Remembering when it snowed... and snowed
The Beast from the East has been disrupting life in parts of Britain, with more snow to come. But for anyone who remembers winter 1963, this is nothing special
FORECASTS of the coldest February on record have brought back chilling memories. As you contemplate another day of rain, snow and traffic chaos, rest assured, it could be much worse.
During the winters of 1947 and 1962/3 – the worst so far to hit these shores – seas, lakes and rivers froze.
In January 1963, as the Beatles celebrated their first big hit with “Please Please Me”, icebergs, not ferries, floated across the Mersey.
In Braemar, Scotland, it hit -22.2 °C on January 18 in what became known as the “Big Freeze”. Emergency services battled through 23ft snow drifts to clear roads. Helicopters had to deliver food to stranded villages.
Iconic shots from the Mirror archive show cyclists on the frozen Thames in 1947, when snow covered most land every day for more than two months.
Football was played on frozen pitches. In Newcastle, soldiers were brought in to clear the streets. From January to March that year, snow fell every day somewhere in the country for 55 consecutive days. It was just above freezing for most of the winter.
Blizzards left many villages in Devon cut off. During that February, the coldest ever in many parts of the UK, the temperature at Kew Observatory did not top 4.4C.
The night minimum temperatures went above freezing just twice. In Nottingham and Edgbaston, there was no sun on 22 days of the month. Most of the Midlands and southern England had 40% of average sunshine.
Night-time temperatures plunged. Woburn in Bedfordshire registered -21C early on Feb 25. On March 10 and 11, Scotland had its heaviest snowfall of the winter, with drifts up to 23ft deep reported by March 12.
Yet the winter of 1963, December to January and February, was even worse and the coldest for more than 200 years. In the 10 weeks to March 6, 1963, Siberian winds froze the sea for a mile off Herne Bay in Kent. Snow lay 20ft deep on Dartmoor, Devon, where 4,500 sheep and ponies were dug out.
There were extraordinary images of shimmering walls of ice on one of the waterfalls of the Brecon Beacons.
Blizzards, snow drifts, and -20C temperatures, made it the coldest winter since 1740. In Essex, a milkman froze to death in his float. For much of Britain, life came to a standstill. Water froze in pipes, and long queues formed to fill buckets from standpipes. Electricity flickered and maternity units delivered babies by candlelight.
The two worst winters were recorded in detail by the Met Office. “Finally, the coldest winter for more than 200 years in England and Wales ended,” it said of March 6, 1963. “With the thaw came flooding... Soon after, life returned to normal.”
SINCE 2016, the supermarket’s Bags of Help initiative has raised this incredible sum of money for over 36,000 projects – from improving outdoor spaces to buying sports equipment and hosting community events – all through money raised by the sale of its Bags for Life.
Every three months, each Tesco store selects three local community projects that have applied for support or been nominated by customers. The winning project receives a grant of up to £2,000, with £1,000 and £500 going to the runners-up.
And you may not know it, but you’ve also played a huge part in a nationwide relief effort during the pandemic. Each 20p Bag for Life you’ve bought has provided vital funds for community projects affected by the fallout from Covid.
In 2020 Tesco donated £4million through its Covid emergency fund, plus a further £4million through Bags of Help. This has ensured speedy support for vital services across the UK whose work was disrupted by the crisis. Between April and September, it donated single payments of £500 to more than 8,000 projects, giving a
lockdown lifeline to local food banks, supporting those struggling with social isolation and supplying urgent PPE to workers.
It’s just the latest effort from Tesco and its customers to help local communities.
The charity Groundwork has helped it develop and administer its scheme since 2016, ensuring it meets the aim of transforming lives in the UK’s most disadvantaged communities.
Thanks to Tesco, a little help from you is able to make a huge difference to local lives. So here’s to carrying on the great work together in 2021 and beyond.
We couldn’t have afforded to do this without the grant from Bags of Help. We have to thank Tesco and the local customers
TRIBALISM has been around since... well, since we first began living in tribes. And with tribalism in the era of social media comes unshakeable conviction.
So an issue comes up – from Boris Johnson’s handling of the pandemic to plans to “rewild” our farmed uplands – and it’s no longer a case of weighing up the pros and cons; it’s all about following the tribe, convinced, unshakeably, that we and our fellow tribe members must be right.
We saw it just last week when a council in Cumbria gave the goahead to sink a new coal mine on the edge of the Lake District, and the Conservative government failed to step in and block it.
The tribe that has a single-minded view of climate change and carbon emissions, and a single-eyed view of how to tackle them, spoke up. Coal mine bad, it said. Many thousands, instinctively, followed.
But dig a little deeper and it emerged that this was a coal mine to extract coking coal. And to smelt steel – which we will need to do in order to construct all the offshore
wind turbines and the electric cars to save the planet – you need coke.
Without the Cumbrian coal mine, we will be importing more of that coking coal from other parts of the world where they are a bit less bothered about coal mines. And there are environmental costs to hauling great ship loads of coal across thousands of miles of ocean, just as there are costs to digging a new mine in Cumbria.
What the tribes on each side of this argument failed to do, at least so far as I can tell, is make any serious attempt to weigh up the damage of digging British coal versus importing foreign coal and help us all make an informed judgement.
At the other end of the environmental scale, I watched a little video this week, posted on Twitter by a man who spends much of his working day deep in the woods, coppicing hazel and making the raw materials for thatchers, hedge layers and hurdle makers.
He said he had been “tweeted at” by ecologists insisting that coppiced woodlands, in which hazel sticks are cut back, on rotation, in a woodland management practice that has been going on for centuries, should be rewilded. In a gentle defence of his work, he said he disagreed, pointing out that managed woodlands create the perfect habitat for species that would otherwise struggle to survive, including Duke of Burgundy and pearl bordered fritillary butterflies.
The rewilding tribe aren’t really interested in the nuances of woodland management, however, or in the fact that thatching spars, hurdles and other pieces of wood used in rural construction projects would need to come from somewhere else if all the coppiced woodlands were rewilded.
Like the vegans who insist their creed is the only one that is environmentally friendly when eating, say, a locally shot deer or a steer raised on pasture has a far smaller impact on the planet than munching on imported meat substitutes, the tribesmen and women have come to their conclusions early and revel in their unshakeability.
In truth, it may be a better bet to say no to the Cumbrian coal mine and invest in new ways to make steel without coke, as well as significantly stepping up the recycling of metals no longer in use. And the valuable well-paid jobs the mine would bring can perhaps be found in other sectors. Woodlands can, almost certainly, play a dual role as both productive places for copse workers to ply their trade, as well as havens for wildlife. And there is no question that we need to think about the effect what we eat, whether juicy steak or vegan pie, is having on the environment.
Unshakeable conviction to drive a simple message is seen today as the way to make a difference. Those who have made a name for themselves in the fields of the environment, conservation and even politics are rarely swayed by someone with a contrary view to their own. Greta Thunberg isn’t one to carefully consider all sides of the climate change argument. Chris Packham doesn’t have much time to listen to the farmers or the gamekeepers. Not many vegans engage with the local butcher. But maybe they should. Otherwise, we’re all just in tribes, talking to each other, not getting very much done.
‘To build the offshore windfarms and electric cars to save the planet, we need to smelt steel’