The Great Heat Wave that left hundreds dead
THE last time Britain faced such high temperatures the country was far less able to cope.
The Daily Mail’s view in an editorial in September 1911 called the ‘Great Heat Wave…a trying experience’. It said: ‘Our conditions of life are not adjusted to perpetual sun, cloudless skies, and temperatures of well over 90 degrees.
‘Milk scarce, vegetables unprocurable, fruit at famine prices, plagues of wasps and flies and a general rise in the cost of food have been the gifts of this interminable summer.’
Britons, naturally enough, flocked to the coast, and ‘jostling crowds of holiday makers’ besieged the main railway stations ‘panting for fresh seaside air’.
But the scene at Britain’s beaches was very different to today.
During the 1911 summer heatwave the sexes were segregated on most beaches and flesh was strictly covered up rather than exposed. A sun tan was seen as disastrous in an age of fair-skinned beauty and The Lady magazine helpfully advised the use of ‘Sulpholine’ lotion to protect the skin.
Light clothing was in ‘great demand’ with ‘silk stockings much in favour’ and shops reporting ‘huge sales of white shoes’. In that year, a pint of beer to quench your thirst would set you back about two pence, while a loaf of bread was about two and a half pence.
Britain had celebrated George V’s Coronation at Westminster Abbey in June, but less than a month later an official drought was declared due to 20 days without rain. The baking sun didn’t disappear until mid-September.
Hundreds of children and babies died from the heat – with 635 children under two dying from ‘summer diseases’ – cholera - in one week in London alone and 137 in Manchester.
There was no cure as antibiotics had yet to be discovered. One charitable clinic in Soho offered treatment of the sick children by injections of ‘specially treated sea-water’.
It was a year when trade unions and suffragettes alike were fighting for their rights. During the heatwave working conditions in factories, industrial workplaces and city tenement buildings were horrific. In Lancashire the quarry workers changed hours to begin at 4.30am and clock out at midday – in a bid to avoid the worst of the heat.
Newspapers reported victims of the high temperatures including a labourer of Moulton, Northamptonshire dying from ‘cerebral haemorrhage brought on by the excessive heat’ and a bowler, John Ganter, dropping dead at a cricket match in Hampstead, North London.