‘Dreadful havock’

The North West may have so far got off relatively lightly in the recent floods, but this late nineteenth-century ballad shows that it wasn’t always so. The catastrophic flood of 1872 caused enormous disruption and severe loss of life in Manchester and much of the North, resulting in ‘dreadful havock’, and is related at length in this ‘sad and dreadful tale’.

The ballad is from the collection of tracts, chapbooks and broadsides at Central Library, which we are looking after for the duration of the renovation works taking place there.