by Ben Fogle
Often, weather watching is done for a purpose. Pilots, especially of gliders and microlights, need to find optimum windows for their sport. Ditto sailors. Surfing has introduced a whole new meteorological community: wind and waves can be constantly monitored via mobile phone and laptop before the dash down to find ideal surf at West Wittering or Newquay.
One thing the English weather can be relied upon to do is to throw up all sorts of dramatic variations, such as the infamous ‘wrong kind of snow’. This phrase became a byword for euphemistic excuses after the broadcaster James Naughtie interviewed British Rail’s Director of Operations, Terry Worrall, asking him to explain how a period of light snowfall could have caused such severe disruption to services in February 1991. The laughable exchange went like this:
WORRALL: ‘We are having particular problems with the type of snow, which is rare in the UK.’
NAUGHTIE: ‘Oh, I see, it was the wrong kind of snow.’
WORRALL: ‘No, it was a different kind of snow.’
Despite this attention to every nuance of different types of inclement weather, the English always seem to be endearingly ill-prepared for a change in conditions. There is an almost annual fuss about why the gritters haven’t treated the roads before icy conditions strike. Who has a can of de-icer to hand on the first few days it’s forecast to freeze? And who is ever dressed appropriately for weather different from that seen from the window first thing in the morning? We are as addicted to weather-watching as we might be to a long-running soap opera, only in this case the drama comes from being caught out by a sudden shower or ambushed by a freak hailstorm. In July 2006, higher than average temperatures caused a series of power blackouts in central London, closing shops and businesses in the West End, due to the unforeseen amount of electricity used by air conditioners. That could only happen in England. Our weather may have prompted the invention of waterproof outerwear and the Wellington boot, but we rarely seem to be prepared. Perhaps it’s a case of hope over expectation? In Wimbledon, we host the world’s greatest tennis tournament, the only Grand Slam contested on grass – a surface which means play has to stop with every raindrop, unlike the clay of Roland Garros where play continues in drizzle. We persist in picnicking in less than ideal weather. Why not? It’s what we do. We’re English!
Even when prevailing conditions tend to be overcast (England has an average of one in three days of sunshine), the topic itself is never dull. What other country’s newspapers print daily photographs of morning mist, evening cloud formations, thunderous skies marbled with lightning or spectacular moody sunrises? What other language has so many weather-based phrases? The English can be ‘under the weather’ or ‘as right as rain’, ‘snowed under’ or ‘on cloud nine’; we have ‘fair-weather friends’, we ‘sail close to the wind’, find ‘every cloud has a silver lining’ and, if we’re lucky, rejoice in ‘a windfall’. Or so many ways of describing cold: chilly, nippy, fresh, freezing, icy, parky, raw, snappy, numbing, cool, crisp, brisk, bleak, wintry, snowy, frosty, icy-cold, glacial, polar, arctic, sharp, bitter, biting, piercing? And that’s without all the regional dialect or slang. What other nation’s government would commission a survey to find out how often the average citizen mentions the weather? (YouGov in 2011 found that the average Briton comments on the weather at least once every six hours.) Where else is the population so pinned to its meteorological environment?
Well, perhaps there is one reason. The English can be thankful to the weather for many random legacies that affect aspects of our lives.
It was weather that inspired the most popular hymn in the English language, ‘Amazing Grace’. An intense Atlantic storm in March 1748 so terrified slave-ship master John Newton when travelling aboard a slave trader en route to Ireland that he prayed for divine mercy. Twenty years later, Newton, now a minister and ardent abolitionist, referred to his ‘great deliverance’ and described his salvation in a hymn co-written with the poet William Cowper:
Amazing grace! (How sweet the sound)
That sav’d a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
It was prolonged snowfall in 1908 that resulted in the invention of the windscreen wiper. Gladstone Adams was travelling back to his Newcastle home after driving down to Crystal Palace Park to support Newcastle United against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the FA Cup final. The snow was so heavy he had to continually pull off the road to clear snow from his windscreen. Furious, he folded down the windscreen and arrived home frozen, vowing to invent some mechanical means of keeping the windscreen clear. Three years later he patented a design: it was never built, but the prototype is on display at Newcastle’s Discovery Museum.
We owe so much to unpredictability and variety. Would Turner, perhaps the greatest English artist, be so celebrated as a painter of light and atmospheric effects if he lived in a country without so much fog, light rain, storms and volatile cloud formations? Would the Glastonbury festival be the renowned event it is without the mud and the fashionable way with wellies? The iconic cover of the Beatles’ 1969 Abbey Road album – with Paul, John, Ringo and George filing across a zebra crossing – would not include the quirky touch of a barefoot McCartney had he not whimsically decided to discard shoes and socks due to the sweltering heat on the day it was shot.
The Norman Conquest, 1066 and all that, might never have happened: stormy weather in the Channel allowed William to land unopposed. Wind and a violent storm saved us from invasion by sinking the Spanish Armada in 1588.
The weather throughout history has given telling insights. On 9 February 1649, for example – the day Charles I was due to be beheaded – it was so cold that the Thames had frozen. Records reveal that Charles was led to the scaffold wearing two shirts. He had taken the precaution so that he would not shiver in front of the huge crowd, giving the impression that he was afraid. ‘I would have no imputation of fear,’ he said. ‘I do not fear death.’
I’m not done with the weather in this book. There is still so much to explore, but so far I think we can safely say that as a nation we love to talk about the weather. Or perhaps we love to grumble about it. Our forecasters are household names and often national treasures, and we have people so dedicated to giving us the most accurate information that they’ll risk life and limb in the process. The weather seeps into our national fabric, from our language to our inventions to our history.
No one has put it quite as well as the New Zealand band Crowded House, who might be commenting on the New Zealand weather but it rings so true about our weather:
‘Everywhere you go, always take the weather with you …’
CHAPTER TWO
THE SHIPPING FORECAST
‘And now the Shipping Forecast, issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency at 05:00 today.’
I am in Central London. It’s 4.30 a.m. and the sun is beginning to rise on England’s capital city. The sky is streaked with long red wisps of orange and red on a canvas of pale blue sky. Heavy grey smudges of rain hang across the horizon, dropping midsummer rain. Flocks of green parakeets dance from tree to tree in Regent’s Park as I head towards Portland Place and one of the most iconic components of our establishment, the BBC.
I have worked for the BBC for nearly two decades and many of its programmes are rightly considered national treasures: The Archers, Blue Peter, Desert Island Discs … but for me it has always been the Shipping Forecast, the five-minute weather update for mariners, that symbolizes all that is great about this institution.
I can remember as a child hearing the forecast, marvelling at the often alien-sounding names and wondering what it all meant. The curious mix of words: Viking, Dogger, German Bight. They were so strange and exotic and mysterious. I was enthralled, and that fascination has lasted a lifetime – at home I still have a large map on which each area is labelled and marked off.
I have visited all of the regions; I have experienced the best and the worst of t
he weather, on land and at sea. But I had never visited the home of the Shipping Forecast … until now.
Chris Aldridge, the senior announcer at BBC Radio 4, invited me to sit in one morning. And so it was that, long before London had woken, I found myself journeying across the deserted city to Broadcasting House. Chris has been reading the shipping forecast for over twenty years and calculates that he has intoned the names of the familiar locations over three thousand times.
Broadcasting House was deserted except for a couple of security guards in the lobby. ‘Hi Ben,’ grinned Chris as he ushered me up through the doors. ‘Sorry about the early start.’ Up on the fourth floor, the Today programme office was a hive of activity as they prepared for their Monday morning show. Justin Webb and Sarah Montague sat in silence in the middle of the office preparing their scripts,
‘Morning.’ I smiled, trying to look cool and unflappable. ‘Nice weather!’ I added. What was I doing talking about the weather with the country’s premier news presenters? The Radio 4 Today programme is another BBC institution and I was a little in awe.
‘Here we go,’ said Chris, settling me into the small studio, where a bank of televisions were broadcasting various news channels. In the middle was a huge digital clock. It read 5.13 a.m.
‘This is Matt, our producer,’ he introduced me. ‘And this is Stav.’ Stavros Danaos, one of the BBC’s weather forecasters, sat at the microphone clutching his notes and the all-important forecast.
5.20. ‘A minute to broadcast,’ announced Matt through the headphones.
Stav cleared his throat as Chris introduced the Shipping Forecast.
There is not one individual who is the voice of the Shipping Forecast. I knew that there must be more than one because I had heard both male and female presenters reading the forecast, but I was surprised to hear that there are as many as twenty who rotate.
The complexities of the data to non-mariners mean that new presenters must take a special Shipping Forecast course to learn the significance of each piece of information, ensuring the correct intonation. ‘You must learn not to say “Gale 8” with a rising intonation on the 8,’ explained Chris as Stav prepared to deliver his missive to mariners across the British Isles, ‘On the Beaufort Scale, 8 is a gale, therefore it’s important not to read it with a raised intonation, but to lift the 9 afterwards.’
Stav’s smooth voice delivered the information with confidence and authority. It was strange hearing it produced in such neutral surroundings, given all the years of listening to it while being buffeted by gales.
And now the shipping forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, at 0505 UTC* on Monday 3rd July 2017.
There are warnings of gales in Trafalgar.
The general synopsis at midnight:
High Scandinavia 1038, expected Norwegian Sea 1036 by 0600 tomorrow. Low 200 miles west of Sole 994 expected Fitzroy 1001 by same time.
The area forecasts for the next 24 hours:
Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: Variable 3 or 4. Slight, occasionally moderate. Fair. Good.
South Forties: Easterly or northeasterly 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.
North Forties, Cromarty: Easterly 4 or 5, occasionally 6 in south. Moderate, occasionally rough. Showers. Good.
Forth, Tyne, Dogger: East or northeast 5 or 6. Moderate. Showers. Good.
Fisher: Northeast 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.
German Bight, Humber: Northeast 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers. Good.
Thames, Dover: Mainly east or northeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Slight or moderate. Showers. Moderate or good.
Wight, Portland: East 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Slight or moderate. Showers. Good.
Plymouth: East or southeast 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.
Biscay: Southeast backing east 5 to 7, perhaps gale 8 later. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain or showers. Mainly good.
South Fitzroy: Southerly at first in east, otherwise westerly becoming cyclonic later, 5 or 6. Moderate or rough, becoming rough or very rough. Occasional rain or thundery showers. Good, occasionally poor.
North Fitzroy, Sole: Southeasterly backing easterly 6 to gale 8, occasionally severe gale 9, becoming cyclonic 5 or 6 for a time in west. Rough or very rough, occasionally high later. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.
Lundy, Fastnet: Southeast backing east 5 to 7. Moderate or rough. Showers. Good.
Irish Sea: East or northeast 5 or 6. Slight or moderate. Showers. Good.
Shannon: Southeast 7 to severe gale 9, backing east 5 to 7. Rough or very rough. Occasional rain. Good, occasionally poor.
Southwest Rockall: Southeasterly 5 to 7. Rough or very rough. Fair. Good.
Northeast Rockall, Malin, Hebrides, Bailey: Southeasterly 5 or 6. Moderate or rough. Fair. Good.
Fair Isle: Easterly or southeasterly 3 or 4, occasionally 5 in southwest. Slight or moderate. Fair. Good.
Faeroes: South or southeast 4 or 5, occasionally 6 later. Slight or moderate, becoming moderate or rough later. Mainly fair. Good.
Southeast Iceland: Southerly or southeasterly 5 or 6. Moderate or rough. Occasional rain, mainly in west, fog patches at first. Moderate or good, occasionally very poor at first.
Once Stav had finished, Matt’s voice came through the headphones, ‘Listen to this,’ and with the click of a button, the clean, clear forecast became slightly distorted with the crackle of interference. ‘You’re hearing it through a shortwave transistor radio we have hidden in the depths of the BBC,’ he explained. ‘We use it to ensure we are still broadcasting and to check what the listeners are hearing.’
I loved the idea that a tiny old-fashioned radio, gathering cobwebs somewhere in a largely forgotten office, was still in use while the rest of the building hummed with the latest in broadcasting equipment.
Even though most modern ships have on-board technology that gives the same information, even though much of the listening audience has no need of maritime weather bulletins, the Shipping Forecast retains its unique, otherworldly authority no matter which BBC reader intones the strict 370-word summary. It’s also a pointer to many of our seafaring traditions and accomplishments. Take the Beaufort Scale as an example – another of England’s meteorological gifts to the world, born from our rich weather patterns and unique maritime heritage.
The scale was devised in 1805 by Francis Beaufort, a Royal Navy officer on HMS Woolwich. Measurements of wind speed at the time were highly subjective, so the reports were unreliable. Beaufort devised a way of standardizing the strength of the wind, at first simply in terms of its effects on the sails of the Royal Navy’s frigates: from ‘just sufficient to give steerage’ to ‘that which no canvas sails could withstand’. As steam power arrived, the scale was changed to reflect the prevailing sea conditions rather than the effect on the fast-disappearing sails. In 1946, tropical cyclones – forces 13–17 – were added to the scale.
The shipping forecast itself can be traced back to 1853, when Captain Robert Fitzroy – the captain of HMS Beagle, made famous by Charles Darwin – was tasked with finding a way to predict the weather in order to reduce the growing number of Royal Navy and trading vessels lost around Britain’s coast. He set up fifteen weather stations around the coastline which together started to provide a version of the weather forecast by 1861. In 1911 the information was sent in Morse code to ships and then, sixty years after those fifteen weather stations were set up, in 1921, it was broadcast on the radio, marking the birth of the Shipping Forecast.
Fitzroy’s original weather stations were based on locations and geographical features. North and South Utsire, Wight, Lundy, Fastnet, Hebrides, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland were all named after islands, many of which I have been to – including the notoriously stormy Rockall, which true to form was lashed by gales. I still feel sick just thinking about it. German Bight was formerly known as Heligoland, an island that once belonged to Britain before we swapped
it and the Caprivi Strip – a small protrusion of land in Namibia – with the Germans in exchange for Zanzibar.
Forties, Dogger, Sole and Bailey were named after sandbanks, while Thames, Humber, Shannon, Cromarty and Forth carried the names of rivers. Dover and Portland were called after the respective towns. Biscay and Irish Sea are named after, well, seas. Finally, Finisterre, Trafalgar and Malin are all headlands.
Perhaps the biggest controversy to hit the Shipping Forecast came in 2002 when the Met Office agreed to change the name of Finisterre to Fitzroy, after the forecast’s founder. Finisterre is also used by the Spanish meteorological office in its shipping forecast to refer to a different, much smaller area.
So controversial was the decision that the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation (can you believe such a thing actually exists?) was called to adjudicate. They ruled that the name change was unlawful. The British press were furious that another nation would meddle in our shipping affairs, and the name stuck.
As an island and a seafaring nation, we are particularly proud of our coast and the waters that surround us. The weather and the oceans have played a pivotal role in our history and lives. And the people who work the waters and the coastline – like fishermen and lighthouse keepers – have always struck me as playing a rich and important part in our national identity.
My own relationship with the ocean goes deep. Despite my central London roots I have spent a great deal of time on or next to the ocean, from a year marooned on a deserted island in the Scottish Outer Hebrides to several months rowing across the Atlantic, not to mention a spell flirting with joining the Royal Navy when I was a student. A keen sailor, I have also spent many years aboard yachts all around the English coastline.
While studying at Portsmouth University on the south coast I enrolled in the University Royal Naval Unit. I was enthralled by naval history and would often disappear into another world as we held formal dinners below deck on HMS Victory in Portsmouth Harbour. The Royal Navy and Portsmouth were steeped in a rich and tangible maritime history. I became a midshipman officer aboard HMS Blazer, a small grey P200 Fast Patrol Boat into which we somehow managed to cram nearly a dozen people per voyage.