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A river in flood is not in the natural course of things, a disaster. Where man, for his own good reasons or through his own short-sightedness, has chosen to construct works by the side of a river, then indeed those man-made works may be disastrously damaged by a flood. But where all is natural, then a flood is Nature's beneficent device to improve the fertility of the land.

There are, of course, some countries whose populations depend for their very existence on the annual river-flood. But in the compact and crowded island of Britain, with its placid and brimming rivers and its adequate rainfall, it is a very different story. In England particularly, the effort, through several centuries, has been to pen rivers between their banks, even at the time of highest flood, and so to reclaim for agriculture the marshy lands around their estuaries. Of this the two most notable examples are Hatfield Chase, that large area of low-lying land between Trent and Yorkshire Ouse, and the low-lying land behind the Wash, receiving the waters of the rivers Witham, Welland, Nene and Great Ouse, which is usually called, rather loosely, The Fens.

(Two of the chief rivers in this narrative both bear the name of Ouse, but are, of course, widely separated and quite distinct, the Yorkshire Ouse running into the Humber, and the Great Ouse running into the Wash.)

The struggle to tame the rivers, and to reclaim from its marshy state hundreds of square miles of some of the richest land in England, began seriously and effectively in the 17th century, with the reclamation of Hatfield Chase by a noted Dutch engineer, Cornelius vermuyden. The Dutch, whose way of life depends upon control of water, have for centuries been most expert at this kind of thing. By cutting new channels, erecting sluices and building flood- banks, Vermuyden successfully reclaimed Hatfield Chase, and received a knighthood ; he had already adopted English nationality.

Then, in 1631, the fourth Earl of Bedford and a company of thirteen other Adventurers undertook to reclaim the Fens. They engaged Vermuyden as their engineer. To this task, interrupted by the Civil War, he devoted the rest of his life, and incidentally his whole fortune ; the scheme ruined all the original Adventurers, and Vermuyden himself died in poverty and neglect. But he did tame the rivers and drain the Fens, and his engineering system, with certain modifications, has lasted until the present day. Just how Vermuyden accomplished this task will be described later. It is necessary to state here only the problem that confronted him.

The main rivers of the Fens (Vermuyden was concerned chiefly with the Great Ouse) collect all the water from large areas of uplands; each river brings this water down, at a fairly steep gradient, until it reaches a wide, almost level plain stretching to the shore of the sea.

This became the battle area. River control in England and Wales is organised in Catchment Areas which take in the higher ground. Where the eastern rivers of England descend into fen country, massive floodbanks confine them. River engineering is a continuous, year-round operation. In the weather crisis of 1947 it became in places a desperate defensive action. Large reinforcements of men and machinery were called in. The situation was restored in those areas and the flooded regions enabled to bear a crop that year.