Heat record broken twice
When temperatures hit 35°C in 1957 – an El Niño year – the sunshine was greeted by national rejoicing. But as the mercury soared this week, The Guardian warned of ‘apocalyptic suffering’
THE record for Britain’s hottest June day was broken twice yesterday – topping the previous high set just 24 hours earlier.
Met Office bosses initially announced temperatures had reached a sweltering 36.6C in Yeovilton, Somerset, but a short while later they found they had climbed to 36.7C (98.1F) in nearby Merryfield.
On Wednesday, 36.1C was registered in Hampshire, surpassing the long-standing June high of 35.6C, recorded in 1976.
As a rare red ‘danger to life’ heat warning was extended to the end of today, hundreds of thousands of Britons who may have been hoping to cool off in their gardens were slapped with hosepipe bans, stopping them from even filling up children’s paddling pools.
South East Water said it was grappling with ‘record demand’ for water as customers in Kent were also told not to use hoses for watering lawns or washing cars.
The ban will be enforced from July 3, but families were asked to abide by the restrictions immediately.
The company has already come under fire after being plagued by supply issues during the May heatwave. Chief executive David Hinton said: ‘Drinking water is being drawn
‘High could be challenged again’
from our storage tanks faster than it can be treated and refilled... we sadly need to ask our communities to not use their hosepipes immediately.’ Those affected hit out at the firm’s ‘utter incompetence’.
Anglian Water also asked its 2.2million customers in Norfolk, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk not to use hosepipes, but stopped short of a ban.
It came as a wildfire broke out in Derbyshire yesterday, with flames and plumes of smoke rising from the moorland in Glossop. Locals were told to keep doors and windows shut as fire services tackled the blaze.
Elsewhere, a fire engine burst into flames while travelling to a car crash in Dorset. Its gas cylinders exploded but the crew managed to escape. In similar scenes, a double-decker electric bus caught fire at a depot in west London.
On the healthcare front, Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital was forced to declare a critical incident after its MRI scanners malfunctioned and more than 250 appointments were cancelled.
It came after chiller units failed at the Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth, throwing ‘critical clinical services’ into chaos.
London Ambulance Service revealed it had dealt with a record 642 life-threatening emergencies on Wednesday, as a result of the extreme heat. Thousands of train journeys have been delayed or cancelled durin the heatwave, with South Western Railway extending its advice for passengers to avoid non-essential travel to include today. ‘Like on Wednesday and Thursday, SWR will operate a reduced service,’ it said.
Britons did their best to manage the extreme weather, clearing out the ice cream isles of supermarkets and queueing to get their hands on air-conditioning units.
At home, some lined there windows with tin foil in an effort to keep the heat out.
The Met Office’s extreme heat warning will run until 9pm today in London, the East and the South East. It was 35.9C in Hampshire yesterday, while Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon and East Sussex all saw temperatures above 34C. Jersey registered a high of 39C, close to beating the overall British Isles record of 40.3C – recorded in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, in July 2022.
Wales also recorded its hottest June day with the mercury reaching 35.9C in Cardiff. Scotland had its hottest day of the year, with temperatures of 31.2C in Threave, Dumfries and Galloway.
Greg Wolverson, of the Met Office, said there was a chance of the June record ‘being challenged again’ today before an ‘easing in temperatures’ over the weekend. Hottest June record is broken twice in a day!
THE Great Scorch, that’s what we called it. At the tail end of an unprecedented June heatwave, a Daily Mail headline writer coined that sizzling epithet for the record temperatures.
On June 29 1957, in north London’s Camden Square, the mercury hit a record 35.6C or 96F – a high for the month that has stood for 69 years.
That record was broken on Wednesday when 36.1C was reached in Gosport, Hampshire, and again yesterday when temperatures soared to 36.7C in Somerset – news greeted with much wailing and gnashing of teeth, and hailed as proof that our planet will soon be uninhabitable because of global warming.
But on that roasting Saturday in 1957 there was no hysteria, no climate scientists predicting the end of the world. And hot sunny days were not treated as life-threatening catastrophes: the government did not issue warnings to ‘keep windows and curtains closed’ or to ‘avoid going outside between 11am and 4pm’. Friends did not urge each other to ‘stay hydrated’.
The broiling sunshine, then as now, may have been exacerbated by a global weather pattern known as El Nino.
This phenomenon, which starts with warm water spreading along the Pacific coast of South America, is part of a natural cycle that comes around irregularly, every two to seven years.
Our high temperatures this week have been fuelled, too, by a ‘heat dome’ of high pressure over continental Europe, which traps heat and humidity underneath it.
Back in the 1950s, Britain took the sweltering consequences in its stride.
A plummy BBC reporter, shirt collar buttoned with a smart striped tie, ventured with his camera crew to the East End, to discover how families in the capital’s poorest streets were coping, and was met with good-humoured understatement.
‘Smashing, lovely bit of weather this,’ declared a young mother on the doorstep of her family’s terraced house. ‘Suits me down to the ground. Another three months of this, I’ll be all right!’
At her elbow, a boy of about ten in a woolly tank top grinned.
LIFTING a curtain on a market stall, the reporter discovered a plump middle-aged whelk seller in white overalls. ‘Do you sell many cockles and mussels and shrimps?’ he asked. ‘A lot,’ she said. He wondered if she liked the sunshine. ‘Very nice, very lovely,’ she said.
‘I certainly wouldn’t like to be wearing that uniform,’ the reporter told a smiling police constable in serge tunic and hard helmet. 'How do you find it?'
‘Well,’ murmured the bobby, ‘it is a bit warm, you know.’
The atmosphere was one of a national holiday, especially at the open-air lidos where the water was as crammed with bodies as the poolside. On the beaches, elderly couples snoozed on deckchairs wearing newspapers as sun hats, while thousands of people paddled. Around Orpington in south-east London, the tap water ran dry and a tanker was sent out to supply drinks, strictly rationed to one glass per person.
The royal fire brigade fought a five-acre grass blaze at Sandringham, Norfolk.
In Huddersfield, West Yorkshire, 20 income tax officials were sent home early after the temperature in their glass-roofed office rose to 37C (98.6F).
Sir Winston Churchill was making few concessions. Aged 83, he joined Queen Elizabeth for the Garter ceremony in full regalia at St George’s chapel, Windsor.
The Daily Mail reported: ‘Wearing his heavy robes over morning clothes, he arrived pink and perspiring, mopping his brow and running his finger round his collar. Even the Queen, normally cool and confident, looked hot.'
All through that June, the sun shone, for a total of 284 hours (a record unbeaten until 2006). The thermometer at Kew Gardens topped 27C (80F) on 10 days. During Wimbledon fortnight, 200 spectators fainted.
On the warmest night, the air temperature at midnight in London was 24.5C (76F).
There were tragedies. On that hottest day, nine people drowned while swimming or boating.
A day earlier, off the Isle of Wight, holidaymaker David Blackmore, 23, drowned while rescuing two women from the sea. Married only months earlier, his wife watched helplessly from the beach.
The weather broke on the last day of the month, with heavy thunderstorms. In Kent, hailstones the size of golf balls shattered greenhouses and stripped fruit from the trees.
Yet still the idea that this weather was something to be feared occurred to no one.
The next day’s Daily Mail noted how people revelled in the rising temperatures, keeping count of each record high just as they once tallied up the number of ‘enemy planes destroyed in the Battle of Britain. And the feeling of triumph is almost the same.
‘It’s as though we were saying “We will melt in the towns and melt on the beaches in our thick clothes, but we will never surrender”’ – even though, outside Buckingham Palace, ‘guardsmen topple over like top-heavy toy soldiers’.
Now amid similar temperatures, we have seen a mood of doommongering from Left-wingers and climate campaigners. In an article this week predicting a ‘Godzilla’ El Nino, The Guardian’s environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan prophesied ‘apocalyptic suffering’.
In fact, El Nino is a natural phenomenon which has been occurring for thousands of years, probably since the last Ice Age and perhaps for much longer.
The warm offshore currents it causes were first noted in the 17th century by Peruvian fishermen. The name they gave it literally means Little Boy in Spanish, though it actually refers to the Infant Christ: El Nino de Navidad, or the Christmas Child.
It occurs when the temperature of the ocean’s surface waters rises by at least 0.5C (0.9F) for several months on end, causing changes in atmospheric pressure and wind patterns.
This year’s El Nino appeared inevitable last January, was confirmed by March, and is expected to peak in October or November, with scientists predicting a 63 per cent probability that the upper layers of the Pacific will be 2C (3.6F) hotter than normal – creating the most extreme climate conditions since records began, including drought across southern Africa, south-east Asia and Central America.
The most catastrophic models, reported by the BBC earlier this month, suggest the warming could even reach 3C (5.4F).
ACCORDING to The Guardian El Nino has contributed to the collapse of civilisations for centuries. The newspaper links it to the French revolution in the late 1700s, and the Spanish conquest of the Incas 250 years earlier, as well as the destruction of dynasties in ancient Egypt and China, and famines that killed ‘tens of millions’ in India and Brazil during the Victorian era.
It’s a welcome change, of course, for the Left to blame historic mass deaths on the weather instead of the British Empire. But the implication is unmistakable: if El Nino could sweep away the Pharaohs and the Sun Kings, Western capitalist society has no chance of survival.
This gloom is shared by the United Nations. Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, has issued an ‘urgent climate warning’. He said: ‘El Nino conditions will pour fuel on the fire of a warming world. Impacts will hit even harder, travel even farther, and cross borders with devastating speed.’
Not all the experts are so direful. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), confirming that El Nino is underway, pointed out that no one can say with certainty what is going to happen.
‘Even very strong El Nino events,’ the NOAA cautioned, ‘do not lead to the expected impact everywhere, but stronger events can more significantly tilt the odds in favour of expected outcomes.’
In other words, El Nino is always unpredictable, often disruptive, and now is as good a time to panic as any.
Or we could fall back on the amiable, understated attitudes of our forebears in 1957. They just rolled up their trouser-legs and had an ice-cream. But such insouciance is frowned on now.