WHAT HAPPENED TO PATROLMAN STAGGS Patrolman Staggs had been told to get back from the jetty to the Time Office with all speed, but a distance of 650 yards cannot be done in less than two minutes. Truly it has been said that 'time and tide wait for no man'. This was no straight- forward frontal attack. Our river wall was holding, but disaster came in a flanking movement on the left, from breaches higher up the river, cutting off the main Works thoroughfare, before the waters fanned out and filled the whole site. Finding he was cut off from the gate, Staggs decided to go back to the jetty.

Just before he got there, he found another stretch of water rushing across, but as he said, 'I took a chance, rushed through it, and made the jetty stairs'. An ex-Navy man, he knew he was cut off until the tide ebbed, but that would not happen for at least another three hours or more, so he continued his patrol- this time along the top of the river wall. In the dark he found the jetty ladder down to the wall, and walked to the west to find out where the water was coming in. There by the side of the Shell Mex jetty he found the first breach, which in the moonlight seemed to be a gap about sixty feet wide. The time was about 1.30 a.m. and from then until after 4 a.m., in conditions which must have reminded him of his seafaring days, he walked along the wall from west to east and back as far as the water would let him 'to keep warm', all the while watching the flood waters relentlessly filling our site at the rate of about five feet an hour.At the turn of the tide, he was able, by a circuitous route along the river wall going down- stream, to get ashore on to higher and dry land, and at 4.30 a.m. he walked into Purfleet Police Station.