Jonathan Sale on the rise of the weather forecasters


WEATHERING A STORM


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921 was a good year for weather. Not only was there as usual a lot of it about, but also there were at least two radio stations, attached to universities, that began


alerting listeners to what the heavens had in store. Both had begun a few years earlier with weather forecasts only in Morse code, but realised that ‘a heavy fall of dot dash dot will be followed by periods of dash dot dash’ was not exactly reader-friendly. Now, the wireless warnings came via human voices. One of those stations, The AM band service WEW in St Louis, has survived The university was linked to the heavens in another way, as its president was the Reverend William Robison, who read out the first 500-word weather bulletin. Later, Rueppel broadened the station’s appeal with programmes ranging from The Foundation of Catholic Faith to the less spiritual How Sugar is Made. Now privately owned, WEW still has a heavenly angle; it provides Christian radio to the local Bosnians, which you could call a niche market. More than two centuries earlier, a weekly


newspaper with the un-snappy title of A Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry & Trade had already demonstrated the British obsession with the elements. “Twould be of great use to have a true history of the weather from which it is likeliest to draw prognostications,” wrote apothecary John Houghton in the issue of May 14, 1692. ’Twould indeed be very handy and the paper produced a chart for the next seven days. This listed only air pressure and wind readings but was absolutely accurate. How, you may ask, was this possible in an age without weather satellites or the legendary presenter Michael Fish? Easy. The crucial term here is ‘history’. The May week in question was in 1691. Houghton gave the figures


16 | theJournalist


for the relevant seven days in the previous year which enabled readers to produce their own DIY forecast. Or not. Today, ‘nowcasting’ is the term used for forecasts for a period as short as two hours ahead; what Houghton provided could be termed ‘then casting’. Still, he did bring an element of reality to ‘prognostications’, which was not the case with some of the competitive publications whose resources included astrology, guesswork and pure fluke. Others did their divinations courtesy of the behaviour of animals, for example a frog in a jar: possibly it croaked once for a storm, twice for sunny spells. (I’m guessing but so was the frog.)


Daily ‘state of the weather’ reports were first published in 1848 in the Daily News, the paper started by Charles Dickens from which he walked out after a few short weeks as editor. Like Houghton’s Collection, the paper’s bulletins consisted of historical weather summaries but at least they weren’t a year but just a day old; thanks to the telegraph, meteorological observations were whisked over the wires to London and printed in the next day’s paper. Readers of Tuesday’s edition could then be informed about what the weather had been like on the Monday. Alternatively, they could have looked out of the window at the time. For mid 19th century mariners, unexpected storms were often a death sentence and many of the 7,201 lives lost at sea in British waters during


Come rain or shine: Lloyd’s long stint


BRITAIN’S first TV weathermen – and they were always men – were never seen but merely heard reading the forecasts. When finally in


vision, they were not necessarily chosen for their looks or dress sense. Today, their suits and dresses are taken as part of the whole presentation. Siân Lloyd, our


longest-serving female weather forecaster,


trained as a meteorologist and was a fan of fashion. “There’s nothing worse than seeing people wrongly dressed for the weather: shivering in Ascot in a little dress,” she says. Before it was


published as A Funny Kind of Love, her autobiography had the


working title of Sunshine and Showers. There is no doubt that


the woman who twice won the award for best TV weather presenter enjoyed many sunny periods. Not least in her education in which she achieved 11 O-levels, four A-levels, Eistedfodd crown at 16 and first class degree at Swansea University,


followed by postgraduate studies at Oxford and a spell


at the Met Office College. As for the showery


conditions, Lloyd wrote about her stormy relationship with Lembit Öpik, the Liberal Democrat MP who was her fiance until he ran off with 50 per cent of Romanian pop duo The Cheeky Girls. He later lost his seat and also the Cheeky Girl. Lloyd presented the ITV Weather for 24 years, from 1990 until 2014. As well as being


fluent in weather, she also speaks Welsh fluently, having studied it at school and at university.


ALLSTAR PICTURE LIBRARY LTD / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO


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