The Met Office historical temperature record -If you were to tell that to the kids today!

By way of light relief from continuous weather station reviews, I felt it would be worthwhile to put past weather events and extremes into a more personal context. There have been very notable weather events of all types in my lifetime ranging from extreme wind in 1987 that led to me being without electricity for 11 days, my 20th birthday in 1976 being the start of a seemingly interminable and fantastic summer heatwave and as a child being sent up into lofts with a red hot poker to free float valves frozen solid in cold water storage tanks in 1963. I do not want to make this into an “eh up when I was a lad…..luxury!” like the famous comedy sketch above (though there is nothing wrong with a bit of humour) but rather personal reflections on known events and of the nature in which they were reported in the media. Initially below is more detail of mine (born 1956) and those of the venerable Talkshop contributor John Marlowe of 1936 vintage. I invite readers to offer their own experiences of any time and event in the comments below. Such memories are useful to relate to the recorded events of the time.

Much is made in the main stream media of “Climate Chaos” as if every slightly out of the usual weather event represents an existential threat. So the first year to consider is 1947 and some remarkable extremes at both ends of both the temperature scale and precipitation.

Winter 1947 was not only extremely cold but is believed to have been the “snowiest” winter of the modern recorded era. Google AI headlines it as follows:

“The UK winter of 1947, known as the “Big Freeze,” was one of the coldest and snowiest on record. Lasting from late January to mid-March, it brought 55 consecutive days of snowfall and temperatures as low as -21°C. The resulting snowdrifts, reaching up to seven metres high, crippled transport, caused severe coal and power shortages, and forced mass factory shutdowns.“

So severe was this year’s winter that Channel 5 produced a very watchable documentary of events including steam driven railway engines acting as battering rams to clear the massive snow drifts. That extremely low temperature was actually recorded at Elmstone in Kent a few miles from my own home – a probable Class 1 site that is obviously now long closed! Try to imagine the complete and genuine chaos such a weather event would cause 21st century UK! John kindly offered his recollections of this time

“1947 Winter.   I was just 10 years old.    Beginning in late January 1947, the UK experienced several cold spells that brought large drifts of snow to the country.

When Dad was on early shift (he worked for the London Underground Tube) it was my job to clear the snow off the paths so that we could get to the coal bunker and the front gate.   The snow lasted for weeks, often in deep drifts.   I was so glad when it finally ended as it was hard work for a little lad.“

Obviously I have no personal recollections of 1947, however, my father (despite being an Italian national) had volunteered and been accepted for the British Army and was not “demobbed” until 1948. He told me that as a Sergeant he was instructed to organise former “detainees” (POW) who wished to stay in Britain to hack coal out of the railway wagons that it had frozen solid into and could not otherwise be tipped out from. Many of these workers had mined coal previously and bitterly complained that it was “warm” down the mines but dangerously cold in the railway sidings. Consider just how bad this extreme cold must have been in the context of the extreme fuel shortage at the time with most homes having just “one warm room” with an open hearth coal fire….and potentially no coal!

Following so much snow the inevitable thaw was coupled with heavy rain causing intense flooding. Astonishingly the summer of 1947 transpired to be one of the warmest on record’ From John:

1947 Summer.    My Father was an avid newspaper reader and could collect an assortment that passengers had left behind on the train.   If he was on an early shift the newspapers that he brought home were Morning Newspapers.    In those evenings I would walk down to the Newsagent’ shop and buy a copy of ‘The Evening News’ for Dad.   During the walk home I used to read the headlines on the front page.   One I remember well; ”90+ degrees again”, which was measured on the Air Ministry’s roof in central London.  [No understanding of UHI in those days.]

“Weather outlook” has an interesting thread as follows;

“When people discuss the weather in 1947, many people talk about it’s incredibly cold and snowy February. What some don’t realise is that 1947 was a very interesting year as a whole for weather fans, as the summer of 1947 was equally as remarkable.

After the cold spell broke in March, the UK was left with quite severe flooding due to heavy rain and snowmelt. This was followed by a topsy-turvy April, before a very warm May set up. May 1947 had a CET of 13.5C, making it currently the joint eighth warmest May for the CET. The month saw lots of warm anticyclonic weather, but it was the final week of the month that was most interesting, with a very potent plume bringing exceptionally high temperatures for the end of spring.

The heat wave kicked off properly on the 29th, with every day from the 29th of May to the 3rd of June recording 30C or higher somewhere in the UK. June 3 was the peak of the temperatures, with 34.4C being recorded in both London and Lincoln. “

The rest of the summer continued in a similar vein. My own transcription of the Fahrenheit data from my local Wye weather station for 1947 was a summer (June, July, August) average maximum temperature of 72.6°F being the same as the 1976 summer figure but marginally lower than the 73.2°F recorded in summer 1933 (93 years ago) – an interesting take on global warming.

Perhaps the most striking winter within living memory must be that of 1962/3. John’s recollection:

1963.  “ I was married the previous August and this was our first winter in the Flat above the building where I worked.    It was not only very snowy, but intensely cold.   Most of the houses around us had no water, the supply pipes were frozen.    Eventually the council opened the stop-cocks from about 10am until 4pm.  We made Epoxy Resin impregnated Transformers and had two large ovens that operated during the night to cure the resin and the heat kept our water pipes unfrozen.   Every lunchtime I would take the hose and fill-up kettles, saucepans, etc for our neighbours.   I also filled their bathtubs so that they could flush their loos.   When the thaw came there were floods everywhere on the roads as the drains were still frozen.“

As the youngest of three children I was also the smallest. Living in a 2 bed tiny terraced house in east Hull (hardly the wealthiest of areas) the only heating was an open hearth fire but we did have the benefit of a “back boiler” providing hot water. Most neighbours had replaced their hearth coal fires with “Town Gas” wall mounted radiant fires which, though they heated the room, did not “waste” much heat up the chimney to provide enough warmth to stop the loft mounted cold water storage tanks from freezing. I vividly recall my size meaning I was the one most suitable for getting through various neighbours tiny loft hatches. Once up there I reached down and collected pokers heated in our open fire (held in oven gloves) and then thrust these through the ice around the float valves to defrost them and return water flow! Now if you tell that to the kids today…………!

This winter had devastating effects on wild life due to its extreme longevity (22/12/1962 to 6/3/1963). It is estimated that over half of all birds in the UK died. Human mortality statistics are recorded differently now to the early 1960s but it is generally regarded that there were over 90,000 excess winter deaths in England alone. Compare that terrible figure to those rather absurdly calculated for summer “heat related” mortality today after average life expectancy in the UK has risen from 71.1 years in 1960 to 83.1 years in 2024.

1976 is obviously the next UK weather milestone and again Channel 5 produced a documentary covering this exceptionally warm, long period. As the documentary emphasises, there was a genuinely good “vibe” about this period with those who could not afford “Two weeks in Spain” gloating that the weather at home was much better than the “Costas”. Oddly, my most vivid memory was skidding off the road on black ice in the early hours of 2nd August driving my somewhat inebriated boss back home in his longer wheelbase V12 5.3 litre 272HP E-Type Jaguar. The most powerful car I had driven up to that point being an aged Fiat 500 Topolino.

Great Gaddesdon recorded an air temperature of -0.6°C on the 1st August that year which was not atypical. The long term drought conditions had dried out soils and the clear overnight skies led to severe ground “radiation frosts“. The absurdity of meteorological averaging has subsequently allowed the Met Office to claim subsequent UK summers were “hotter” based on this false averaging as more recent warmer summers were not as dry and did not record such unusual minima. The 1976 heatwave started on the 23 June (my 20th birthday) and, with a few brief respites of lower intensity, continued until the last week of August.

Apart from the June all time record at Southampton none of the other 1976 record highs hold to this day but that is largely due to weather station re-locations, instrument changes and suspect readings. The subsequent record highs are all of questionable provenance i.e. Cheltenham 1990 with an ongoing festival in Montpelier Gardens, the 2003 Faversham figure is to this day disputed by the Royal Meteorological society, the 2019 Cambridge figure recorded at a site removed from the Central England Temperature Series in 1930 due to UHI concerns and the 2022 Coningsby Typhoon performance take off. It seems the Met Office finds the summer of 1976 an “Inconvenient Truth”

Another major point to note though is that summer 1976 was also very much an English phenomenon that did not spread as widely to the rest of the UK as many seem to remember. John’s experiences from northwest Wales are very different to mine.

1976.   I lived on Anglesey and it was a normal summer for us.    The grass was still green as usual.    You can Imagine my surprise when, in August, I had to visit companies in Oxford and Bristol to see parched fields, grass the colour of straw, the only green visible were a few deep-rooted thistles.

For other memorable date John goes on to highlight the following:

2003.    I had retired and moved to Western France.   We had a canicule- a heat wave.   Tmax was in the upper 30s for several weeks.   There were 49 days where Tmax was over 30°C.    (Average is 30.3 days over 26 years.)

2025.   Another heat wave; It was hotter than 2003.   There were 46 days where Tmax was over 30°C.    Tmax went over 40°C for two days.  

These were clearly very extended heat events. I have personally never experienced such a period and would welcome any other views on what this actually feels like – as a retired person now I would quite welcome such warmth but it must be stressful for those having to work through such continuous highs.

For my part I remember that disputed 2003 UK record very well indeed as I previously reported. I was personally within a few hundred metres (if that) of the record site at the time and it was not as hot as claimed – more a case of some local “rascality” than genuine heat burst.

Leaving aside the notably hot days of 2019 and 2022 perhaps my most other vivid memories of weather events were being overtaken on the A20 heading home by a workman’s roadside hut blown along by devastatingly high winds in October 1987 ( the “Great Storm“) and then spending the next 11 days with no electricity supply and 6 weeks before restoration of telephony.

Overall the least publicised but harshest event for me personally was the winter of 1978/9. Having bought my first home in late December 1978, I was unable to access it due to snowdrifts for several days. On finally getting there, conditions worsened and I was unable to leave and dependant on the good will of neighbours for food! The entire county of Kent was ultimately effectively cut off from elsewhere and the RAF ended up parachuting in emergency supplies to some rural communities. There were many unscheduled home births and emergency helicopter airlifts of pregnant women were widely reported.

So this is my trip down memory lane with helpful additions from John for a longer term perspective. I welcome any more anecdotes or detailed studies of such weather events and extremes that anyone may wish to offer.

Source: https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2026/05/21/the-met-office-historical-temperature-record-if-you-were-to-tell-that-to-the-kids-today/