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.
It was a baptism of fire for a lazy university student. I would spend my week drinking, sleeping and generally missing lectures, and weekends washing the heads (toilets) with a toothbrush and being shouted at by higher ranks. HMS Blazer’s permanent crew were technically lower ranking than us, but we all knew where the authority lay and the regular sailors took great pride in making life as much of a misery as possible.
Truth be told, I loved the regimen of life aboard a naval vessel. In spite of the storms and the language and the discipline and the sleepless night shifts and the impossible navigation, there was something rather marvellous and English about the Navy. We took our small grey war vessel on foreign deployments as far afield as Norway and Gibraltar, where we would often host foreign powers’ First Sea Lords. I wondered frequently whether they ever realized we were mere university students dressed in our finest officers’ jackets. I shall never forget my time in Dartmouth at the Royal Britannia Naval College. It still gives me tremendous pride that I played a tiny part in our rich naval heritage.
Throughout all of these maritime experiences, there has been one constant: the Shipping Forecast. I have listened to the Shipping Forecast in most of the regions included in the report. I have been on fishing trawlers, naval warships, yachts and remote islands, listening in to London. Often, the contrast between the conditions in the sea areas referred to and the calm of the BBC studio in which the report is read could not be more marked. There was always something reassuring about the smooth tones of the BBC reader’s voice as it crackled through the ship’s radio delivering the update from the Met Office, but I often wondered whether the reader had any idea under what conditions the words were being listened to.
While I endured gales, rain and storms, I would imagine the calmness of London. The way the reader announced storm force winds without a hint of worry or drama was always a comfort. The report was utterly literal. Fact. No hype or drama. No jeopardy – that was hidden within the forecast in the numbers of the Beaufort Scale. You never wanted to hear of anything above a 10. The Shipping Forecast above all had the ability to transport me to a different place, more often than not a slightly nicer, calmer one.
There is a school of thought that the Shipping Forecast is much more than purely weather information. Some consider it poetry; others a national anthem of sorts. However you see it – and poets, musicians, rock bands, comedians, film makers, video game designers continue to draw inspiration from it – the BBC broadcast attracts hundreds of thousands of daily listeners who have no technical need to know their Dogger from their Lundy.
It is treasured just as it is – from its idiosyncratic vocabulary, whereby winds are either veering (changing clockwise) or backing (changing anti-clockwise), to its sense that there is, beyond the individual stresses and concerns we might ponder as we lie tucked up cosily in bed, a truly wild maritime world out there. Some fans go as far as to describe it as an adult lullaby, a soporific comfort that helps them nod off at the end of a long day. There is no doubt that it has evolved into a quirky but much-loved national institution, as intrinsic as the Houses of Parliament or fish and chips.
In the opening ceremony for the 2012 London Olympic Games, the Shipping Forecast was played with the accompaniment of Elgar’s ‘Nimrod’ to represent Britain’s maritime heritage. Such is its popularity, the BBC iPlayer website retains a collection of humorous and lyrical clips, even a quiz. It’s been read by playwright Alan Bennett. Its form and formulaic language have been borrowed to create a rap version called ‘Snoop Doggy Dogger’ and applied satirically to the world of politics and sport. Artists, musicians, writers, comedians and even politicians have lined up to both satirize and pay tribute to its distinctive tones: these include Seamus Heaney, Blur, Stephen Fry, Frank Muir, Radiohead, British Sea Power and Carol Ann Duffy. And there have been a few celebrity readings, such as that by former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott, who read the forecast in 2011 to raise awareness of Red Nose Day. When it came to his native Humber, he deliberately dropped the ‘H’ and said: ‘’Umber, as we say it up there.’ Once, in 1995, a plan was mooted to move the late-night broadcast back by twelve minutes – prompting a fierce debate in Parliament and fierce newspaper outrage. The Shipping