In the long and wet annals of Great Yarmouth’s 900-year war with the North Sea, Friday, November 9, 2007 will be remembered as a day of victory. There and all along Britain’s most easterly stretch of coastline, but for a few minor incursions, the defences held.

The village of Walcott suffered a slight inundation, a few roads and a railway line were temporarily submerged, the residents of a sheltered accommodation unit were rescued by dinghy, one publican’s cellar was flooded and a Citroën Saxo belonging to a local bus driver fell victim to the rising tide. These seemed minor setbacks when set against the horrors envisioned by thousands in the sleepless night before the tidal surge.

David Smith, the landlord of The Duke’s Head pub opposite the quay-side, told The Times: “It could have been a disaster. We were looking at water up to the ceiling.”

He moved £4,000 of spirits upstairs and stayed open all evening, serving tea to evacuees. In the event, a flooded cellar seemed a reasonable price to pay. “It’s a 400-year-old building,” he said. “It’s coped for that long.”

Across the river in Cobholm, hard against the marshes, the downstairs rooms of houses still have high-water marks from the flood of 1953 in which 307 people died.

Janice Johnson, 69, told The Times: “We didn’t have any warning last time. We were listening to Saturday Night Theatre. It was about 9pm, and a neighbour banged on the window and said, ‘Get upstairs!’ ” She remembers seeing water cascading down the road. “I could see it gradually creeping up the garden fence,” she said. As she and her family rushed to move everything upstairs the lights went out; they were stranded for two days, cooking on a fire in a bedroom.

This time a policeman knocked on her door just before 1am: she had time to get out and take her cats with her.

George Denby, a local head teacher, was busy turning Caister High School into one of several evacuation centres, ready for 300 evacuees. About 500 came: the council provided sleeping bags and care workers, the Salvation Army served tea and the refugees slept in stairwells and corridors and across hard plastic chairs. Late in the evening, a pregnant woman went into labour and was helped to hospital.

A little later, Doris Brown, 83, arrived with 37 fellow pensioners from Nottingham. It was the final night of their holiday and they had been evacuated from their hotel rooms.

“We usually go abroad,” she said. “But this has been different; it’s been an experience.”

As dawn broke, hundreds ventured to the sea walls, where they stood like King Canute, willing the tides to recede. Connor Donavan, 42, a plumber from Lowestoft, had spent the evening helping to evacuate 33 horses from a riding school. At 6am he came to look at the sea. “We might just get away with it,” he said.

Charlie Liffen, 55, claims that he never doubted the defences, in particular the concrete walls that hemmed in the River Yare, even when the waters had risen inside them above the benches and tables on the banks. He helped to build them himself a decade ago, as one of several construction gangs that worked their way in from the coast. “I did my bit towards saving Yarmouth,” he said.

Across town yesterday morning a pub landlady was experiencing the joy at finding her pub had not been flooded. Christine Vale often deals with floods at The Sportsman. It was last flooded in September last year.

It has taken a year to dry out. She was waiting for the new furniture to arrive when she heard that three quarters of Yarmouth was due for another inundation. “Sometimes I think I should go and live on top of a hill in Scotland,” she said. “But I love it here really.”