaze? ‘A Cessna [light aircraft] was flipped over, an F27 [a typical passenger plane of the time] was turned through 90 degrees and we lost a bit of the old Anglo Engineering hangar,’ he said. ‘But when the shift finished at nine the previous evening there had been nothing remarkable happening and by the time we got there in the morning it was all over.’

To the layman this might seem an unlikely let-off for a vulnerable site with parked aircraft dotted around, but Mr Plant pointed out that planes are designed to fly and therefore, if they are facing the right way, the wind will simply flow over and around them. The F27 hadn’t been facing that way, but the storm blew it until it was.

As for delays in the aftermath of the storm, those that affected local passengers were due to the fact that the wind hit the south-east of England after it had left us and therefore disruption was still being caused in the UK when our planes were trying to get there, with 15 million trees having been brought down. Guernsey contributed its fair share to that total, with southern cliffs incurring most of the casualties.

In situations such as this, the media are expected not just to cope with what is happening but also to get out there and report it. Staff of the Guernsey Press awoke, like the rest of the population, to scenes ranging from the unusual to sheer devastation. Richard Digard, now the editor, was news editor at the time and it fell to him to deploy his people on various assignments.

But this wasn’t a one-person story. He had chief reporter Herbert Winterflood at police headquarters, Tim Earl in the west of the island, Julie Mosley covering the north, John Neale in the Town area, Peter Webb in the Castel and central parts and Steve Falla picking his way through the debris that littered his local patch, the south and particularly Jerbourg, the high, exposed area where the storm arrived.

Steve had been on duty at the Guernsey Press the previous evening, getting the paper as ready as it could be for printing in the morning, with just the overnight news to add. He had left the building at about 9pm and gone home to the Bouvee Lane ‘granny wing’ where he was living at the time. He was due back in the office at nine and wasn’t expecting to be woken two hours early by a phone call asking what it was like at Jerbourg. ‘I didn’t know what they meant at first,’ he said.A few moments later he got the picture, though, when he drew back the curtains to see a large tree stretched across the garden and on top of a seesaw. ‘If it had fallen another way it could have landed on the house. I had been told that Jerbourg Road was blocked by a fallen tree, so I walked along the road to see what had happened.’

He came upon some people who had stables behind their house and had been up all night trying to keep the horses calm.

With the road still blocked (it wasn’t cleared until mid-morning, Steve recalled) he phoned his story in to contribute to the major reorganisation of the paper, with much of his work from Thursday evening having to be scrapped to accommodate this dramatic occurrence.

Just around the corner from the southern cliffs is, of course, St Peter Port Harbour, which took quite a battering.

The man in charge was harbour master Captain Tim Spencer. Now retired from that job but still involved in matters of the sea as a director of Maritime Allied Projects, Capt. Spencer recalled the point at which he first realised all was not well. He and his wife had been with friends for the evening at a house in the Strand. When they left at 11, Capt. Spencer thought it was unnaturally quiet, although huge seas were crashing over the Castle breakwater.

‘I knew something was about to happen,’ he said and he told his wife as much, before driving her home to Kings Mills. From their house he telephoned the Signal Station, which sits at the end of the White Rock, and spoke to Rodney Norman, who told him the wind was gusting to over 70 knots.

Capt. Spencer put on his oilskins and sea boots and headed for Town in his Daihatsu jeep, peppered by twigs and branches most of the way and at the bottom of Rohais de Bas, opposite the chip shop, finding that a tree had been blown down but was resting on a wall either side of the road, enabling him to drive underneath it.

At the harbour he found the vastly experienced Trident owner, Charlie Wilcox, watching anxiously as one of his ferries crashed repeatedly against floating wood that had come between it and the sea wall, holing it.

Mr Wilcox wasn’t the only concerned person in the area. The Island Commodore’s gangway was turning over in the wind and fishing boats were testing their moorings.

Over in the Albert Marina there was a different problem. In those days, the pontoons were attached by chains rather than being on stanchions and in addition to being thrown around by the weather, breaking some of the ties, as the tide went down the boats were being dragged towards the marina entrance, as if trying to get out. ‘It only stopped when the tide fell below the level of the sill,’ Capt. Spencer explained.

Sturdy 4WD vehicles were used to try to pull the rogue pontoon back, but it took a powerful Second World War lorry to finally do the trick.

Capt. Spencer got back to relatively sheltered Kings Mills to find that his home had not been entirely untouched. ‘Most of my greenhouse was next door.’Keyholders responsible for business premises must have slept fitfully – if at all – that night. One who got the dreaded call was Peter Richardson, retail supervisor at Quayside.

‘The phone went at about three in the morning,’ he said. It was Graham Solway, a director of the company, telling him that one of the shop’s big windows had been blown in and he was concerned that someone could get in and rob the place.

Mr Richardson jumped into his car and headed up the road from his home at the bottom of the Hougue du Pommier, intending to drive down the Landes du Marche.

It was easier said than done.

‘I didn’t realise how bad it was out there,’ he said, recalling how he met a fire engine that had found its way blocked by a fallen tree. He had followed the appliance down a lane with the aim of finding a way to the Camp du Roi crossroads. ‘There were trees down and still coming down all over the place. Probably the worst thing was that down in one lane there were greenhouses on both sides and there was so much debris on the road it was like driving on a carpet of glass. Eventually I got to about halfway, so it was either carry on or turn around and go home.’

He carried on, reached the Bridge and with the help of a builder who lived nearby, the Quayside men blocked up the window to make the premises secure. All the time the old roof on the building was banging and creaking as if it were about to fly off.

Mission accomplished, Mr Richardson got back into the car and headed for home, but this time around the coast, his reasoning being that there were fewer trees there. He went via Bordeaux and got all the way around to Pulias, just past Port Grat, when he came across a leafy blockage and was forced to turn around and go inland, up Le Vaugrat, through Pleinheaume and down Barras Lane to safety.

The following day, Saturday, Mr Richardson and his wife, Anne, went to Le Guet, where the scene was not so much one of devastation as of opportunism, with chainsaw-wielding individuals getting a stock of logs for the fire, but some not necessarily restricting themselves to trees that had already fallen.