The recent BBC broadcast ‘WinterWatch’ showed an archive film on The Big Freeze of 1962/63 – I have followed/taken extracts from this footage ...
There
will now be three parts ... a great deal in note form ...
1.
Big Freeze 1962 and conditions stayed as
Siberian weather ebbed and flowed, but mostly stuck for 10.5 weeks .... (long post and long freeze this one!)
2.
Weather forecasting 1960s style ... and reported
outcomes of big freeze
3.
Fun stories, silly outcomes, housing stock and
floods – various ...
Forewarned is forearmed ... it’s now three
more weather posts ... !!
The
snow came from the north reaching us in Surrey on December 26th
1962: The newspaper headlines told the
story ...
Now
It’s Siberia
Britain
Snowed to a Standstill
It’s
Chaos
 |
| Bleak Scotland |
Cliff Michelmore in the 1963 broadcast noted
that the BBC Tonight programme would be using the Fahrenheit scale (it had changed
on 15 October 1962) ... as we, and as many of us still, are used to 32 deg F
rather than 0 deg C.
Snow covered buses still ran – there was no reason to think otherwise!
 |
| Dartmoor - became impassable |
Advised
not to travel or go out
Towns
were isolated
200
main roads were impassable – in that
first week – minor roads were completely cut off ..
1962
went out with a bang leaving the southwest littered with abandoned cars ...
Dustbins
weren’t emptied – because the dustmen were also road clearing staff ...
 |
| Gold and creamy, Silver now classified as full fat, Red was skimmed milk |
Housewives
accused of hiding milk bottles! – they were buried in the snow ..
London:
1 in 10 parking metres in use ... plenty free!
Road clearing
held up by lack of rock salt ... or
actually lorries couldn’t get through to deliver ... and in 1963 sand was not
added to the salt for spreading ...
Transport
paralysed – roads, railways and airports were buried ...
Resources
of shovels, rock salt, snow ploughs, dynamite and muscle were in very short
supply or snowed out or in (whichever way
you want to look at it!) ...
Railway
tracks disappeared under the snow ... some trains kept puffing along
...thankfully they did – because snow ploughs couldn’t get through ...
 |
| Steam train not functioning - not much snow |
On
Dartmoor – a goods train on a branch line tried to get through – it got stuck
... two more engines with snow ploughs froze solid too – it took 80 men over a
week to dig them out and get the engines moving again ...
At
Heathrow one runway was kept going .. the planes were frozen in ...
Farmers
stopped thinking about producing and thought about surviving ...
 |
| No modern media then |
The landline telephone was the only link to the rest of the outside world ... villages, hamlets, farms were in 20 foot snow drifts (over 6 m) ...
In
Wiltshire 30 children under age 5, in an orphanage, were cut off for 3 days –
helicopter pilots dropped supplies ... helicopters had never been so busy ...
dropping off medical needs, baby food, helping new borns, expectant mothers etc
... including animal feed ...
14
people were marooned in a pub – eventually left with only booze – plenty of
whisky!!
The prison
at Princeton, Dartmoor, Devon was cut off for days ... the officers and
villagers became imprisoned (along with the prisoners) by the conditions –
again relieved by the helicopter service ...
 |
| Sheep on Yorkshire Moors |
...
milk nearly ran out – as the milk lorries couldn’t reach the collecting points
...
4.5
million sheep died in 1947 ... how many in this 1963 winter is unrecorded here
... the deer in Richmond Park fared better, but they were given extra feed ...
Saturday
afternoons – instead of being sport for the men – it was find your car, find
shovel and get clearing – the steps, pavements, back paths ... and then move
onto house rooves ...
Two
ladies both over 75 (& dog) didn’t want to move out of their marooned home
in Devon ... but they got bored with their own company, and perhaps decided a
trip in a helicopter was a change for the better!
 |
| RAF Fylingdale |
That
was the first week ... of 1963 ...
The
brief insufficient thaw brought the story of ice: middle of January 1963 ...
the appalling weather continued:
Blizzards
were on an unheard of scale ...
 |
| Rowing on the Thames at Kingston - 1963 new ice sports invented |
- - Nothing melted
- - Cold and frost just went deeper and deeper into
the earth
Now it was the waterways turn ... rivers, lakes, canals froze – many completely ... the Thames froze at Kingston ... at Windsor bicyclists rode over the river ...
The Grand
Union Canal froze ... (London to Birmingham)
 |
| Greenwich Peninsula looking east - taken from Canary Wharf |
Frozen
waters were converted to
- · ice racing
- · car racing
- · ice skating (and to work)
- · ice yachting
An
iceburg 10 foot high (3 metres) was sited at Greenwich ...
The sea
froze ...
·
as it came over the sea wall at Torquay
·
there was pack ice in most harbours
·
sheets of ice were to be found in the docks
·
the London to Paris train was suspended ... as
the Channel froze at Dover and Eastbourne (here)
... while at Dunkirk the ice stretched for 5 miles ... Britain was nearly connected to Europe once again!
 |
| Torquay Harbour 1842 |
Chaos
turned into Crisis – as the country struggled to cope with the cold spells and
their severity and duration ...
electricity failures abounded, shortages of
salt, water, gas, paraffin,
milk, milk bottles, vegetables, coal, disposable nappies (commercially
available after the War), vegetables, candles ...
There
was a water crisis – the brief thaw in January led to mains pipes’ bursts ...
while hundreds of underground service pipes were frozen solid ...
....
water rationing was the order of the day – water tanks became familiar sights
... but you needed hot water to thaw the
tap ... to get cold water ... to make hot water ....
 |
| Shipping on the Clyde |
....
then you couldn’t wash up – because the waste pipes were frozen ... housewives
searched for enough buckets and kettles ...
...
school kids were very happy when the loos froze = that was the end of school!
The
Electric Grid couldn’t cope and no-one in the country had full power throughout
the 1963 Big Freeze winter ...
Freezing
fog – broke cables ...
Gas
couldn’t cope either as demand rose everywhere ...
Households
had to fetch their own coke ... reserves at the coal yards shrank fast
 |
| One of Beeching's axed branch lines |
Coal
was used for – gas for industry
-
the railways transporting the coal trains
-
generating electricity
-
and finally we used it at home
Emergency
lorries ran through 24 hour days ...
January
25th 1963... Burn’s Night – a thaw began ... and even slush looked
beautiful ... mains pipes burst ...
It was
too good to last wasn’t it ... yes the blizzards returned with a vengeance
(particularly in the West Country and Wales) ..
The
country took stock again and found the conditions were even worse ... on 8th
February 1963 ... many were stuck in cars, or on trains ...
 |
| Hot chocolate anyone?! |
In early
January 90,000 miles of highway were closed, this time (early February) 130,000
miles were shut off – Scotland and Cornwall were completely cut off ... five
feet (one and a half metres) of snow had fallen ...
Here
endeth part 1 of three
Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters Inspirational Stories
