Down Memory Lane of Winter’s past
09/01/2010
It’s not that cold. It’s just winter
Ian Jones offers a historical perspective on the current cold snap.
Rex Features
A sentry stands in the snow outside Buckingham Palace, January 1982
On January 10, 1982, Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary:
“The news was all about the dire state of the country in the grip of the freeze, with cattle dying and travellers stranded. Oh! It is unrelieved gloom! In desperation one begins to lose caution. I sat drinking sherry and eating crisps and chocolate, in fact, doing all the things I should normally avoid!”
The winter of 1981/1982 was indeed a bitter one. I remember it well. My primary school closed because the outside toilets froze and the boiler broke down. Milk froze in bottles on my mum and dad’s doorstep. Power lines were felled by the snow, leaving us without electricity. And all this in a large East Midlands town.
The cold snap we’re experiencing currently has some way to go before equalling conditions of almost 30 years ago. Back then, sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow arrived in early December and persisted uninterrupted well into the new year.
Rex Features
Schoolchildren play in the snow, January 1982
The politician Tony Benn recorded in his diary: “Bitterly cold. The country is under the worst conditions within living memory.” Writer and comedian Michael Palin talked in his journal of: “An almost apocalyptically gloomy day… a bleak snowswept, wind-howling evening… Another heavy snowfall – the third already this winter and the papers are full of articles about The New Ice Age and the Frozen Eighties.”
Many in the media, particularly the tabloid press, have been talking of the present chilly spell in uncannily similar terms.
As observed by Roy Greenslade, the Sun trumpeted: “BRR-RITS poised to wake to snow more than a foot deep today – in the iciest winter for A CENTURY”. The Daily Mirror proclaimed “BRRRITAIN!” and asserted: “Britain froze to a halt in -15C blizzards yesterday – and another dollop of snow will pile on the misery today.” The Daily Express, meanwhile, tried to twist circumstances to fit its usual anti-science agenda: “As one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is getting warmer.”
Something has gone awry here. The general tone of reporting throughout the media implies a crisis betokening a breakdown of civilisation, but this is out of proportion with reality.
It’s not that cold. It’s just winter. Yet turn the pages of the national press or switch on a 24-hour news channel and it’s like the country has lost not just an appreciation of what counts as a “bad winter” but an awareness of its not-too-distant history.
If you want to see properly frozen BRRRITAIN, look at the winter of 1981/1982. Or the winter of 1986, another chiller. Or the winter of 1990, when our house was without power for three days after snow once again brought down power lines.
PA Wire
A bus abandoned in a snowdrift on the Poole-Dorchester road, December 1962
Yet even they can’t compete with the truly worst winters of the last 100 years. Prior to 1981, the most extreme winter had been that of 1962/1963, when snow fell from late December all the way to February. Kenneth Williams records in his diary how “a terrific snow blizzard started about 1am and it was still raging when I started out at 9am. Even with drifts of over a foot on roads, the buses were running…” Temperatures fell so low that the sea froze.
PA Wire
The sea freezes at Minnis Bay near Margate, January 1963
However, that pales in comparison with the first few months of 1947: truly the most desperate winter the UK had experienced for many generations.
On the night of January 23, snow began to fall over much of the country. Within two days almost the whole of the UK was covered. But that was just the beginning. As the historian Patrick Hennessy records, the temperature didn’t rise above freezing between February 11 and 23. Coal boats bound for London were icebound in north-east ports. The RAF had to drop food for people and animals.
As businesses and factories shut down, unemployment went up from 400,000 to 1.75m. Those who were able to keep their jobs worked by candlelight. National newspapers were cut to four pages. Nobody was allowed to cook using electricity between 9am and 12pm and from 2pm to 4pm. The River Thames froze. The Observatory at Kew recorded no sunshine at all from February 2 to 22.
PA Wire
A man walks on the frozen River Thames, February 1947
There was already a shortage of fuel in a country still recovering from the Second World War. The bad weather made a beleaguered situation catastrophic. Eyewitness accounts tell of scenes that were literally bonechilling. The journalist JL Hodson observed: “Drifts fifteen feet deep in Northumberland, railways in parts impassable, and queues of professional women in St John’s Wood with buckets at a water-tap in the road, like a night after a blitz.” An ex-serviceman told historians from the Mass Observation organisation that “I wish I were anywhere but in this goddamned country where there is nothing but queues and restrictions and forms and shortages and no food and cold.”
According to historian David Kynaston, January 29 was the coldest day in the UK for more than 50 years. Power failed all over the country. Gas in most cities was at about a quarter of its normal pressure. Kynaston quotes a housewife, Florence Speed, writing in her diary: “I’ve borrowed a balaclava helmet from Fred [her brother] to wear in bed.” Another contemporary diary-keeper, Mary King from Birmingham, wrote: “One thinks of the shortage of food, the difficulty of transport, and the unemployment of thousands of workers in factories due to lack of coal and materials. Never in my lifetime have I known such a period of history.”
PA Wire
Men clear snow from the main Gravesend-London road, 1947
The playwright Christopher Isherwood summed it all up: “Soldiers turned out to fight [the snow] with flame-throwers. The newspapers spoke of it in quasi-military language: ‘Scotland Isolated’, ‘England Cut in Half’. With coal strictly rationed, gas reduced to a blue ghost and electricity often cut off altogether, everybody was shivering.”
It didn’t last. The cold weather eased in the second week of March. But one catastrophe was replaced by another. The thaw that followed the snow flooded entire counties and left tens of thousands homeless.
So yes, this winter’s snow has caused inconvenience and disrupted travel services and spoiled people’s holidays and left people, including me (yet again), without power.
But it hasn’t been devastation on a historic scale. And it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Instead of thinking up ever more extreme ways to describe the sort of weather that is only to be expected at this time of year, perhaps we should be thinking more of how to respond better to such conditions when they happen again.
