LIAM WHITE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO SSPL/SCIENCE MUSEUM


a five-year period might well have been saved by a timely warning. This was the theory of Admiral Robert FitzRoy (pictured above), who had already done his bit for science by captaining HMS Beagle on Charles Darwin’s highly significant voyage round the globe.


He founded what became known as the Met Office, which began by providing wind charts so that ships could reduce sailing times by making the most efficient use of this free power source. Prompted by one particularly ferocious storm


that caused hundreds of deaths, FitzRoy devised a much-needed warning system. Thanks again to the telegraph system, FitzRoy could receive instant information from distant observers, calculate what the weather was playing at and send alerts to ports all over the country. (Though without, obviously, the accompaniment of today’s Sailing By melody on Radio 4’s Shipping Forecast.) “The term ‘forecasts’ is strictly applicable,” he stressed and, indeed, it sounded less loopy than ‘prognostication’, let alone ‘prophecies’ or ‘predictions’. He offered them to the general public as well as to mariners – two whole days ahead. The Times published the first of these forecasts on August 1, 1861, which got the project


off to a promising start: 62° Fahrenheit in London, a cloudy 61°F in Liverpool and a sizzling 70°F in Dover, the same as in Lisbon. The admirable admiral was so successful that a racehorse was named after him and so unsuccessful that he was mocked by readers when he got it wrong and they got soaked. Exhausted and overworked, he suffered the return of a depressive condition and killed himself in 1865. Appositely enough, he lives on in the Shipping Forecast. In 2002, the region then known as Finisterre was renamed FitzRoy in his honour.


The first BBC radio forecast was broadcast in


November 1922 and, like that of The Times six decades earlier, was aimed at shipping. By the end of March 1923, the Beeb decided that listeners on land would enjoy a daily forecast. In 1936, the corporation led the world with the first televised weather maps; these filled the tiny screens of antediluvian televisions while an unseen announcer described the weather on theway. It took a further two decades for the presenter to be in vision, the first being George Cowling, a physics teacher lookalike who appeared, to judge by the shrunken appearance of his jacket sleeves, to have been caught in an unexpected


thunderstorm. The artwork was drawn by hand at the London Weather Centre and couriered over to the studio, where the presenter added final touches with a state-of-the-art wax crayon. ‘Relatively low accuracy’ was the verdict on the


early forecasts and dissatisfied viewers were complaining about relatively low accuracy for the next half century. A Which? survey during the mid-1980s complained that the forecasts were only 50 per cent correct; one might as well have tossed a coin. As Bob Dylan had put it: “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”


Hours before the 1987 Great Storm, when vast


trees were uprooted and slates crashed from roofs, Michael Fish cheerily dismissed fears of stormy weather. His defence later was that he was referring to a hurricane off the coast of Florida. This was true but he had conspicuously failed to do justice to the killer winds that followed.


Since then, forecasts have smartened


themselves up, not just in accuracy but also in fashion. I wouldn’t presume to judge the dresses of the weatherwomen but the weathermen’s suits no longer look as if left out in a deluge. Not even in a light-to-variable shower.


theJournalist | 17


Looking back to:


1921


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