by Ben Fogle
Lucy has presented hundreds if not thousands of weather reports over a decade. ‘The thing about being a weather girl is that the weather always leads,’ she smiles. ‘We are merely the messengers, we can’t change the weather.’
While it’s fair to say I will probably never become a weatherman, at least Lucy has a warm studio in which she can shelter from the worst of the elements, which is a lot more than can be said for what is arguably England’s most extreme forecasting job, that of the Fell Top Assessor. This was the next port of call in my English weather odyssey.
A bitter wind ripped across the car park as I made my way to the waiting Land Rover. It was midwinter and I was joining a man with one of the most unusual weather jobs in England.
I have always loved the Lake District. I will never forget the first time we went there as a family. I couldn’t believe that England had such a magical, watery landscape. I still get that childhood excitement whenever I visit as I hurtle back to my childhood. It is the location of Swallows and Amazons.
But today I was in the Helvellyn range of mountains, between Thirlmere and Ullswater, ready to climb Helvellyn itself. It is a dramatic, rugged mountain – at 3,117ft the third-highest point in England – and from its summit, on a clear day, you can see Scotland and Wales. Alfred Wainwright, the celebrated fell walker and guide book author, described one ridge to Helvellyn Plateau as ‘all bare rock, a succession of jagged fangs ending in a black tower’, which makes the fact that there have been a number of fatalities on the mountain over the years understandable.
The rocks of Helvellyn were forged in the heat of an ancient volcano some 450 million years ago. It inspires poetry as well as respect for its dangers. Coleridge and Wordsworth both wrote about it. This is the final stanza of Wordsworth’s poem ‘To ——, on Her First Ascent to the Summit of Helvellyn’:
For the power of hills is on thee,
As was witnessed through thine eye
Then, when old Helvellyn won thee
To confess their majesty!
The mountain has attracted lots of odd adventurers. In 1926, one man landed and took off from the summit in a small plane. Today, though, Helvellyn is arguably best known for one of the strangest weather-forecasting jobs in the world: that of the Fell Top Assessor, whose role is to assess both meteorological and ground conditions to provide an accurate local forecast for the estimated 15 million visitors to the Lake District National Park each year. The key is to check the ground underfoot and predict avalanche risks.
Dressed in multiple layers against the bitter wind, soon we were in the cloud as the temperature plummeted and the trail became increasingly icy. Thick grey cloud clung to the Cumbrian valleys. Drystone walls disappeared into the gloom as we began our hike. We were forced to strap crampons to our boots as we ascended the snow and ice. Gripping my ice axe in one hand, we beat into the wind that had dropped the temperature to a freezing minus 9°C. Ice formed on my eyelashes as we continued past half a dozen hardy mountaineers.
Soon we had reached the summit, where the Fell Top Assessor’s real work begins. He pulled his tiny notebook from his jacket and assessed the conditions. Tiny horizontal icicles, known as hard rime, had formed on every surface, including us. These miniature formations of spiky ice grow into the wind, giving an indication of the prevailing winds on the summit. Wind speed and wind chill measured, within minutes he had gathered the necessary data, and after a quick mug of tepid tea from a Thermos flask, we began our descent.
Every day, come rain or shine, wind or snow, storm or hurricane, the Fell Top Assessor climbs the peak to report on weather conditions from the summit. That’s every day. Working seven days on and seven days off, the two assessors will take it in turns to make the daily climb, often braving temperatures as low as minus 16°C. It is estimated that the fell top assessors climb the equivalent of Everest every two weeks.
Unsurprisingly, candidates must have ‘considerable winter mountaineering experience and skills, preferably with a mountaineering qualification’, according to the job description, which continues, ‘You will provide information and advice to other fell users to ensure safe and responsible use of the mountain. You will also identify and carry out basic rights of way maintenance on the routes.’ Other skills required include the ability to write concise reports, assess snow and ice conditions and use a map and compass.
Jon Bennet, who has been a fell top assessor on Helvellyn for eight years, says: ‘Fell top assessing is the best job, and to be out in the hills doing something as worthwhile as this is a perfect combination.’ The job is not without its perils, however, as several walkers have lost their lives on the peak in recent years.
In October 2016 Robert Pascoe, a 24-year-old RAF engineer, was killed when he lost his footing while walking with a companion on the Striding Edge side of Helvellyn and fell 650ft down the mountain. In 2010, Alan Burns, thirty-nine, from Preston, Lancashire, suffered fatal head injuries in a fall from Swirral Edge. Three days later, Philip Ashton, forty-three, from St Helens, Merseyside, fell from the same ridge while walking with friends and died later in hospital.
Yet Helvellyn is one of the most popular fells with walkers in winter and summer, attracting ramblers and experienced mountaineers who come to enjoy the views and the diverse topography. And the Striding Edge route to the summit is one of the busiest.
And as far as jobs go, being the Fell Top Assessor probably beats sitting in front of a computer screen for eight hours a day. At least, that’s what the adventurer in me thinks. More generally, the job tells me that English people are prepared to go to any extreme to provide others with the most precise information about the weather.
‘What’s the weather like?’ asked my mother as I clung to the side of a tiny rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I was on a satellite phone, 1,500 miles from land, and my mother was asking about the weather.
‘Warm, a little rain, beautiful cloud formations,’ I answered. ‘What about you? Is it cold?’
‘Freezing, I had to scrape a thick layer of ice off the car.’
‘We’re expecting rain later.’ I replied.
I was six weeks into a gruelling and frankly rather dangerous bid to row across the Atlantic Ocean, and my rare link to the outside world via satellite phone was dominated by chats about the weather. How English is that?
We love to talk about the weather. It’s all about the weather. I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had around the world that have been about weather. And now here I was on one of my most dangerous trips, and my mother’s main concern was the prevailing weather conditions.
The first time I met the Queen (apologies for the humble brag there – very unEnglish, maybe it’s the Canadian part of me coming out), it was at Windsor Castle. It was December and I was, quite honestly, a little nervous. She had gathered the great and the good from the world of rural and agricultural life to celebrate the countryside.
‘What am I going to talk to her about?’ I worried as I made my way to Windsor. There were so many things I could tell her, about the places I had been and the adventures I had experienced. I would tell her about Antarctica, and of the time I met a tribe in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Perhaps I would recall meeting the Prince Philip Island cult, or the time I met some of her Labradors.
‘It’s terribly cold, Ma’am, isn’t it?’ I smiled as I shook her gloved hand.
‘Warmer than last December. Though we could do with a little rain,’ she replied.
We both nodded, and she headed off to chat to the next guest.
And that just about sums it up. My first opportunity to chat to Her Majesty, and I talked about the weather.
I have found myself in the most unlikely situations around the world discussing the nuances of the English weather. And here’s the thing: we don’t really have weather. As Lucy Verasamy told me, it can be a little rainy, a little windy, sometimes a bit sunny – but let’s be honest, the strangest thing about the English weather is that
it’s all a little meh. Compared to other countries it really is quite benign.
If you doubt me here, just take a trip to the Andes, or Borneo or even the US, and you will see what I mean by BIG weather. I’m talking about hurricanes, tornadoes, freezes, heatwaves. In England we have variables, but most of our weather-related conversations revolve around too much rain, or too little rain, or it being too warm, or too cold. And that is about it. It amazes me that we are capable of talking about the weather so fluidly and constantly when it varies so little.
Visitors from abroad are thoroughly bemused by the English fixation with the weather – because the only extreme aspect of our weather is its changeability. The conditions our climate might usher in from one day to the next induce inordinate anxiety, even though we technically ‘enjoy’ a temperate climate, with temperatures rarely falling lower than 0°C in winter or rising higher than 32°C in summer. English weather plays out its repertoire of conditions right in the middle of the range of potential hazards – certainly without the blizzards, tornadoes, hurricanes, killer heatwaves and monsoons that plague other geographical zones. We don’t have to batten down storm hatches, switch to snow tyres or build homes to strict storm mitigation codes (as they do in New England). We don’t have companies offering storm-chasing adventure holidays. It is said that, on average, an English citizen will experience three major weather events in their lifetime. The singular characteristic of the English weather is that it changes frequently and unexpectedly.
And this leads on to another point about our relationship with our weather: our propensity to complain about it. This is at odds with the Blitz-like spirit of ‘mustn’t grumble’, but we do. I think we have a tendency to be a pessimistic nation, particularly when it comes to the weather. Is there such a thing as ideal weather for the English? Isn’t it always too hot or too cold, a bit grey or intolerably windy, unbearably humid or relentlessly drizzly? It’s rarely right.
How many times have you heard someone saying the weather is perfect? Even on those rare cloudless, windless summer days of unbroken blue sky, there is often some reason to lament the weather: ‘It’s too hot’, ‘The grass is turning brown’, ‘We need rain’, ‘Careful or you’ll get sunburn’. You get the point.
But somehow the weather is part of our psyche. It may have something to do with our geographical location in the North Atlantic and the resulting propensity for it to rain.
Here are some English weather stats. The hottest recorded temperature was 38.5°C (101.3°F) in Faversham in Kent on 10 August 2003. The hottest month in England is August, which is usually 2°C hotter than July and 3°C hotter than September. The sunniest month was over 100 years ago, when 383.9 hours (the equivalent of thirty-two 12-hour days) of sunshine were recorded in Eastbourne, Sussex in July 1911. The lowest August temperature was minus 2°C on 28 August 1977 in Moor House, Cumbria. Highest rainfall in 24 hours was 10.98in (279mm) on 18 July 1955 in Martinstown, Dorset. The largest amount of rain in just one hour was 3.62in (92mm) in Maidenhead in Berkshire on 12 July 1901. The lowest temperature recorded in England was minus 26.1°C at Newport in Shropshire on 10 January 1982.
Wherever I am in the world, I am asked about the weather at home. I never know whether this is genuine curiosity about the renowned unpredictability of English weather or a reliable conversational gambit – an ice breaker, so to speak – because it is assumed that anyone hailing from England is totally fixated on the weather. As Professor Higgins told Eliza Doolittle when he launched her into society in the film My Fair Lady, it is advisable when making conversation to ‘stick to the weather and everybody’s health’.
It’s true that the English always hope for a White Christmas or a Summer Scorcher, and worry about a Bank Holiday Wash-Out or a Big Freeze. Weather warrants capital letters. It has status in everyday life. But the obsession is not just with the big picture; it is about the minutiae of each day’s conditions. There is no doubt that the English are genetically tuned to be on tenterhooks as to (a) what the weather is looking like each morning and (b) whether conditions are exactly as have been forecast.
We secretly like the fact that our weather continually takes us by surprise, often several times in the course of one day. The changeability of the weather has been a source of marvel, anxiety and unfailing interest since the year dot. In 1758 Samuel Johnson wrote an entire essay entitled ‘Discourses on the Weather’. ‘It is commonly observed,’ he pointed out, ‘that when two Englishmen meet, their first talk is of the weather; they are in haste to tell each other, what each must already know, that it is hot or cold, bright or cloudy, windy or calm …’ He went on to explain that
An Englishman’s notice of the weather is the natural consequence of changeable skies and uncertain seasons. In many parts of the world, wet weather and dry are regularly expected at certain periods; but in our island, every man goes to sleep, unable to guess whether he shall behold in the morning a bright or cloudy atmosphere, whether his rest shall be lulled by a shower or broken by tempest.
So, long before our national addiction to social-media alerts, breaking newsflashes and live online updates, the English had the weather to spice up conversation on an almost minute-by-minute basis.
Enter a particularly English social stereotype: the weather obsessive. An article in Country Life in 29 August 2012 surveyed the type, which has existed since medieval times. ‘Who, from the hotly contended field, takes the Golden Barometer as Britain’s most possessed weather obsessive?’ asked Antony Woodward.
Would it be William Merle, the so-called Father of Meteorology, who had the curious idea of keeping a daily weather journal in 1277, persisting doggedly for 67 years? Or William Murphy Esq, MNS (Member of No Society), Cork scientist and author of little repute, whose 1840 Weather Almanac (on scientific principles, showing the state of the weather for every day of the year), despite correctly predicting the weather for only one day, became a bestseller?
How about Thomas Stevenson, one of ‘the Lighthouse Stevensons’, who measured the force of an ocean wave with his ‘wave dynamometer’ before going on to devise the Stevenson Screen weather station? Admiral Beaufort, perhaps, whose eponymous wind scale sailors still use? Or the artist John Constable, whose ‘skying’ cloud paintings ushered in a new scientific approach to the depiction of the heavens? Dr George Merryweather, inventor, is surely a contender for his 12-leech ‘tempest prognosticator’. Then there’s poor Group Capt J. M. Stagg, on whose knotted shoulders rested the decision of whether to go, or not to go, on D Day. Or perhaps it’s the humble Mr Grisenthwaite, who’s assiduously kept a two-decade lawn-mowing diary (and why not?) that was, in 2005, accepted by the Royal Meteorological Society as documentary evidence of climate change?
In all honesty, I’m surprised that there aren’t more examples of English people obsessed with our weather.
And the funny thing is, we still look to the weather for daily interest – even more so, now we have a myriad of forecasting apps, widgets and websites with names like Accuweather, Dark Sky, Raintoday, Weather Bomb, Radarscope and so on. Rather than eradicating uncertainty about how the day will pan out, forecasts with detailed features surely useful only to a few – such as hourly UV level predictions and dew point information – simply add more variables to a reliable topic of conversation.
‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
‘Yes! It’s 17°C, but at 3 p.m. it will feel like 12°C because of an east wind blowing in with a chill factor of minus 5!’
Amateur meteorology is a quintessentially English hobby, requiring kit, dedication and lots of specialist vocabulary. All over England people have set up independent weather stations in their own back gardens with hygrometers, anemometers and sunshine recorders. To join this club you need a Stevenson Screen, a sort of box which is the standard means of sheltering instruments such as wet and dry bulb thermometers, used to record humidity and air temperature. Every aspect of its structure and setting is specified by the World Meteorological Organisation, which states f
or example that it should be kept 1.25m above the ground to avoid strong temperature gradients at ground level. It should have louvred sides to allow free passage of air. Its double roof, walls and floors must be painted white to reflect heat radiation. Its doors should open towards the pole to minimize disturbance when reading in daylight, and so on. As one observer has quipped, ‘It’s like bee-keeping without the bees. The Stevenson Screen even looks like a beehive.’