Storm in 1874 gave a rare sight of ball lightning

Dark clouds sank low, gusting winds rose, a crack of thunder rang out like gunfire and torrents of rain crashed down with cascades of hailstones as forked lightning lit up the sky.
A fearful thunderstorm erupted over London on July 11, 1874, described by Dr John Tripe from his home in Hackney as including an astonishing sight: “I saw a ball of fire of a pale yellow colour rise behind the houses, apparently from the Regent’s Canal. The ball at first rose slowly, about as fast as a cricket ball thrown into the air, rapidly increasing its rate of motion until it reached an elevation of about 30 degrees, when it started off so rapidly as to form a continuous line of light; after describing several zigzags, it disappeared in a large black cloud. In about three minutes another ball ascended, and in about five minutes afterwards a third, both behaving as the first and appearing in the same cloud.”
These lights were ball lightning, a rare and mysterious form of lightning created in the exceptionally electrified atmosphere of this violent thunderstorm. But witnessing three balls of lightning in quick succession is incredibly rare, a sign perhaps of the frenzied state of the atmosphere.
There were other accounts of the violence in the storm. “The streets were like rivers, in many cases flooding the basements and cellars. The furniture in lower rooms of houses floated into roads, buses ceased running, horses were breast high in water,” reported Symons’s Monthly Meteorological Magazine.
The Times reported damage elsewhere. In Ayot St Peter in Hertfordshire, the church was almost totally destroyed by lightning and many nearby cottages were flooded. In Tunbridge Wells, buildings were badly damaged, and near Guildford the MP Denzil Onslow’s mansion partially collapsed after a lightning strike, leaving several servants in the kitchen struck down although they were “not much injured”.
Thunderstorms returned later that month, on July 23, in London, Preston, Sheffield, Newcastle and southern Scotland. But after this storm had passed, a rare lunar rainbow was seen in Malvern, a largely white arc with a faint tinge of rainbow colours.