Five: Worrying Times
The War – The Great Winter of 1947 – The Floods
MUCH DELAYED LETTER TO MY PARENTS, 2003
King’s Lynn, Norfolk
February 2003
Dear Peg and Buster
I realise now that I never really answered the question you asked me some years ago about how much I remembered of the War. We’d been talking about how traumatic the year 1939 had been for you: first, giving birth to me, then moving house to Shrewsbury and finally adjusting to the living conditions of a country at war.
The Australian writer Clive James was born in that same year as me. He begins what he called his ‘premature’ autobiography, Unreliable Memoirs, published in 1980 when he was forty, like this:
I was born in 1939. The other big event of the year was the outbreak
of the Second World War, but for the moment that did not affect me.
Well, I can say two things about this. One is that when I began to feel the annoying urge of writerly ambitions myself at 14 or 15, I thought the best thing to start with would be my autobiography. I was already aware that many first novels were themselves substantially and openly autobiographical. I was less aware that someone of my age probably had very little to say that would interest anyone else. But it soon dawned on me. As a result, I never really got past the first couple of sentences, but they were based on exactly the same idea as James’s opening words. The beginnings of the War and of my own life were the only two meaningful events of the year 1939. When I read his book, I was pleased that this much respected writer and I had shared the same brilliantly witty idea and put it to the same use. Most other comparisons between us point to all the excellent reasons why he became so deservedly well known.
The other thing is his comment on the War: ‘for the moment that did not affect me’. This was true for me, too. It was the common experience of many children aged between one and five or six, living in a place that the War hardly touched. In any case, for small children, whatever form life takes, it’s given. We know nothing else. There’s no other version to compare it with and we simply get on with it. Only much later in our lives do we attach meanings to the many conditions and situations that we necessarily took for granted.
As you know, Shropshire as a whole attracted very little hostile attention during the War. There were no dock complexes, no concentrations of heavy industry or large cities to be bombed. Industry there was, but only in smaller splashes here and there. This meant that enough of Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge still remained, to become much restored, renovated and superb monuments to the beginnings of the industrial age. Shrewsbury itself, with its relatively small population, suffered very little damage. So, in one sense, it’s perfectly accurate to say that the War ‘did not affect me’.
On the other hand, many aspects of my earliest years of life would have been different but for the War. The Old Man’s work for Post Office Telephones put him in a ‘reserved occupation’, excusing him from serving in the forces while he made his essential contribution on the home front. I believe one War Office theory was that Hitler might invade England by way of the Bristol Channel, like the Spanish Armada. For much of the War, Buster was posted to vital telecommunications centres in Swansea and Cardiff, which would warn London of the approaching enemy. Peg and I remained in Shrewsbury, parts of a fragmented family like so many others.
Naturally there were leave periods when the Old Man came home. I recall him one day standing with me in our back garden, looking at a group of small aeroplanes flying overhead. ‘Trainers’, he said to me, as though that explained everything. For me, it explained nothing, though I realised later that this announcement probably reassured both of you considerably. The high buzzing machines were on our side and probably came from nearby Shawbury Aerodrome They were not enemy aircraft on their way to release death and destruction onto somebody’s hearth and home, or to demolish an engineering works in the Midlands.
Sidelined from the ‘real’ armed forces during the War, Buster was in the Home Guard. I can see now his khaki uniform hanging on the back of your bedroom door. You’ll agree, O.M., that this wasn’t the most challenging way of contributing to the war effort. From what you’ve told me, your duties involved a regular evening meeting, probably a Friday, with a number of other blokes somewhere out in the Shropshire countryside. You all put on your uniforms and went off to test a couple of smoke bombs and produce a report on their effectiveness. This task probably detained you for no more than thirty minutes, leaving the rest of the evening to be spent in the village pub. Sometimes you returned with a locally trapped rabbit or chicken, often poached, which you then skinned or plucked. You hated this job but were prepared to do it, while Mum, who also hated it, wouldn’t touch it.
Meanwhile Uncle Bill was aboard ship with the Clan Line, most often on the long Liverpool-South Africa-India-Australia run. Wartime regulations allowed food parcels to be sent from abroad back to the severely rationed and restricted family members at home. I still have images of you both, eagerly unpacking the substantial parcels from Uncle Bill on the kitchen table. We also occasionally received cast-off clothing in parcels from Peg’s very distant cousins in California. The food parcels disgorged dreamed of luxuries like tea and coffee in civilised quantities and a tremendous selection of tinned fruits. In your pantry in Cambridge I found there were still two of those small, neat, wooden boxes, with their labels, that had once contained packets of Ceylon tea sent home by Uncle Bill during the early 1940s.
Among the contents of those parcels, the most startling article for me was a tin of small peeled bananas in syrup. I was familiar with things like apples, pears and plums from the fruit trees in our garden. This was very different. Born just before the War started, I’d never seen or even heard of a banana. You were very excited at introducing me to this exotic fruit, and put one on a small plate on the table in front of me. At the sight of it, the emotion uppermost in my tiny psyche was actually slight fear. I’d no idea what it was, where it came from or what it might be like to eat. It just lay there in its little pool of juice, tinned and skinned. I obviously couldn’t pick it up and eat it like a ‘proper’ fruit. It certainly didn’t look like anything I could relate to or had ever imagined.
You, Mum, sensed my hesitation and said something like: ‘It’s a banana, dear, you’ll love it.’ That was about as much help to me as the O.M. saying ‘Trainers’ when the aeroplanes had gone over. The young child needs lots more information and explanation than that to make any sense of the continuous barrage of brand new experiences that occur every single day. I poked it and prodded it and pushed it around with my spoon. In the end, to your delight at my response to this special treat, I summoned my courage, cut off a small piece, and ate it. As so often, you were right - I loved it. I still like bananas and read recently that they’re the most commonly bought fruit in Britain. It’s said that nearly every schoolchild’s lunchbox in the country contains one. In my own ‘lunchbox years’, they were non-existent.
You’ll remember, Mum, that from the time I was born until I left home at nineteen, you never took on any paid employment. For those times, this was quite normal. However, you did devote considerable time to several voluntary activities, both during and after the War. Indeed, you remained an active member of the Samaritans well into your late seventies. When I was small, you worked mainly on house-to-house collections for the Red Cross and in a number of ways as a member of the Women’s Voluntary Services, the WVS. My favourite WVS job was going with you, one or two afternoons a week, to do the refreshments for the travelling servicemen as they passed through Shrewsbury railway station. (Incidentally, in Nikolaus Pevsner’s opinion, the station building, constructed 1903-4, ruined for ever the very best view of Shrewsbury Castle). Members of the forces, British and American, seemed to be constantly on the move up and down the country in tremendous numbers in crushingly overcrowded trains. Whenever one of these trains pulled in to the platform, the refreshment rooms were deluged by hundreds of men in khaki and grey-blue uniforms, all wanting tea and rolls at the same moment.
Strange as it may seem to us now, the arrival times of most trains seemed to be known accurately in advance. You and your colleagues would be ready, prepared for the rush with thousands of filled bridge rolls that you’d spent the previous hours splitting, smearing with ‘official’ margarine, and filling. When the troops arrived, I sat on a shelf thing at the side of one of the serving hatches. This was a good position. It kept me out of the way of the roll-filling tables where I would have been a nuisance and probably trampled underfoot by kindly but very busy WVS ladies. I could also be, and often was, the temporary centre of friendly attention from Our Boys. The soldiers would lift me up in the air, make me laugh, tickle me, give me a sweet or chat to me while they waited. Several of them would pass through the station quite regularly. They got to know me, expecting me to be there and would promise to bring me some sort of surprise next time. Some did, and there was an American soldier who brought me a toy car or train of very superior quality. When they offered me American chewing gum, something completely unobtainable by normal means, you would accept it on my behalf, but then keep it, saying it was bad for me. The true reason, as I discovered later, was that you wanted to save this wartime treat for yourself.
What else about the War? I expect you remember ‘The Baron’. There was a rented house on one side of our back garden that accommodated an Austrian refugee couple whose name I learned to pronounce then but have since forgotten. They were, or claimed to be, of minor aristocratic stock, so you called them The Baron and the Baroness. I was invited in to see them now and again, and can see myself sitting listening to the Baron telling me something at great length in a dark, book-lined sitting room or study. I know I found their brand of accented English strange and interesting and probably made fun of it later. My name ‘Graham’ gave them some difficulty and it came out as a series of ‘aah’ sounds: Gr-aah-aah-aahm. I did wonder what eventually became of them.
Other things are no more than snippets that made their impressions then and have stuck with me ever since. Uncle Ted, Buster’s handsome youngest brother, was in the RAF, the glamorous branch of the forces. A bachelor during the War, he sometimes came to stay with us while on leave and once gave me a thick piece of broken Perspex from the cockpit of a crashed aircraft. This was the kind of thing you had to show to your friends, time and again, and I kept it for years. Later on, after the War, he gave me his RAF cap.
Whenever we needed new Ration Books or ‘official’ orange juice or halibut oil capsules, Mum and I went and queued at the Food Office which I think was somewhere along New Street, en route to Frankwell. Our regular butcher was certainly along there, where we queued for our corned beef. Was his name McNamara? Our grocer was Mr Paintin in Frankwell, whose shop had chairs for people to wait, a gigantic old coffee grinder and a bacon slicer. When you’d given him your order, and he’d cut the necessary coupons out of the Ration Books, you’d ask the key question sotto voce: ‘Anything under the counter today, Mr Paintin?’ With a knowing look as though none of his other customers enjoyed this privilege, he would then offer you an extra few ounces of something or other that had come his way. Anything from ‘under the counter’ cost you money but not ration coupons.
The radio News gave me strange words at different times during the War, such as ‘the Oder’ and ‘Hong Kong’, words I used to repeat incessantly, first amusing and then exasperating you. I remember the Bren-gun carriers clanking their way up or down the A5 at the end of Radbrook Road, and the concrete blocks and huge coils of cable to be strung across Porthill and other roads in the event of invading tanks coming our way – rather like the chains they stretched across the Thames in the 1660s to deter Dutch warships from coming upstream to menace London. One wartime sound we heard frequently was guns firing when the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry (the KSLI) were practising shooting in Shrewsbury Barracks.
Some of the books I read or that you read to me that were printed during the War contained, on the copyright page, the symbol of a lion couchant on top of an open book bearing the words BOOK PRODUCTION WAR ECONOMY STANDARD and underneath it the mention ’The paper and binding of this book conform to the authorized economy standards’. Also from that period, I’ve recently come across one of your old Ordnance Survey maps, Sheet 60 Shrewsbury and Welshpool, (Second War Revision 1940, published at The War Office, 1942).
Mainly, you know, I recall living my life in ways that had nothing whatsoever to do with the War. What annoys me most about it now is how the War has been so unavoidable in my life ever since those days. The notion of ‘Lest We Forget’, the idea that constant reminders of the past horrors will deter us from committing them again in the future, is simply and plainly false, empty. You only have to glance at the history of the 20th century after 1945 – let alone the history of humanity before that - to demonstrate this abundantly. And yet, throughout my entire life the long shadow of the Second World War has darkened my personal landscape. Every year we have Poppy Day and the services at the Cenotaph and at local war memorials nationwide. Every anniversary is noted, celebrated and marked by ever more books and more miles of television footage. The twentieth, the twenty-fifth, the thirtieth, fortieth, fiftieth and now the sixtieth anniversaries of any notable event, victory or defeat, are made to sit up again in front of us.
While writing this, though it won’t bother you now, we’ve been reminded of the twentieth anniversary of the wretched Falklands War, Thatcher’s high water. Eleven years have passed since the (first) Gulf War and the Second Gulf War is on its way. Would you ever have expected that? War isn’t inevitable but we seem to behave as though it is. In fact, it’s one of the routes of least resistance. Our national leaders, largely bereft of vision or creative imagination, resort to it time after time through the centuries. Over and over again these small-minded people ignore everything we’ve learned about the folly of it and the suffering generated by armed conflicts. Their motives are nearly always uncertain, ill defined or over-simplified. Quite frequently, they’re downright dishonest. There’s little we can do except to say, as we do so often and so helplessly, History will judge.
To sum up this belated reply to your question of long ago, I lived through the Second World War as a small child and hardly noticed it. Its malevolent traces have been with me ever since.
Your son,
Graham
*
RADIO PROGRAMME: ‘ORAL HISTORIES - THE WINTER OF 1947’
PRESENTER: For anyone who lived through it, this was the grandest, greatest and worst winter of them all: the Winter of 1947. Occurring during the January and February of that year, it has since been recognised, nationally and across Europe, as the worst winter of the 20th century – though the winter of 1962/63 outdid it in certain statistical respects. The Met Office records show that ’47 was snowier than ‘62/63 but that the latter was actually the colder of the two. This was the year when there was snow and snow and more snow, freezing cold for weeks on end, ice on the inside of windows every morning – central heating was largely unknown - power cuts, and then burst pipes when it all began to thaw. Graham Brown experienced it at the age of eight. How much can you remember?
GRAHAM BROWN: I never forgot the phenomenon itself partly because, during the many years that followed, my father always brought it up any time harsh winters were mentioned. His favourite statistic was that we had some six weeks with temperatures never above freezing, and he knew how many feet deep the frozen ground went. Of course, it depended where you were. We lived in Shropshire but parts of the country further north had the cold for much longer than us, with much larger and more frequent snowfalls.
PRES: That’s true. Large areas of Britain were completely at a standstill and cut off. And all this was only a couple of years after the end of the War. The country’s economy was dead flat and people were living under a necessary regime of austerity with shortages of food and irregular supplies of fuel and the transport to bring it. And you became eight years old in the greatest snow of your life.
GB: Yes, I was eight in the February. Snow had always had a magical and romantic effect for me. Anything that it clung to was made beautiful: a fence, the top rail of the front gate, a tree stump, entire trees laden and bowed. I loved the deep slices of thick snow lying along their branches. Large areas of untrodden snow fascinated me partly because of their complete virginity and because their actual depth was unguessable. They may be a couple of inches or a couple of feet deep. You only found out when your tentative Wellington boot went in. When I came in from playing, there were daily routines for weeks of removing cold, wet woollen gloves and socks to be hung over the fire guard to dry. My father must have walked to work and I must have trotted up the road to school through the snow every day for weeks.
PRES: So you children were out in it as often as you could be?
GB: We were. The pavements and road were deep in disturbed snow, front paths emerged through canyons of shovelled snow on either side, only to be reburied that night beneath the next, wonderful, new fall. We scoured the sides and drainpipes of our houses for the longest icicles, licked them and shattered them. We trudged the nearby roads and into the fields looking for big frozen puddles that hadn’t been cracked yet, and cracked them. We built snowmen, then hurled snowballs at them and at each other.
PRES: Many people have said that one of the best things about the Winter of ’47 was its reliability, its certainty. You knew the snow would still be there tomorrow, and the next day, possibly topped up by another night time fall.
GB: Yes, cold and snow had become the norm. Another ‘best thing’ for me was being out in it during the dark of early evening before and perhaps again after teatime. Windows with drawn curtains glowed onto the whiteness outside, invitingly warm and secure, like the windows the Rat and the Mole see in The Wind in the Willows as they pass through the village en route to Mole’s house at Christmas. Bushes and garden hedges, normally shadowy and indistinct - perhaps threatening, too - were sharp and clear now in their white details, illuminating the whole road like bright moonlight, reflecting the beams from the few streetlamps that were still working. We’d found that a well-aimed snowball thrown high could nudge the lamp-holder and make the light go out. There were -
PRES: Were you the kind of eight year-old vandal who did such a thing?
GB: I’m afraid so. I have to admit it, though you only did it a couple of times because then there were so few lights to put out. One or two of them withstood our wicked little onslaught. In any case, it wasn’t our intention to plunge the whole road into darkness. The power cuts would do that for us. In fact, I don’t know that we had any real intention at all. It was one of those things kids do because they can, and can get away with. However, the lamp right outside our house was always spared because I wouldn’t have dared do it so close to home, and wouldn’t let anyone else do it.
PRES: You lived in Shrewsbury and had power cuts. But many places further out in the countryside were completely without electricity for ages.
GB: Yes, they were, and the weight of snow brought down the telephone lines in some of the most remote places. It was one of my father’s jobs to organise and supervise repair work when this happened in his area, though it must have been very difficult to get a vehicle through to many of the hamlets and villages near the Welsh borders. Of course, there were relatively few cars on the road then, but if it was your car stuck in a five-foot snowdrift . . . To be honest, my own interest in the wider effects of this exceptional winter was slight. All I wanted was more and more snow to go on forever.
PRES: Let’s broaden our perceptions of it now from what we’ve discovered since. Then we can connect ‘past’ and ‘present’ into the single continuum of lived experience. Christmas ’46 had passed and, apart from a couple of short cold snaps early on, January’s weather was unusually mild. The famous Winter really began on 23 January with heavy snowfalls across the whole of southern England. The southwest had the worst blizzard since 1891 and many villages in Devon were completely isolated. The anticyclone over southern Scandinavia determined the nature of British weather for the rest of the month. In fact, cold sunny weather went on through the whole of February and well into March. From 22 January to 17 March snow fell somewhere in the UK every single day. Temperatures were consistently so low that the snow never went away but persistently accumulated: ‘Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow/In the bleak midwinter . . .’
In many places, February ’47 was the coldest February on record, and snow was lying at 9.00 am on 26 of the month’s 28 days. There was hardly any sunshine on most days of the month, particularly in the south of England and in the Midlands. Hardly a February day passed without a snowfall somewhere in Britain. March was even worse than this. Here’s the Met Office report on it:
In the first half of the month, there were more gales and heavy snowstorms.
On 4 and 5 March, heavy snow fell over most of England and Wales, with
severe drifting. On 6 March, drifts were five metres deep in the Pennines and
three metres in the Chilterns. In some places glazed frost occurred. On 10
and 11 March, southern Scotland had its heaviest snowfall of the winter,
and the snowstorm reached the Scottish Highlands where, on 12 March, drifts
more than seven metres deep were recorded.
Meteorological Office: Winter Chills 1947 and 1963
GB: My wife was six at the time, living at Lowestoft, and recalls the day the family, her mother heavily pregnant, went over to Oulton Broad and walked on its frozen surface.
PRES: And we’ve found Terry Gough writing of his childhood memories of the Great Winter on the Wotton-under-Edge Community website. Among other things, he recalls a feeling that anyone who’d known it first-hand would recognise immediately: ‘ . . . almost delirious delight the next morning when we awoke to a world that had been transformed . . . and it was still snowing.’ Their milk was brought in churns on an improvised sledge. They had their own chickens for eggs but there were food shortages everywhere. He speaks of ‘main roads and railway lines closed for weeks on end’, and for them it was April before the thaw properly set in. His experience of supplementing fuel supplies would be typical of many:
After another heavy overnight fall of snow we arose to find that when we
opened the back door we met a wall of solid snow. We had to dig our way
out to get to the coalhouse, which was already getting seriously low on coal
and firewood . . . Dad and some of the neighbours got together and ventured
off into the woodlands, armed with saws and axes to collect wood that they
could carry home and saw up into logs for the fire, so that what coal
remained would last that much longer . . . I can see Dad and the men now,
returning home, chilled to the marrow, their faces blue with the cold, snow
laden eyebrows, hair and clothes. The snow caked logs when sawn were
taken inside and placed on the hearth to dry, hissing as they did so. Next
morning the warm ashes from the grate were raked out with the poker, then
shovelled from under the fire basket into a metal bucket and then spread onto
the garden paths to try and stop them freezing over again.
Terry Gough, Wotton-under-Edge Community.com
GB: That’s serious snow. People living in towns in wintry conditions have no idea what it’s like out in the country, with no means of clearing the snow away, and often no way of anyone getting to them to bring supplies. And we thought it was tough . . .
*
LETTER TO MYSELF AGED 11
King’s Lynn, Norfolk
July 2003
Dear much younger Graham,
It’s three years now – a good quarter of your whole life away – since you lived through the record Winter of 1947 when, day by day for weeks on end, there was far more snow than you could ever manage to play with. Whatever else you’ve been doing since then, you’ll already have heard your – our – father say something like ‘Ah, now, I remember the winter of ‘47’. More than once. And I can assure you that, whenever the situation deserved it, he was to say it many more times during the rest of his life.
I want to assure you about something else, and that’s why I’m writing this particular letter to a younger edition of myself. If we’re very lucky, there’ll be just one or two moments of pure enchantment in our early years that will hold their magical qualities for us right through our lives. For you – and still for me now on the further side of sixty – it’s the purest thrill and delight of a fresh fall of snow with the sun shining on it. I know it works on you now at age eleven, and I can tell you it will stay with you, in virtually its original purity, through all your days. I hope this letter will help you to hold on to that magic. It’s to remind you of the very first time you really experienced it and of the way it made you feel.
Like many people, my love of snow is derived from my earlier years. Despite passing time, I still cherish the gently optimistic way that it temporarily covers all things dark, transforming the world we see, making it clean, soft and rounded. On the other hand, I dislike getting cold and wet, just as you do, and I’ve always been deeply disappointed as the snow gets trodden away by passing footsteps and eventually turns to slush. The best time to see it is after a fall during the night and the following morning’s sky has cleared to brilliance and brightness. Then the snow is glaringly white with myriad highlights of frost glittering on it in the sunlight. Deep and undisturbed, no one has walked on it. Not yet. Part of you wants it to remain like that, wants to gaze at its purity for ever. Another part wants to rush into it and plant the very first footsteps.
Your first serious encounter with it was one morning when you were about three. I’m sure you’ll be able to recall this. Your mother came into your bedroom as usual and switched on the single-bar electric fire you stood in front of while you got shiveringly dressed during the winter. This time, instead of hurrying you along and getting you into your clothes, she said: ‘Put your dressing gown and slippers on, and come and look’. You followed her along to the living room. There the two of you stood together in the curved bay window. She knew what she was doing. She usually did, and it was so often to do with giving you small scraps of pleasure like this. It was exactly one of those radiant winter mornings. ‘Look at the snow’, she said. You looked, and couldn’t believe it. Bright sun, blue sky and the whole garden a dazzling field of the purest white.
You thought it was magic. You just looked and looked. Everything was still. The quietness had a quality you’d never known before but would always recognise again after that first experience. The whole lawn was covered deep, every outline of fences, flower beds and paths concealed beneath the downy whiteness. Trees and bushes, branches, twigs and leaves, everything holding its individual burden of snow, undisturbed. It would be overly romantic of me to complete the image and say that, as you watched, a starkly black blackbird hopped across the snow-covered lawn, leaving its delicate tracks as it went. It may have done, and quite possibly did. That night you looked out of your bedroom window when you should have been in bed. Again you looked and looked at the now disturbed whiteness and the lumpy shadows in it by the yellow glow of the streetlight outside our front garden. Then into bed and off to sleep, longing for another heavy fall and, on waking next day, another sunny morning to see it.
As I write, we’re enjoying the frequently exceptional heat of mid-summer 2003. The other day, our elder daughter Jenny said, almost on cue and without any artifice, that she thought most of her childhood summers were like this one. The way we conflate our childhood experiences, especially the long, carefree summers, remains with us. No, they weren’t all like that. Very few were. But I too seem to recall the winters in the same way. I’ve believed there was sledging and trudging through snow, and making snowmen, and freezing fingers, and wet wellies and all the rest of it, in most years. You’ll find out the truth of this. In fact, you may well enjoy a few more snowy winters than we have known more recently. Sledges were quite often given as Christmas presents, suggesting that there was a fair chance of some snow. But winters suitable for sledging won’t come round all that frequently and not as grandly as I may have imagined much later in my life.
It means that you’ll need to make your own effort of imagination to preserve your feeling for snow. Talk to your mother about it and ask her to describe that glittering morning again. When you have your own camera, take photographs of the snow and look at them later to reinforce your earlier memories. I know this will work for you because I know it has worked.
Your affectionate older self,
Graham
*
FROM THE MEMOIR
And now to the even colder winter of ‘62/63. It begins a bit earlier than ’47 with a snow belt that reaches southern England on Boxing Day ’62 and stays there. Much of the area is initially covered by snow 30 cm deep. Some friends from New Zealand and Australia have never seen snow before in their lives. Like three-year-olds this past week, they delight in the white stuff, playing in it, throwing it around, even rolling in it on Hampstead Heath. We see the television pictures, taken from a helicopter, of stranded sheep in drifts on Dartmoor, and of attempts to keep them alive by dropping feedstuffs from the air. Helped by a blizzard on 29/30 December, snowdrifts six metres deep affect southwest England and South Wales. The results, according to the Met Office:
Villages were cut off, some for several days. Roads and railways were
blocked. Telephone wires were brought down. Stocks of food ran low.
Farmers couldn’t reach their livestock. Thousands of sheep, ponies and cattle
starved to death. From Boxing Day ’62 to early March ’63, much of England
was under snow continuously.
Here in London, apart from the usual discomforts of slushy snow underfoot, services generally run smoothly enough and we have no trouble getting about on public transport. And now on New Year’s Eve, the pubs have closed, and Nigel and I are running, somewhat unwisely, up one of the steeper streets in Kilburn towards the mansion block where the party is being held. There’s a half bottle of whisky in my overcoat pocket. As I slip and fall onto the snowy pavement, the voice of a stranger just behind me says: ‘I could see that coming’. Yes, very clever, of course he could. It’s another of those small chastening moments in one’s life, doing something foolish before an audience. I ignore him and pick myself up grumpily. The bottle and I are intact and unharmed. It turns out to be the coldest British winter since 1740. The Met Office commentary again:
In February 63, air frost occurred every night at Durham and almost every
night in the English Midlands . . . Lakes and rivers froze. Ice formed on
harbours in the south and east of England. Patches of ice formed on the sea.
Huge blocks of ice formed on beaches where waves broke and the spray
froze.
INTERRUPTION: E-MAIL FROM AN UNKNOWN AMERICAN
From: brad@arcadia.unh.edu
To: brown.graham@eidoscope.com
Date: June 17 2003 11:47
Subject: Winter 1947
Hi, Graham.
You don’t know me but I work with your good friend Dave over here in New Hampshire. He told me recently that you were researching the great Winter of 1947 for your memoirs. Well, one of my interests is extreme weather of all kinds, wherever they occur in the world. Ferreting among the Winter of ’47 weather sources for the United States, I discovered ‘The Nearly Forgotten Snow Storm of May 27-29, 1947’.
Here’s a short quotation about its extent: ‘from Colorado and Wyoming east through southern South Dakota, Nebraska, southern Minnesota and Iowa, and then northeast from southwest Wisconsin to the eastern Upper Peninsula of Michigan.’ It was the latest and largest snowfall ever to fall in three of those states. Given the relatively late stage of the year, most of the damage caused by unprecedented cold and six to twelve inches of snow was to young growing crops, such as fruits, grain and tobacco.
I hope you can use this unexpected piece of information, perhaps as a footnote.
With best wishes for a successful memoir,
Brad Crawford
BACK TO THE MEMOIR
The winter wasn’t the only significant event of 1947. For one thing, the then Princess Elizabeth, determined to prevent any taint of Englishness from sneaking into the royal family, married a Greek prince. The coalmines were nationalised. India was hurriedly granted independence, to be followed by the terrible aftermath of partition. Hugh Dalton, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, told a newspaper reporter about intended tax cuts before he’d announced his Budget to the Commons. He had to resign, which is what you did in those days. Denis Compton, the cricketer, scored a record 18 centuries in the single season.
But the country as a whole still had a very long way to go in recovering from the War. Foreign holidays were not permitted, and business people travelling abroad were allowed only £8 per day expenses. Industrial and domestic power supplies were turned off for one day a week in parts of the country. And if you went on holiday in Britain you had to use your ration books to provide your food if you stayed in a hotel or boarding house.
Those things all belong later in the year. Before them, as the winter snows began to melt and March experienced well beyond its normal rainfall, we had the Floods of ’47, ‘in modern times . . . unique for [their] volume and persistence.’ Living on the River Severn at Shrewsbury was just the place to get to know them.
My memories of the great snow are generally enjoyable. We know the damage it could and did do and the tremendous dislocation it caused for weeks on end all over Britain. But as long as it remained there we kids were happy. It was a largely benign element for us to have fun with. This snow was one more thing we would pack into our memories of the long, golden period of childhood innocence.
The floods were very different. Their immediate effect was more specific in many ways with a darker, much more threatening aspect. The flooding was dramatic and exciting and, at the same time, ugly and potentially dangerous. Instead of the soft white cushions and coverings of snow, which we could shape and form and throw around harmlessly, now we were faced with these fast, brown, powerful, swirling torrents that we could only gape at fearfully. Acres of unruly water lay or rushed across places where we’d never seen water before. The river and the streams themselves disappeared. Bursting their banks, they left enormous wastes of water, without boundaries, a malevolent force beyond control.
The thaw began rapidly and in earnest on 11 March. By the end of that day, vast areas of southern England were under water and the much warmer air continued its progress further north and east. Within two days, the rivers of the East Anglian Fens were close to bursting and before long they overflowed. Rain and strong winds whipped up the floodwaters that drove through the dykes. Troops went in to help as the Fenland was totally inundated, but they could achieve very little. The plans for many of the current flood defence systems in this vicinity date from that experience. Some places had their worst flooding for 250 years, and for many this would be their worst flooding until the late 1990s. The whole of the lower Trent valley was under water, inundating hundreds of homes in Nottingham. A massive acreage of southern Yorkshire went under water as the rivers Wharfe, Derwent, Aire and Ouse burst their banks. The town of Selby was almost entirely under water. As the ice melted, millions of old lead water pipes were found to have burst. They had to dig a deep trench right down our front garden to the pavement outside to repair the mains pipe.
For towns like York and Shrewsbury, there was nothing new about winter flooding. There’s a 15th century record of eight feet of water at ‘the friary’ in Shrewsbury, and the Severn is said to have flooded five times in 1818. In March-April ’47, over many parts of the country, the ‘extent was phenomenal’:
In all, at some time or another during the floods, 690,000 acres of land were inundated. This is roughly equal to the farming area of the whole county of
Kent. And of these flooded areas, 325,000 acres were arable land, urgently
needed to grow the nation’s food. The total cost of flood damage, including
loss of existing crops, was estimated at £12 million.
These extraordinary floods had two main causes. For one thing, the months of January, February and March had seen exceptional rainfall, including the snow, nearly half as much again as the usual average. March itself delivered three times its usual rainfall. In normal circumstances, all this rain would have soaked into the ground or run off through the rivers to the sea. But this had not been a normal winter. The whole country had been in the grip of severe, unrelenting frost for at least a month, and the best part of two months in many areas. The new water from rain and melting snow couldn’t soak away because the earth was rock hard. Instead, it had to flow across the frozen ground by whatever route it could find naturally, until it reached small streams and rivers, enlarging their flow way beyond their capacity to hold it, and feeding ever-increasing volumes of water into the larger rivers.
The valleys of the Wye and the Severn were always affected by the melting snow on the Welsh mountains at the approach of spring. In Shrewsbury, I was used to seeing rowing boats going up and down Frankwell, and the town being more or less cut off, with Kingsland Bridge its only access route across the river. Every year came fears that the force of the flood waters might cause the old stone Welsh Bridge to crack and collapse. One side of Frankwell would be fitted with temporary plank walkways so that people on foot could reach whatever small shops had managed to stay open. The barber’s shop I used from about the age of ten, run by a man called Percy, had old monochrome framed photographs on the walls depicting many of the years that Frankwell had gone under water during one winter after another. People in some houses regularly had to move into their upstairs rooms and the rowing boats brought their provisions to them.
It was the Winter of ’47, when the whole of Shrewsbury was nearly cut off by water, that really brought home to me the enormity of all this water in the wrong places. I sensed for the first time how huge and uncontainable it was. To see it, brown and wantonly swirling, carrying broken trees on its back, was to know and feel its power and awfulness. There was a small wood up Radbrook Road on the side of the stream that ran through the far end of The Fields. Here there was no bank to speak of and the flood-water simply flowed across the nearby field in every direction. There was nothing to stop it, and it transformed this familiar play spot into something alien and fearsome. I would look at it and shudder at its strange, shapeless power.
But then, as we became more used to the floods, we became braver, especially when the water had begun to recede a little. The Quarry end of Porthill Bridge opposite the Boathouse was well under water and a couple of us would walk across as far as we could get and test the depth of the water in our Wellingtons to see how much the level had changed. Then, one day, when there was no-one around, we decided to climb over the balustrade at the far end of the bridge and clamber our way along on the outside, poised at every step to fall into the raging, swollen Severn not very far beneath us. It must have been someone like the ever adventurous John Mansell-Jones who suggested that little escapade. I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it for myself. Anyone seeing us doing this would have feared for our lives. We were apparently not too concerned, made our way along for a while, then returned the same way and went back over the bridge. Of all times to do such a thing, the flooded aftermath of the Winter of ’47 must have been the very worst to choose:
All the rivers of England, from the south up to the Midlands, were in spate,
and thousands of acres of farmland and thousands of homes had been
inundated. Gales had torn down telephone communications and blocked
many of the main roads with fallen trees. By the end of the first week of
serious trouble there were floods in thirty of the forty English counties and in
many parts of Wales.
… at Worcester, that river [Severn] rose 10 feet in 24 hours. On the river walk
by the cathedral there is a plaque which reads: ‘On November 18, 1770, the
flood rose to the edge of this brass plate, being ten inches higher than the
flood which happened on October 23, 1672.’ In 1947, the water lapped within
half an inch of the brass plate . . . The River Wye reached its highest level for
155 years . . . the county of Herefordshire was almost completely isolated.
*
EXTRACT FROM RADIO NEWS FEATURE, 2000
PRESENTER: Since 1947, many of the usually affected towns, particularly York, have suffered flooding during the second half of the 20th century. It’s this Millennium year, however, that brings back powerful echoes of ’47. RECORD FLOOD ENGULFS BRITAIN runs the Guardian headline for Friday 3rd November, 2000, when an inch of rain in one hour made its dramatic contribution to ‘what is fast becoming the most widespread flood in British history.’ In several places, the effects are even greater than those of ’47. The Guardian report tells us:
READER:
Emergency teams were nervously watching river levels throughout Yorkshire
last night, after drenchings in the Pennines. Shropshire was hit by 98 floods
which has cost the local authority £450,000 with the final bill expected to be
very much more.
Part of the Worcester Royal Infirmary was evacuated, as was a residential
caravan park in Stourport. In Shrewsbury, the town centre was impassable
and waters reached the city’s ancient abbey. More than 200 homes were
flooded.
More than 200 families along the swollen Aire in Skipton, north Yorkshire,
bedded down for the third night in hotels and bed-and-breakfasts while
major road bridges between Skipton and Leeds opened and closed erratically
as the water level fluctuated . . . The east coast main line between York and
Darlington was also closed yesterday, when floods from the Ouse and
Derwent covered the tracks.
Guardian, 3 November, 2000
PRES: These startling conditions prompted the Prime Minister to get into a helicopter and visit the devastated areas, giving encouragement to members of the emergency services. He went to Shrewsbury, Bewdley in Worcestershire and York, all places where the water was still rising. Among his comments, he widened the local problems to include the much larger, and fashionable, issue of global warming: ‘We have to put in the right protection for people against the possibility of floods and work to deal with the issue of climate change’. At much the same time, the big insurance companies were threatening to withdraw future cover from people who knowingly lived, or built new houses, on flood plains.
As the flooded Severn rose day by day, it became clear at Bewdley that this was even worse than ’47, in fact the ‘worst since records began’. The online newspaper Dudley Mall reports Tony Blair’s visit there in less than enthusiastic terms:
READER:
An increasingly unloved Prime Minister of a once overwhelmingly popular
Government came later that day to see the damage, was heckled about the
closure of the Kidderminster Hospital’s Accident and Emergency Unit, and
apparently cut short his visit as a result. Perhaps he could have taken a hint
from the strength in adversity shown by the people he didn’t find time to see.
As one of the residents reportedly said afterwards: ‘I’m up to my knees in
water and they sent me another drip’.
Dudley Mall.co.uk, November 2000
*
EPILOGUE
I wanted to reproduce a few of the evocative descriptions of snow and the English winter that we have in literature and other accounts from the past. I thought of the seemingly eternal winters in Doctor Zhivago’s life, and the formidable non-fictional challenges of ice and snow endured by Scott’s party en route to the South Pole or by Hunt, Hillary and Tensing on their way up Everest for the first time. By contrast, the jolly wintry celebrations of the traditional Christmas card scene were almost invented by Charles Dickens. And there’s no shortage of descriptions of London winters when Frost Fairs were held on the frozen river Thames.
Abraham Houdins’ painting Frost Fair on the Thames, 1683-84 shows exactly what you can do on London’s frozen river. Pepys the diarist missed it by being in Tangier on business at the time, although, by chance, during a diversion to Spain, he found Europe coping with one of its roughest winters for decades. He was held up at Seville for six weeks while torrential rain and floods caused rivers to burst their banks all over the southern part of the country. And the words of many of the seasonal songs and carols run deep in the mainline of our culture, through their images of bleak midwinter, frost, midnight clear, holly and ivy, with the snow deep and crisp and even.
I soon realised that I was assembling an anthology of winter cold and whiteness far beyond my purpose, so I’ve limited it to two of the most moving and enduring pieces. My parents had a 10-inch 78 rpm shellac record of a young John Gielgud reading Eliot’s ‘Journey of the Magi’. They played it quite often, particularly when they were studying poetry in WEA classes. The unique cadences of Gielgud’s voice and many of the phrases themselves became part of the aural landscape of my childhood. The first few lines of Eliot’s poem have remained with me all my life and provide a brief but complete statement of the essentials, concisely expressed, with the fifth line leaving nothing more to be said:
A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.
From TS Eliot: ‘Journey of the Magi’
The second is the final paragraph of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, from Dubliners. I’ve read it dozens of times, especially when I was teaching it with ‘A’ level college students. It still stands among the few most poignant groups of words I’ve ever read in my life, and I can never reread it without tears coming to my eyes. It says everything there is to say about snow and the human consciousness. The narrative is set in Dublin on Twelfth Night, and, by the end of the story, Gabriel Conroy has finally recognised how bereft of love his life has been and how much he has missed through being blind to his own limitations. Joyce writes ‘His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead’:
A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun
to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling
obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his
journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over
Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless
hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling
into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every pat of
the lonely churchyard where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted
on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the
barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly
through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end,
upon all the living and the dead.
From James Joyce: ‘The Dead’
Floods were part of my winter picture from an early age, and I experienced some of them very directly. But they can only ever be secondary to the great white covering of 1947 - and the few good snowfalls I’ve known since. For me, the magic still works, waking one winter morning to that unusual quiet and the unexpected whiteness reflected on the bedroom ceiling, knowing what a single peep through the drawn curtains will show me. Again it will thrill me, welcoming its newness and its gentle power to evoke those happiest of childhood days.
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