WEATHER

See Also: BIRDS Pigeons; CATS Sunning; NAUTICAL; RAILWAYS Wrong Kind Of; STATUES Nudity, Zimbabwe House

Website: www.rmets.org (The Royal Meteorological Society)

Barometers

On 1 February 1664 Pepys had a meeting with King Charles II. During this the monarch made clear the way in which he found the seeming impracticality of much of the work of the Society's members, notably their weighing air (barometric pressure).

Alexander Cumming, a Scot, established himself as a watchmaker and instrument maker. He acquired premises in New Bond Street. In 1763 he was invited to become a member of the Board of Longitude. This adjudicated upon John Harrison's marine chronometer. The body concluded that a second instrument should be made in order to prove that Harrison had disclosed all of the techniques that he had used to make the first.

Cumming developed an interest in air pressure. He was aware of the ideas that the scientist Robert Hooke had had for a barometer. In 1765 the watchmaker presented King George III with what is believed to be the first working recorder barograph. The following year, he built a refined version, which he kept in his own possession. After his death, it was bought by Luke Howard, who used data derived from it as the basis for his book The Climate of London (1820).

See Also: ASCERTAINING THE VERTICAL; TIMEPIECES

Fog

The Roman author Tacitus (c.56-c.120) made a reference to the fogs of the site of London.

Charles Dickens referred to fog as 'London ivy'.

The 1880s had the worst.

Wharves specialised in different varieties of goods. It is reputed that during heavy fogs, lightermen on the River Thames could tell where they were on the river by the smells emanating the wharves.

The Great Smog of 1952: the first sign was cattle dropping dead at the Smithfield Show; cinemas and theatres were penetrated and entertainments had been abandoned.

The City of London Clean Air Act of 1954; two years later the principal Act.

A Matter of Perspective

There is a story that upon one occasion a dense bank of fog settled across the English Channel. As a result, all of the ferry sailings to Europe were cancelled. One newspaper is said to have reported this development under the headline Heavy Fog Strands Continent.

Lightning

The medieval Church of St Bride's Fleet Street was destroyed by the Great Fire of 1666. The present Sir Christopher Wren-designed building had the tallest steeple of any of his churches. In 1764 it was struck by lightning. It was generally agreed that a lightning conductor should be mounted upon its tower. However, what shape the conductor's heavenward end should be became a matter of public dispute. King George III preferred a blunt one, whereas Benjamin Franklin felt that a sharp one would be more apposite.

Location: St Bride's Passage, EC4Y 8AU (purple, orange)

See Also: CITY OF LONDON CHURCH OF ENGLAND CHURCHES St Bride's Church; ELECTRICITY James Graham's Celestial Bed; FIRESTORMS FROM THUNDERSTORMS

Website: www.stbrides.com

Cat On High

During a lightning storm, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley attached a cat to a kite that he then flew in order to see what would happen if it was struck by a bolt.

Location: 15 Poland Street, W1F 8PR (red, turquoise)

See Also: CATS; HORROR FICTION Frankenstein, A Moving Example

Varieties

There are different types of lightning.

Website: www.mets.org/metmatters/types-lightning

The Meteorological Office

Fitzroy

The impact that weather could have upon shipping was a matter of international concern. The issue was discussed at a conference of the shipping nations that was held in Brussels in 1853. The following year the Meteorological Office was established as part of the Board of Trade. The body's first head was Captain Robert Fitzroy. He had commanded H.M.S. Beagle during her 1831-6 global circumnavigation.

Initially, the Office's resources were minimal. The body was discouraged from making forecasts. However, on the night of 25 October 1859 the S.S. Royal Charter, a vessel that was travelling from Fremantle, Western Australia, to Liverpool, sank off Anglesey. 459 passengers and crew died. Charles Dickens visited the site. He described his experience in The Uncommercial Traveller (1861). An inquiry was conducted into the matter. The British Association recommended to the Board that the Office should use telegraphy to communicate warnings about possible storms in coastal waters. In early 1861 the department issued its initial gale warning. The Times published the first known newspaper weather forecast later that year.

The Board chose to take the view that the Office's issuing of weather warnings was an action that was beyond its remit. This restriction of the latter's activities appears to have been a factor in Fitzroy's subsequent mental ill-health. In 1865, while suffering from severe depression, he committed suicide. Subsequently, weather forecasting was to become one of the Office s principal activities.

In 2004 the Finisterre shipping forecast area was renamed Fitzroy in honour of the sailor.

Location: 38 Onslow Square, SW7 3NS. Fitzroy s home. (red, grey)

116 Victoria Street, SW1E 5JL

Website: www.metoffice.gov.uk

Michael Fish ... and Ian McCaskill

While the infamous B.B.C. 1987 weather forecast was delivered by Michael Fish, it had been compiled by his colleague Ian McCaskill (1938-2016), who confessed to the error.

Sir John Mason

In the 18^thC Franklin asked the question as to how it is that thunderclouds can generate electrical charges. In 1957 (Sir) (Basil) John Mason's (1923-2015) book The Physics of Clouds (1957) was published. This argued that the charge was derived from precipitation within a cloud, such as hail pellets or ice crystals, colliding with one another millions of times per second. The Mason Equation is a mathematical expression of the formation, deriving from either condensation or evaporation, of water droplets in clouds. Four years later Imperial College appointed Mason to be the U.K.'s first ever professor of cloud physics. In 1965 he was appointed to head the Met. He took his research group with him. In the early 1970s they argued that electrical charges create vertical electrical fields. Under certain conditions, these become so strong that break through air insulation and cause lightning storms.

Advances in computational and satellite technology had made it possible for President John F. Kennedy to announce in 1961 a Global Atmospheric Research Programme. This sought to improve the quality of long-term weather forecasting. Up until then the Met's forecasts had been short-term and done by hand. Under Mason's leadership the body undertook a major modernisation programme. He found that its training facilities were some wartime huts in Stanmore; he persuaded the Ministry of Defence to construct a purpose-built complex in Reading. Over the next two decades its approach became numerically oriented and its activities global. During the establishment of the North Sea oil industry there was a team that worked 24-hours a day to furnish data to both the helicopter operating and oil engineering industries. In 1983 the International Civil Aviation Organisation chose the Met's Bracknell office to be one of the two world area forecasting centres.

Rainfall

See Also: UMBRELLAS

Global Weather

In 1814 and 1815 volcanic eruptions occurred. These effected the world's weather. This led to the summer rain that prompted the writing of both Frankenstein (1816) and John Poldari's The Vampyre (1819).

See Also: HORROR FICTION Frankenstein; VAMPIRES Nineteenth-Century Vampires

The Sands of The Sahara

An orangish pink dust sometimes fall upon London. It is sand from the Sahara.

George James Symons

George James Symons (1838-1900)

Location: 62 Murray Street, NW1 9XD

Snow

British Rail

In 1991 British Rail complained that it was unable to provide some services because the wrong kind of snow had fallen. The train operator had been expecting the slushy snow rather than the powdery variety which had fallen. As a result, the engines filters became clogged.

There went on to be a number of variations on `the wrong kind of theme - including leaves, llamas, and thaws.

The Met Building Rooftop

It used to be customary that the definition of snow at Christmas was if during the 24 hours of Christmas Day snow was recorded as falling upon the rooftop of the Meteorological Office's London Weather Centre building in High Holborn. It was something upon which people used to bet.

Location: 283-287 High Holborn, WC1V 6JF (purple, red)

Storms

1703

The Great Gale of November 1703 bagged the Bishop of Bath & Wells and his wife by blowing over a chimney top.

1987

See Also: TREES The Great Storm

Tornadoes

Occasionally, a tornado strikes London, e.g. Kensal Rise in 2006 (this could have been an instance architectural criticism).

Weather Forecasting

1848 weather forecasting; James Glaisher at Greenwich Observatory.

Weather Maps

The statistician and eugenicist Francis Galton was the first person to plot a weather map.

Weather Report

In 1861 The Times published the first newspaper weather report.

Weathervanes

The Protestant Wind

In 1685 King Charles I's younger son James Duke of York succeeded to the throne as James II. The new sovereign's elder daughter Princess Mary (later Queen Mary II) became the heir-apparent to the throne, she being his first-born daughter by his first wife Anne (1637-1671). The political situation in Britain was tense because of the new monarch's wish to extend religious toleration so as to benefit his fellow Roman Catholics. Many Anglicans looked upon his actions with concern, as they thought these heralded the dawn of an era in which the monarchy would try to force the people of England to convert to Roman Catholicism, as had been the case during the reign of Queen Mary I.

James s second wife, Mary of Modena, became pregnant. This meant that Princess Mary might cease to be her father s heir-apparent. This gave her husband Prince William of Orange (later King William III) an incentive to actively involve himself in English politics. James is reputed to have had the weathercock placed upon the northern end of the Banqueting House so that he could know when the wind was favourable for his son-in-law to set sail from The Netherlands.

In June 1688 Mary of Modena gave birth to a son. Five months later William invaded England - sailing with the 'Protestant Wind'. James put up a brief military resistance and then fled from the realm. The events that followed led to the Bill of Rights, the annual passage of the Mutiny Act, the Triennial Act of 1694, and the birth of modern Parliamentary democracy.

Location: The Banqueting House, Whitehall, SW1A 2ER (purple, turquoise)

See Also: THE GUNPOWDER PLOT The Celebration of November 5th; HALLS The Banqueting House; PALACES, DISAPPEARED & FORMER Whitehall Palace; STATUES The National Gallery Statues; TOWNHOUSES Schomberg House

The Royal Exchange

The Royal Exchange has a grasshopper weathervane.

Location: The Royal Exchange, EC3V 3LR (purple, blue)

See Also: SIR THOMAS GRESHAM The Royal Exchange

St Ethelburga s

St Ethelburga's is reputed to have the oldest weathervane (1671) in the City of London.

Location: 78 Bishopsgate, EC2N 4AG (red, purple)

Website: www.stethelburgas.org

Weathercock

In the 9^thC Pope Nicholas I (c.800-867) decreed that the symbol of a rooster should be displayed on top of every church. This led to the development of cockerel weather vane.

See Also: BELLS Bow Bells, Windblown Cockneys; BELLS The Whitechapel Bell Foundry; GUNS The Gunmakers Company; HEADGEAR James Lock & Company, The Coke; NAUTICAL; PALACES Kensington Palace

The Whitechapel Art Gallery

Rodney Graham copper weathvane on Whitechapel Art Gallery roof. It features the artist dressed as Erasmus, riding a horse backwards reading a copy of Moriae Encomium (In Praise of Folly). Erasmus is supposed to have written one of his works while travelling on a horse through Italy.

In 2009 The Whitechapel Gallery's extension opened.¹ This featured a weathervane of Erasmus sitting backwards on a horse.

Location: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX (purple, turquoise)

Website: www.whitechapelgallery.org

¹. The former Whitechapel Library.

Wind

The Jet Stream

The jet stream is a fast wind that travels in the middle atmosphere. Following the Krakatoa eruption, the Royal Society set up a committee to collate accounts of the explosion and observations of attendant phenomena. These were solicited from around the world. As the 800 reports came in (Francis) Rollo Russell (1849-1914), the body s meteorologist, appreciated that the aftermath had spanned in the globe at the tropics in the space of about nine days. From this he inferred the existence of the jet stream, something that the committee had not been looking for.

Location: 43 Holland Street, W8 4LX (orange, purple)

David Backhouse 2024