Weather disasters explained
In 1816 a freak summer led to the creation of Frankenstein, the invention of the bicycle and Turner's finest paintings. In the bleak winter of 1947, Britain nearly starved. The Times's weatherman explains why
In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia exploded so violently that a third of it vanished in rocks and dust. It was possibly the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 10,000 people outright and many more from starvation and disease.
Ash and sulphuric acid were blasted 43km (27 miles) into the stratosphere, then spread around the globe, hanging as a veil over the sky and blocking out sunlight for years. As a result, global temperatures dropped so drastically that, in the northern hemisphere, the year after was known as “the year without a summer”.
In Britain the summer of 1816 was wet, cold and wretched. The foul weather rotted crops and led to shortages of food.
Farmworkers were left unemployed, grain prices soared and mobs went on the rampage for food - in one riot, some 2,000 people in Dundee ransacked more than 100 shops and a grain store. In Ireland, rain fell on 142 out of 153 days of summer, potato crops rotted and an estimated 60,000 people died of famine or typhoid. Across Europe there was desolation, at a time when the continent was emerging from the Napoleonic Wars.
In the grim climate of 1816, crop failures in France led to riots that shook the new constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII and Talleyrand. Starving Germans baked straw and sawdust into loaves of “bread”, and in Switzerland people ate moss in desperation. At least 200,000 people died from famine in Europe, and the weather was also blamed for a typhus epidemic from 1816 to 1819 that killed millions more. Thousands of people emigrated to the US, only to find conditions there just as bad - the northeast suffered snow in June and frosts in July that ruined harvests and, in turn, drove a mass migration of farmers westwards across the prairies.
In India, the monsoon failed and the resulting famine triggered the world's first cholera pandemic. Cold weather killed trees, rice crops and water buffalo herds in northern China and disrupted the monsoon season there as well.
The dismal weather did have some more fortunate consequences. In Switzerland, Lord Byron rented a villa near Lake Geneva. Among his guests were 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her husband Percy. Incessant rain kept the members of the house party trapped indoors for days, so Byron declared: “We will each write a ghost story.” The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818.
That same summer party inspired another masterpiece, by Dr John Polidori, Byron's personal physician, who wrote The Vampyre, which eventually inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Byron became so depressed in the gloomy weather that he wrote Darkness, a poem about the extinction of the sun:
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;/ Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day...”
The volcanic ash of Tambora also created brilliant sunsets, twilights glowing orange or red near the horizon, purple to pink above as sunlight scattered off the dust floating in the stratosphere. Those vivid skies became a trademark of the painter William Turner, who also lived through several other major eruptions, including that of the Babuyan Claro volcano in the Philippines in 1831, that resulted in spectacular sunsets and twilights as well as green and blue-coloured suns.
In Germany the soaring price of oats spurred Karl Drais to invent a replacement for the horse - the draisine, a forerunner of the bicycle. He first demonstrated it in June 1817 and the machines proved popular to begin with, although most cities ended up banning them as a menace to pedestrians.
WINTER 1947
After the Second World War Britain was bombed out, bankrupt, exhausted and desperately short of fuel. The winter of 1947 sank the country to a level of deprivation unknown even during the war. A catalogue of weather calamities precipitated a national crisis and changed Britain and the rest of Europe for decades afterwards.
The winter began deceptively, with just a brief cold snap before Christmas 1946. Snow lay thick on the ground when, in mid-January, temperatures soared so high that it felt as if spring had arrived early. The snow thawed so rapidly that it set off floods - just as hurricane-force winds brought down roofs, trees and even houses and a railway bridge in Birmingham.
But real winter arrived soon afterwards as the country was gripped in an Arctic freeze that lasted for two months, with snow whipped into monstrous drifts that buried roads and railways. The temperature fell to -21C at Woburn, Buckinghamshire.
On February 20 the Dover to Ostend ferry service was suspended because of pack-ice off the Belgian coast. It became the coldest February ever recorded - and there was virtually no sunshine for almost the whole month.
The freeze paralysed coalmines, with coal stocks often stuck at the collieries by railways and roads buried in snow. Even carrying coal by sea was hazardous, with storms, fog and iced-over harbours.
A week after the freeze began, the Minister of Fuel and Power, Emmanuel Shinwell, ordered electricity supplies to be cut to industry, and domestic electricity supplies to be turned off for five hours each day, to conserve coal stocks. Whitehall and Buckingham Palace were reduced to working by candlelight. Television was closed down, radio output reduced, newspapers cut in size and magazines ordered to stop publishing. The emergency package hardly made a difference to power supplies but was a crushing blow to public morale.
Food supplies shrank alarmingly and rations were cut even lower than they had been during the war. Farms were frozen or snowed under, and vegetables were in such short supply that pneumatic drills were used to dig up parsnips from frozen fields. For the first time, potatoes were rationed after some 70,000 tons of them were destroyed by the cold.
The Government tried a deeply unpopular campaign to encourage everyone to eat a cheap South African fish called snoek, millions of tins of which had been imported - but it tasted disgusting and was used eventually as cat food.
Those delivering food supplies were battling to get through blizzards and snowdrifts, and The Attlee Government was seriously worried that the country could slide into famine.
March turned out even worse than February. March 5 brought the worst blizzard of the 20th century. Supplies of food shrank so low that in some places the police asked for authority to break open stranded lorries carrying food cargoes. On March 6 The Times reported: “The blizzard has virtually cut England in two. It is almost impossible to get from South to North.”
Eventually, on March 10, a sustained thaw set in - and triggered another spectacular disaster. After weeks of deep frost, the ground was so hard that the melting snow ran off into raging torrents of floodwater and, to make things worse, a huge storm dropped heavy rain. Indeed, it was the wettest March on record in England and Wales. The winds whipped up floodwater into waves that breached dykes in the Fens, flooding 100 square miles of rich farmland, and houses collapsed. Canada sent food parcels to stricken villages in Suffolk, and the prime minister of Ontario even offered to help to dish them out.
It is difficult to imagine a worse run of weather, although the Government was blamed for the food and fuel crises. Elected in the summer of 1945 with a landslide majority, the Labour administration had embarked on a radical programme of nationalisation, including the health service, coalmining, electricity supply and railways. But it was caught unprepared when people began to buy electric fires and immersion heaters, and power stations could not meet the rising demand for energy.
Yet despite the collapsing economy and threat of starvation, the Government carried on behaving as if it were in control of a world superpower. Military expenditure was 15 per cent of GDP - far higher than before the war - and included the development of Britain's own nuclear bomb, as well as forces stationed in Europe and across the Empire. With a hugely ambitious programme of free healthcare and reconstruction, it was simply unsustainable. The winter of 1947 led to savage cuts in public spending at home and contributed to the humiliating devaluation of sterling from $4 to $2.80 the next year.
Less than two years after winning the war, the nation was left freezing cold, plunged into darkness and on the brink of starvation - and for many people it showed that national planning and socialism did not work. Labour was turned out of office in a landslide defeat at the next general election.
Had the winter of 1947 been kinder, and had power cuts been avoided, perhaps Labour and its programme of nationalisation would have been seen as a great success. Perhaps it would have been seen as the “natural party of government”, as its political equivalents were for the following decades in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
The legacy of that winter had other aspects, too. After years of war and deprivation, the British public had had enough. Many simply voted with their feet and emigrated rather than suffer any more hardships.
Some historians believe that the winter of 1947 was also a milestone in the decline of Britain as a world superpower. The nation could hardly feed its own population, let alone the starving millions for which it was responsible in Germany, where the winter was even more savage. The populations of the bombed-out cities there were reduced to an almost Stone-Age existence of scavenging for food and fuel to survive.
America looked to Britain as a bulwark against the threat of communism in Europe. Instead it saw a nation on its knees. It was then that the US administration realised that it would have to save Europe single-handedly. As a result, the US proposed a more active role in the defence of Western Europe and used the Marshall Plan to boost the recovery of the European economies with billions of dollars of aid.
The Marshall Plan kick-started Germany's great postwar industrial revival - and brought Western Europe together in an economic co-operation that eventually became the Common Market.
© Paul Simons 2008
In 1816 a freak summer led to the creation of Frankenstein, the invention of the bicycle and Turner's finest paintings. In the bleak winter of 1947, Britain nearly starved. The Times's weatherman explains why
In April 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia exploded so violently that a third of it vanished in rocks and dust. It was possibly the biggest eruption in recorded history, killing around 10,000 people outright and many more from starvation and disease.
Ash and sulphuric acid were blasted 43km (27 miles) into the stratosphere, then spread around the globe, hanging as a veil over the sky and blocking out sunlight for years. As a result, global temperatures dropped so drastically that, in the northern hemisphere, the year after was known as “the year without a summer”.
In Britain the summer of 1816 was wet, cold and wretched. The foul weather rotted crops and led to shortages of food.
Farmworkers were left unemployed, grain prices soared and mobs went on the rampage for food - in one riot, some 2,000 people in Dundee ransacked more than 100 shops and a grain store. In Ireland, rain fell on 142 out of 153 days of summer, potato crops rotted and an estimated 60,000 people died of famine or typhoid. Across Europe there was desolation, at a time when the continent was emerging from the Napoleonic Wars.
In the grim climate of 1816, crop failures in France led to riots that shook the new constitutional monarchy of Louis XVIII and Talleyrand. Starving Germans baked straw and sawdust into loaves of “bread”, and in Switzerland people ate moss in desperation. At least 200,000 people died from famine in Europe, and the weather was also blamed for a typhus epidemic from 1816 to 1819 that killed millions more. Thousands of people emigrated to the US, only to find conditions there just as bad - the northeast suffered snow in June and frosts in July that ruined harvests and, in turn, drove a mass migration of farmers westwards across the prairies.
In India, the monsoon failed and the resulting famine triggered the world's first cholera pandemic. Cold weather killed trees, rice crops and water buffalo herds in northern China and disrupted the monsoon season there as well.
The dismal weather did have some more fortunate consequences. In Switzerland, Lord Byron rented a villa near Lake Geneva. Among his guests were 18-year-old Mary Shelley and her husband Percy. Incessant rain kept the members of the house party trapped indoors for days, so Byron declared: “We will each write a ghost story.” The result was Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, published in 1818.
That same summer party inspired another masterpiece, by Dr John Polidori, Byron's personal physician, who wrote The Vampyre, which eventually inspired Bram Stoker's Dracula. Byron became so depressed in the gloomy weather that he wrote Darkness, a poem about the extinction of the sun:
“I had a dream, which was not all a dream./ The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space,/ Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth/ Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;/ Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day...”
The volcanic ash of Tambora also created brilliant sunsets, twilights glowing orange or red near the horizon, purple to pink above as sunlight scattered off the dust floating in the stratosphere. Those vivid skies became a trademark of the painter William Turner, who also lived through several other major eruptions, including that of the Babuyan Claro volcano in the Philippines in 1831, that resulted in spectacular sunsets and twilights as well as green and blue-coloured suns.
In Germany the soaring price of oats spurred Karl Drais to invent a replacement for the horse - the draisine, a forerunner of the bicycle. He first demonstrated it in June 1817 and the machines proved popular to begin with, although most cities ended up banning them as a menace to pedestrians.
WINTER 1947
After the Second World War Britain was bombed out, bankrupt, exhausted and desperately short of fuel. The winter of 1947 sank the country to a level of deprivation unknown even during the war. A catalogue of weather calamities precipitated a national crisis and changed Britain and the rest of Europe for decades afterwards.
The winter began deceptively, with just a brief cold snap before Christmas 1946. Snow lay thick on the ground when, in mid-January, temperatures soared so high that it felt as if spring had arrived early. The snow thawed so rapidly that it set off floods - just as hurricane-force winds brought down roofs, trees and even houses and a railway bridge in Birmingham.
But real winter arrived soon afterwards as the country was gripped in an Arctic freeze that lasted for two months, with snow whipped into monstrous drifts that buried roads and railways. The temperature fell to -21C at Woburn, Buckinghamshire.
On February 20 the Dover to Ostend ferry service was suspended because of pack-ice off the Belgian coast. It became the coldest February ever recorded - and there was virtually no sunshine for almost the whole month.
The freeze paralysed coalmines, with coal stocks often stuck at the collieries by railways and roads buried in snow. Even carrying coal by sea was hazardous, with storms, fog and iced-over harbours.
A week after the freeze began, the Minister of Fuel and Power, Emmanuel Shinwell, ordered electricity supplies to be cut to industry, and domestic electricity supplies to be turned off for five hours each day, to conserve coal stocks. Whitehall and Buckingham Palace were reduced to working by candlelight. Television was closed down, radio output reduced, newspapers cut in size and magazines ordered to stop publishing. The emergency package hardly made a difference to power supplies but was a crushing blow to public morale.
Food supplies shrank alarmingly and rations were cut even lower than they had been during the war. Farms were frozen or snowed under, and vegetables were in such short supply that pneumatic drills were used to dig up parsnips from frozen fields. For the first time, potatoes were rationed after some 70,000 tons of them were destroyed by the cold.
The Government tried a deeply unpopular campaign to encourage everyone to eat a cheap South African fish called snoek, millions of tins of which had been imported - but it tasted disgusting and was used eventually as cat food.
Those delivering food supplies were battling to get through blizzards and snowdrifts, and The Attlee Government was seriously worried that the country could slide into famine.
March turned out even worse than February. March 5 brought the worst blizzard of the 20th century. Supplies of food shrank so low that in some places the police asked for authority to break open stranded lorries carrying food cargoes. On March 6 The Times reported: “The blizzard has virtually cut England in two. It is almost impossible to get from South to North.”
Eventually, on March 10, a sustained thaw set in - and triggered another spectacular disaster. After weeks of deep frost, the ground was so hard that the melting snow ran off into raging torrents of floodwater and, to make things worse, a huge storm dropped heavy rain. Indeed, it was the wettest March on record in England and Wales. The winds whipped up floodwater into waves that breached dykes in the Fens, flooding 100 square miles of rich farmland, and houses collapsed. Canada sent food parcels to stricken villages in Suffolk, and the prime minister of Ontario even offered to help to dish them out.
It is difficult to imagine a worse run of weather, although the Government was blamed for the food and fuel crises. Elected in the summer of 1945 with a landslide majority, the Labour administration had embarked on a radical programme of nationalisation, including the health service, coalmining, electricity supply and railways. But it was caught unprepared when people began to buy electric fires and immersion heaters, and power stations could not meet the rising demand for energy.
Yet despite the collapsing economy and threat of starvation, the Government carried on behaving as if it were in control of a world superpower. Military expenditure was 15 per cent of GDP - far higher than before the war - and included the development of Britain's own nuclear bomb, as well as forces stationed in Europe and across the Empire. With a hugely ambitious programme of free healthcare and reconstruction, it was simply unsustainable. The winter of 1947 led to savage cuts in public spending at home and contributed to the humiliating devaluation of sterling from $4 to $2.80 the next year.
Less than two years after winning the war, the nation was left freezing cold, plunged into darkness and on the brink of starvation - and for many people it showed that national planning and socialism did not work. Labour was turned out of office in a landslide defeat at the next general election.
Had the winter of 1947 been kinder, and had power cuts been avoided, perhaps Labour and its programme of nationalisation would have been seen as a great success. Perhaps it would have been seen as the “natural party of government”, as its political equivalents were for the following decades in Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
The legacy of that winter had other aspects, too. After years of war and deprivation, the British public had had enough. Many simply voted with their feet and emigrated rather than suffer any more hardships.
Some historians believe that the winter of 1947 was also a milestone in the decline of Britain as a world superpower. The nation could hardly feed its own population, let alone the starving millions for which it was responsible in Germany, where the winter was even more savage. The populations of the bombed-out cities there were reduced to an almost Stone-Age existence of scavenging for food and fuel to survive.
America looked to Britain as a bulwark against the threat of communism in Europe. Instead it saw a nation on its knees. It was then that the US administration realised that it would have to save Europe single-handedly. As a result, the US proposed a more active role in the defence of Western Europe and used the Marshall Plan to boost the recovery of the European economies with billions of dollars of aid.
The Marshall Plan kick-started Germany's great postwar industrial revival - and brought Western Europe together in an economic co-operation that eventually became the Common Market.
© Paul Simons 2008
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