Recalling extreme weather events in Rickmansworth area

We seem to have arrived at the autumn, after a remarkable period of quite unseasonal warmth and (in some parts of the country) quite severe storms. What upsets farmers (and gardeners too), of course, is the extremes: drought followed by flood is no real help, and many parts of the world have had just that – our changing climate is clearly a large part of the problem. But what has our weather been like over the last 150 years or so? And what’s the effect been? I thought we might look back and see what memories we can prompt.

Flooding in Church Street, Rickmansworth 1947. Image: Three Rivers Museum

The first thing I noticed is that photographs of really bad weather are pretty unusual. Photographers like to go out to capture a beautiful, clear cold day with the new snow lying thick on the ground: but photos of drought are rather harder to come by, and floods (around here, at least) rarely feature. And yet, there have been some really nasty weather ‘events’, some quite recently – is it that we’ve got better at dealing with them, or do we just not notice so much?

Winter 1963: power-assisted skating at the Aquadrome. Image: Three Rivers Museum

Perhaps the most famous is still the Great Freeze of 1963, when much of the country, including round here, was at a standstill in snow, hard frost, thaw and then more frost and snow from Boxing Day to March. But even that wasn’t as bad as the winter of 1947, when the country was still dealing with the aftermath of war – hard frost, deep snow, then thaw and widespread flooding, with Rickmansworth, like many places, affected quite badly. And it happened again in 1951 and in 1958, when a February blizzard isolated Chorleywood, and no doubt other places – the Observer’s picture shows what it looked like.

Blizzard-bound at Chorleywood, February 1958. Image: Watford Observer

At the other end of the scale, how about the drought of 1976? Or of 1959, which was ended by huge storms and floods? And the great wind storms – many readers will remember 1987 across the south of England, but go back another hundred years to 14 October 1881, when the Watford Observer reported trees down across Rickmansworth, Croxley Green and Chorleywood, gas lamp standards blown down so they couldn’t be lit (supplies to houses weren’t interrupted, though), and the ‘poorer classes’ of people collecting the fallen wood. ‘The heavy snowstorm of January 1881 was nothing to be compared to it, as regards damage to property, but no injuries were reported although the most miraculous escapes have occurred’.

A common enough scene: a winter's day on the M25. Image: Rickmansworth Historical Society/Geoff Saul collection

And there were long-term effects, just as now threaten. A ‘bad year’ every now and again is commonplace; but the weather of the 1870s and 1880s caused real problems for farmers and other residents, and the resulting depression was to change the nature of British agriculture. The summers were cold and wet (our own Rickmansworth farmer John White recorded almost continuous rain in March and April 1877, then severe frost in the first ten days of May followed by huge cold storms at the start of June), and that continued year after year for about twenty years, with the winters being cold and dry as well. A lot of farmers, and some landowners, went under.

So our varied weather, so often the subject of jokes and other comments, has always had a more serious side, and the effects were sometimes severe. What other weather-related memories would Watford Observer readers like to remind us of?

• Three Rivers Museum is open on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays, 2pm to 4pm, and on Saturdays from 10am to 2pm.