'The wettest winter ever'

On 10 January 1982, the actor and comic performer Kenneth Williams wrote in his diary:
"The news was all about the dire state of the country in the grip of the freeze, with cattle dying and travellers stranded. Oh! It is unrelieved gloom! In desperation one begins to lose caution. I sat drinking sherry and eating crisps and chocolate, in fact, doing all the things I should normally avoid!"
The winter of 1981/1982 was indeed a bitter one. I remember it well. My primary school closed because the outside toilets froze and the boiler broke down. Milk froze in bottles on my mum and dad's doorstep. Power lines were felled by the snow, leaving us without electricity. And all this in a large East Midlands town.
The recent spell of extreme weather has been dreadful for some. Many more have had their normal routines disrupted or inconvenienced. And the Met Office have now declared that it has been the wettest winter since records began.
It's no comfort to those still suffering to be told that things could have been far worse. But we've still some way to go before equalling conditions of just over 30 years ago.
Back then, sub-zero temperatures and heavy snow arrived in early December and persisted uninterrupted well into the new year.

A couple use a sledge instead of a train during the winter of 1982. Image: Associated Newspapers/Rex Features

The politician Tony Benn recorded in his diary: "Bitterly cold. The country is under the worst conditions within living memory."
Writer and comedian Michael Palin talked in his journal of: "An almost apocalyptically gloomy day... a bleak snowswept, wind-howling evening... Another heavy snowfall - the third already this winter and the papers are full of articles about The New Ice Age and the Frozen Eighties."

Recent headlines
Some in the media have been talking of this year's weather in similarly extreme terms.
"Britain's 100 days of WEATHER HELL," boomed the Daily Express. "Britain's maniacal winter weather, which has unleashed an onslaught of savage and relentless storms, has prompted the Met Office to issue 277 alerts."
"Havoc," cried the Daily Mail. "108mph winds cause power cuts, shut motorways and force passengers off trains. Now prepare for a month's rain in two days."
"'It will be bad'," quoted the Daily Mirror, before adding: "EVERY part of UK to get rain or snow storms in next 24 hours."

Something has gone a bit awry here. These kind of reports suggest we've been facing a crisis close to a breakdown of civilisation. But this is completely out of proportion with reality - and with history.
If you want to see some proper WEATHER HELL, look at the winter of 1981/1982. Or the winter of 1986, another chiller. Or the winter of 1990, when my family home was without power for three days after snow once again brought down electricity lines.

Cyclists on a frozen River Thames in 1963. Image: PA Wire

No sunshine for 20 days
Yet even they can't compete with the truly worst winters of the last 100 years.
Prior to 1981, the most extreme winter had been that of 1962/1963, when snow fell from late December all the way to February.
Kenneth Williams records in his diary how "a terrific snow blizzard started about 1am and it was still raging when I started out at 9am. Even with drifts of over a foot on roads, the buses were running..." Temperatures fell so low that the sea froze.
However, that pales in comparison with the first few months of 1947: truly the most desperate winter the UK had experienced for many generations.

On the night of 23 January, snow began to fall over much of the country. Within two days almost the whole of the UK was covered. But that was just the beginning.
As the historian Patrick Hennessy records, the temperature didn't rise above freezing between 11 and 23 February. Coal boats bound for London were icebound in north-east ports. The RAF had to drop food for people and animals.

As businesses and factories shut down, unemployment went up from 400,000 to 1.75m. Those who were able to keep their jobs worked by candlelight. National newspapers were cut to four pages.
Nobody was allowed to cook using electricity between 9am and 12pm and from 2pm to 4pm. The River Thames froze. The Observatory at Kew recorded no sunshine at all from 2 to 22 February.
There was already a shortage of fuel in a country still recovering from the second world war. The bad weather made a beleaguered situation catastrophic.

Men clear snow from the London-Maidstone road in 1947. Image: PA Wire

'I wish I were anywhere but in this goddamned country'
Eyewitness accounts tell of scenes that were literally bonechilling. The journalist JL Hodson observed: "Drifts fifteen feet deep in Northumberland, railways in parts impassable, and queues of professional women in St John's Wood with buckets at a water-tap in the road, like a night after a blitz."

An ex-serviceman told historians from the Mass Observation organisation that: "I wish I were anywhere but in this goddamned country where there is nothing but queues and restrictions and forms and shortages and no food and cold."
According to historian David Kynaston, 29 January was the coldest day in the UK for more than 50 years. Power failed all over the country. Gas in most cities was at about a quarter of its normal pressure.

Kynaston quotes a housewife, Florence Speed, writing in her diary: "I've borrowed a balaclava helmet from Fred [her brother] to wear in bed." Another contemporary diary-keeper, Mary King from Birmingham, wrote: "One thinks of the shortage of food, the difficulty of transport, and the unemployment of thousands of workers in factories due to lack of coal and materials. Never in my lifetime have I known such a period of history."