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
‘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 the 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
