‘Lovely day, isn’t it?’
‘Yes! It’s 17°C, but at 3 p.m. it will feel like 12°C because of an east wind blowing in with a chill factor of minus 5!’
Amateur meteorology is a quintessentially English hobby, requiring kit, dedication and lots of specialist vocabulary. All over England people have set up independent weather stations in their own back gardens with hygrometers, anemometers and sunshine recorders. To join this club you need a Stevenson Screen, a sort of box which is the standard means of sheltering instruments such as wet and dry bulb thermometers, used to record humidity and air temperature. Every aspect of its structure and setting is specified by the World Meteorological Organisation, which states for example that it should be kept 1.25m above the ground to avoid strong temperature gradients at ground level. It should have louvred sides to allow free passage of air. Its double roof, walls and floors must be painted white to reflect heat radiation. Its doors should open towards the pole to minimize disturbance when reading in daylight, and so on. As one observer has quipped, ‘It’s like bee-keeping without the bees. The Stevenson Screen even looks like a beehive.’
Often, weather watching is done for a purpose. Pilots, especially of gliders and microlights, need to find optimum windows for their sport. Ditto sailors. Surfing has introduced a whole new meteorological community: wind and waves can be constantly monitored via mobile phone and laptop before the dash down to find ideal surf at West Wittering or Newquay.
One thing the English weather can be relied upon to do is to throw up all sorts of dramatic variations, such as the infamous ‘wrong kind of snow’. This phrase became a byword for euphemistic excuses after the broadcaster James Naughtie interviewed British Rail’s Director of Operations, Terry Worrall, asking him to explain how a period of light snowfall could have caused such severe disruption to services in February 1991. The laughable exchange went like this:
WORRALL: ‘We are having particular problems with the type of snow, which is rare in the UK.’
NAUGHTIE: ‘Oh, I see, it was the wrong kind of snow.’
WORRALL: ‘No, it was a different kind of snow.’
Despite this attention to every nuance of different types of inclement weather, the English always seem to be endearingly ill-prepared for a change in conditions. There is an almost annual fuss about why the gritters haven’t treated the roads before icy conditions strike. Who has a can of de-icer to hand on the first few days it’s forecast to freeze? And who is ever dressed appropriately for weather different from that seen from the window first thing in the morning? We are as addicted to weather-watching as we might be to a long-running soap opera, only in this case the drama comes from being caught out by a sudden shower or ambushed by a freak hailstorm. In July 2006, higher than average temperatures caused a series 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 …’