New beach arrived in the nick of time

THE rain poured down, the lightning flashed, as we witnessed the end of this year's St Luke's Summer.Why link it to that good man, that Greek evangelist? His feast day is October 18 and tradition says that should that month in any year be mild and sunny, it's his doing!

So where was he in mid-October 1987, when overnight a hurricane hit this part of the coast? Some might say it was our greatest adversary, the sea, protesting against man's latest attempt to repel it. Only days before, the last pebble had been hurled, the last twirl of the water hose made, the last vestige of our old wooden groynes covered, and the engineers considered their 9.5 million beach conversion job satisfactorily completed. The 439ft dredger Barent Zanen, its attendant boats and machinery departed after some months as part of the seafront scenery, and for a short time all was quiet. Residents walked along the esplanade, viewing the featureless expanse of pebbles that our beach had become.

On that night to remember (though some of us slept through it) the full fury of wind and wave battered our shores. Next morning, it looked as if the work of the dredger had never been done '“ then it was realised: without those tons of new shingle protecting the sea wall, we could have been looking at the worst flooding of the town since the disaster of November 1875. Houses in Cliff Close were badly hit, at least 13 mobile homes at Sunnyside Caravan Park near The Buckle were severely damaged, the roof of the Baptist Church in Belgrave Road was blown off. Some fine firs and other trees fell across the A259 near Sutton Comer, others crashed through the boundary wall of Alfriston Road cemetery, damaging gravestones. The emergency services pulled out all the stops: at last some good news came - 'the worst storm for 300 years to hit our coast' may have done many poundsworth of damage, but there was not a single human fatality.

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St Luke was chosen as the patron of a new church at Chyngton, built to accommodate some of the many newcomers to the area. In 1956 it was calculated that the combined seating of the three existing churches '“ St Leonard's, St Peter's Blatchington and St Andrew's Bishopstone '“ was 850, while the population stood at more than 10,000. A piece of land in Walmer Road had already been acquired, but 20,000 was needed for the building itself. The new church flourished. In 1973, a number of members of its congregation joined a group led by Bishop Stanley Betts, Dean of Rochester, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land 'in the steps of our Lord'. Often screened and frisked or turned back by soldiers from their chosen route through that security-ridden territory, they nevertheless returned with memories of awesome moments in places previously only read about.

The name Luke can be translated as 'bringer of light', as applied to the Evangelists '“ Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Their special emblems are winged animals: Luke's is an ox.

It is known he died in about 74 AD, having somewhere in his travels '“ perhaps through his work as a physician '“ met up with St Paul, from whom he heard of Christ and his teachings. These he put into his Gospel, drawing also on his own experiences as an early Christian convert. His interpretations of the Magnificat, Nunc Dimitis and other familiar scripture passages have come down to us in beautiful translations.

His thriving church at Chyngton is now raising money again: 150,000 is needed to enlarge and improve facilities for their widening range of parish activities.

PAT BERRY