THE TELEGRAPH: This winter seems bad but the freeze of 1947, the worst in living memory, tested the resolve of war-weary Britons to the limit,
On the morning of Thursday, January 23, 1947, the front page of The Daily Telegraph made deeply depressing reading. "Bread Ration May Be Cut" read the main headline. "Less Bacon and Home Meat. Beer Supplies to be Halved Immediately". After years of shortages and austerity, this was the last thing Britain's weary people wanted to hear. But it was another small headline, hidden further down the page, that was to prove more significant. "Snow Falls in London" it said, and in those four short words, many readers had their first glimpse of Britain's worst winter of the 20th century.
The cruellest cold snap in modern history could not have come at a worse time. In January 1947 Britain was exhausted after the long, valiant but ruinously expensive struggle to defeat the Nazis. The shelves were bare, the Treasury coffers were empty and the coal stocks were perilously low. On New Year's Day the mines had come into public ownership, joining the railways, road haulage and utilities in the Labour government's nationalised empire. But with the country already beset by shortages and strikes, the economy was dangerously close to collapse. And when the snow came down, life in Clement Attlee's New Jerusalem ground to a halt.
In just a few days, so much snow fell on Britain that this week's freak weather looks like a mere dusting. By the end of January, hundreds of remote Northern farms and villages were cut off by 20-foot snowdrifts, while a bitter 12-hour blizzard off the south coast brought shipping to a complete standstill. In Essex, the drifts were 14 feet deep; in Surrey and Middlesex, millions of commuters stayed at home. The railway network collapsed completely, and by January 29 the temperature in London – minus 9C – was the lowest for half a century, made worse by protracted power cuts. "Freeze up continues," one Brixton woman wrote in her diary. "Thermometer has been at freezing point all day. Waste pipe in the bathroom and the geyser frozen … Even colder the forecast for tonight, so I've borrowed a balaclava helmet from Fred to wear in bed!" >>> Dominic Sandbrook | Saturday, January 09, 2010
