Thirty years ago this morning.

The south of England woke up to scenes of natural devastation not witnessed before or since. In the great storm of 1987, thousands of trees came down, cars were crushed and 22 people were killed. The storm raged most ferociously between 2am and 5am. Imagine if it had been between 2pm and 5pm – how many hundreds would have died? Three days later on “Black Monday”, the London Stock Exchange suffered its biggest-ever percentage drop. This too can almost certainly be attributed to the Great Storm. Most senior traders lived in the Home Counties’ “stockbroker belts” and couldn’t get in that morning, so serious trading was left to inexperienced juniors who didn’t know what they were doing. I woke up in Kilburn that morning to see three giant trees lying across Brondesbury Road.. The wind may have cried Mary but my predominantly Irish Catholic neighbours cried, “Jesus, Mary and Joseph!”