Do You Recall The Big Freeze Of 1962 ?

[Bazile]

It certainly is a good deal better nowadays ( although i appreciate that it depends where in the uk you are ) .

I certainly remember awful winters as late as during the last two decades ; when for example snow turning to ice , laid on the ground for weeks .

Would you agree that the winters nowadays aren't nearly as bad as they used to be ?

[emmie]

canary, good old days of British Rail, cor mince pies in front of your eyes.
Constantly late trains, doors and windows that didn't close properly, total under investment in stock, freezing cold rail carriages, and packed just as much as they are today. I remember it well.

[daffy654]

I wasn't born until 6 years after :)

[vulcan]

Don't forget the cardboard jno, pure luxury, we had to cover the holes with our socks and if the hole in the sock coincided with the hole in the shoe, pure agony!

[tonyav]

Yes I can remember it great fun as a 6 / 7 year old, it seemed to last forever.
One thing that sticks in my mind was on one side of our street the snow only seemed a few inches deep yet on the other side the snow looked like it had drifted half way up the houses !.

[Mosaic]

have I wandered into the four Yorkshiremen sketch?
Scuse-a-me for ever wearing hand-me-down winter boots.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&hl=en-GB&v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

[lady-janine]

yes i remember. that was the time i moved from kent to remote cottage on welsh hillside. we moved just after christmas with young child (9 months old). not easily forgotten. snow drifts were as high a the hedges. telephone not connected, electricity not connected. very chilly to say the least. but we all survived.

[jno]

we didn't have any shoes by January, Vulcan, we'd eaten them for Christmas. As a special treat mother served them with stuffing, made of old newspaper and coal dust.

[jno]

none of your fancy expensive southern remakes, Mosaic, only the gritty original will do

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAtSw3daGoo

[New Judge]

The question of whether 1947 or 1963 was the "worst" is debatable, aog. 1947 certainly had some features which were worse than 1963 (in terms of snowfall and lack of sunshine in particular) but 1963 was without doubt the coldest. It was, in fact, the coldest for 200 years.

This article from the Met Office makes interesting reading:

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/teens/case-studies/severe-winters

[keyplus90]

/////Do You Recall The Big Freeze Of 1962 ?////

Yes I do, it was only 5 years before I was born.

[boxtops]

I do indeed - my little brother was six. Dad had to dig a big channel from our front door to the gate, the snow was so deep that all I could see was the bobble on my brother's woolly hat.

That was the year our neighbours took me tobogganing, and I broke my leg :-(

[masma]

I remember it very well. Dad died 20th Dec. '62, the snow came down on Boxing day and it took 3 weeks before we could have a funeral for him. Even then the hearse couldn't get to the house and all the mourners had to walk down the road. We lived in High Wycombe and the nearest crematorium was Oxford, it took forever to get there and back along the old A40.

[Mosaic]

Steve % - 'kex'....you bear the mark of a Manc, young sire....

[jake-the-peg]

In any set of random figures you get clumps, basically extremes

Marcus Du Sautoy does this great party trick of taking 2 sets of numbers, one random and one created by someone trying to write random numbers and pcking out which one is truely random and which is Human.

It works because the real random numers usually have many more features in them.




What has this got to do with the question?

Well if you look at temperatures over say 100 years it's very tempting to see trends, especially if it's tempered by your own experience - but whether they're real trends or not is very difficult to say unless you do a proper analysis.

Certainly to my mind we seem to see snow more often than when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s - but even if that's true its likely to be just a statistical blip

[ichkeria]

What we don't seem to get now are long periods of freezing weather. The last I can remember (in Britain) is the winter of 1985/6. Light snow which fell in early January was still on the ground weeks later.
On the other hand the coldest Christmas Day I can remember in England was 2 years ago.

[atalanta]

I was a student in Birmingham. The snow-heaps on the sides of the roads and pavements stayed frozen for over three months. I was living in digs, in a room built over a garage. Every night we put almost all the clothes we possessed on top of our bedclothes, and on top of those the towels we had dried our faces with when we got washed ready for bed. In the mornings those towels were full of ice.

[Mosaic]

Shriek! I'm conversing with a scouser!