Have you ever heard of the big freeze of early 1895? I thought not and no, neither had I until I sat down with a book about past weather extremes.
December 1894 was unusually mild. So much so in fact, that it was precisely the sort of balmy winter that would lead to protesters hurling cans of soup at paintings and shrieking headlines. Even chrysanthemums were flowering in Herefordshire at Christmas.
However, it all changed in January 1895 when the cold started. A vast mass of freezing air had locked itself down over Britain, preventing the mild low-pressure cyclones from pushing up across the Atlantic. Within a few days widespread snow up to 10 inches (25 cm) deep but a fleeting thaw made it seem as if the worst was over.
It wasn’t. On January 23rd 1895 the cold was back and with a vengeance. It began with major thunderstorms followed by a howling gale from the northwest that tore off roofs and ripped up trees while dumping a fresh round of snow. By January 25th a train leaving Wick was buried under 25 ft (7.6 m) of snow.
The snow spread further south, to be followed by plunging temperatures. At Braemar by February 11th it was down to —17°F (—27°C). The same day Buxton in Derbyshire clocked —11°F (—24°C). London was almost mild by comparison. At Beddington near Croydon on February 7th an almost pleasant —2°F (—19°C) was recorded.
The massive freeze ended river navigation. Ships were stuck fast, and cargoes could be neither loaded nor unloaded. The Manchester Ship Canal was solid ice and resisted all attempts to break it up.
The result was also mass unemployment, a catastrophe at a time when there were no benefits and workers could be laid off at the drop of a hat. Farm labourers were laid off because the land was like concrete. Fishermen obviously couldn’t work and had no income, to say nothing of the fish that no-one could now eat (and at a time when the British fishing industry was enormous).
Glasgow became a city of soup kitchens and starving families with tens of thousands of unemployed men. In order to keep the gas works operating on the Old Kent Road a special team had to be organised to be on duty round the clock smashing the ice on the river so that coal could be brought in. That eventually created an ice wall 10 ft (3 m) high and two miles (3.2 km) long.
The frost penetrated two foot (61 cm) underground shattering water mains in the south and even deeper in the north.
By February 14th the Serpentine in London had 9.5 in (24 cm) of ice and a 600-strong battalion of Grenadier Guards performed manoeuvres on it.
It was, in short, a late Victorian Beast from the East. It lasted most of the month and began only gradually to abate in the latter part of February, but Glasgow’s harbour remained blocked by ice until well into March, with another cold snap temporarily halting the thaw.
According to the BMJ for April that year deaths from respiratory diseases in February nearly tripled:
The effect of the cold on the public health was noticeable, especially in the increased mortality among children and old people. The increase in the number of deaths from diseases of the respiratory organs was first notable in the return for the week ending February 2nd, and a month later the weekly number of deaths from these causes was 1,448, or 945 above the average.
That’s more than three times as many deaths than normal from respiratory conditions. There’s no mention of the others who just froze to death.
The meteorological conditions that prevailed in 1895 were far from unique. They were a function of Britain’s location. They had occurred before and have happened since, for example in 2018, even if 1895 was exceptionally bad.
The interesting question though is how will 21st century Britain cope if 1895 happens again, especially in the utopian landscape of Net Zero? We live in an astronomically more complicated world. And it will happen again. The only real question is when?
It’s not hard to imagine the devastating consequences on the supply food chain as every electric delivery vehicle grinds to a halt, its battery rendered lifeless by the temperatures, to say nothing of the deadened solar farms. Indeed, the wholesale economic devastation that could be caused by compromising the electrical supply is too awful to contemplate. Back in 1895 that simply didn’t matter.
We also have today a vastly greater elderly population, many of whom are totally dependent on medication and support to keep them alive during their 80s and 90s. With so few homes now unable to accommodate open fires, the reliance on electric heating to keep them warm will be exposed as catastrophically vulnerable. As it is, many of the elderly who live on their own already cannot afford to heat their homes even through the recent years of mild winters.
And what would happen to the hospitals? As the sick and elderly piled up outside the doors of A&E the creaking NHS edifice would collapse. The death rates of 1895 would look like a mouse breaking wind in a hurricane by comparison.
The main point is it’s not so much that the weather has changed (regardless of what anyone thinks about that or by how they measure it, or what the causes are) because it’s always changed, but that our world has altered beyond imagination since 1895. In some respects, we seem more in control than ever before of our environment, but the truth is that we are actually more vulnerable than we have ever been: every aspect of our existence now hangs by an electronic thread.
Worse, we seem dead set on making ourselves as vulnerable as possible. Moreover, our expectations of the state have exploded. Back in 1895, people were rather more self-sufficient, because they had to be.
Perhaps the next Government, whomever it’s formed by, will have ‘top people working on it’. Perhaps the chancers who run our lives will strike lucky and it will all pan out as we march joyously into the promised land where the sun always shines on solar farms and the battery is always charged. But I wouldn’t bank on that. It only has to happen once, and the whole house of cards will be flattened. Just like the batteries.
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I’ll make one prediction you can take to the bank if we have another winter like that.
The climate change mafia will tell you that it’s an extreme weather event caused by man-made climate change like they warned us,
They saw the flaw in their system when they were still calling it global warming. But now they have all weather and climate events covered with “climate change”.
It’s going to be something like Man-made climate change has made it much more likely that such an event may happen again, as they never really say anything, only hint at what they believe might occur.
They won’t be able to – there will be no electricity for them to broadcast with.
Things are worse in this country than one can imagine. I asked the department for energy to conduct a grid stress test via my MP whereby temperatures fell to -7 degrees and wind didn’t blow for a month in January, ie classic anti cyclone. The department first sent a patronising go away pleb response then when I insisted they just point blank refused to do it because they already knew the answer, many would die needlessly. When you have a bureaucracy wilfully destroying a nation there’s not a lot one can do.
My solution would be to eliminate the bureaucracy. But it’s just so hard to find people to support the idea and then even harder to execute the plan. The bureaucracy aggressively attacks anyone who stands up to it.
The system bribes so many very effectively.
Solution to head lice: Decapitation.
Solution to mould: Burn the house down.
Etc.
We need to get rid of these people and not of the institutions they’re abusing because – guess what – they’ll find something different but similar enough to abuse instead. Like banks or multinational technology firms … oh wait, they’re doing that already …
Ah yes. The myth of the “right person”. The honest, competent politician or bureaucrat who will do what is best for others and not what is best for him.
Meanwhile, as the search continues the bureaucracy grows ever more totalitarian, elections come and go and for some odd reason we never seem to get the right people. Just the bad ones.
OR, maybe, just maybe, people are people. Essentially selfish and self interested and can only be relied on to do “the right thing” consistently over time when proper incentives are put in place.
The incentives in our bureaucracy and our political system are all corrupted and yes I would burn it all to the ground.
The period of human history is way longer than the period of American history which is way longer then the neoliberalism period which only started in the late 1970s/ early 1980s. It encompasses, for instance, people like Frederick II (the great) who coined the phrase that the king would be the first servant of the state and dedicated his time to tirelessly working for what he believed to be the greater good of his country.
The idea that people are naturally mad egotists is part of the ideology of liberalism and was very much decried as such in Germany after an Anglo-French-American alliance had violently blessed us with it in 1919. Ie, you’re basically complaining about the fact that your favoured political system is as broken as it was designed to be: Elections come and go. And all we ever get by selecting this or that political party is more party politicians. As in “keep doing the same thing, keep getting the same result” or “play stupid games, win stupid prices” (I like this phrase).
Humans are social animals and they naturally care for the fate of their offspring, their family, their tribe and generally their people (Volk). That’s why the technically best equipped and most modern army of the world in 1917, with limitless supplies of ammunition, food and whatever other equipment soldiers in the field need and with a numerical superiority of more than 2:1 over their enemies needed until November to capture the remains of the Belgian village its general had meant to capture in July as first step of the offensive against the German submarine bases on the Belgian cost.
I draw your attention, btw, to the new bureaucratic organ that the WHO has agreed to create, the one that will be charged with seeking out dangerous mutations of pathogens.
I can 100% guarantee that you employ a bunch of people to look for dangerous pathogens and they will find you dangerous pathogens. As sure as the sun rises in the east.
It doesn’t matter whether those are good people or bad people or average people. They are going to find you dangerous pathogens because that is what their jobs are, what their livelihoods depend on and because once you create a bureaucratic organism to do that it will do whatever it takes to guarantee its continued existence. Even if that means finding pathogens that nobody should care about and then creating global panics around them.
And the leaders we apparently elect simply preside over and “manage” those cemented in place bureaucracies. Trump (appallingly too late) tried to fix with EO that would have been a start. Immediately revoked by the electoral coup and Barack Obama..
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-creating-schedule-f-excepted-service/
I agree with stewart – it will be put down to anthropogenic influence, in particular white Western anthropogenic influence of course (probably heteronormative and systemically racist white Western anthropogenic influence at that), and our evil ways.
They bang on about the oceans boiling and a couple of degrees of warming but I’ve always thought that cooling or a return to the conditions described above would be far more alarming.
I have had to put the damned heating on this morning. They can Foxtrot Oscar with climate change and climate crisis.
Mind your carbon footprint there Hux. —-Go and get two jumpers and a scarf. But if we get anymore winters like 1895 then the Smart Meter will switch that heating of for you.
We haven’t got a smart meter.
Neither do I, and at the moment they are voluntary. But we should realise that as with every other part of the Green Agenda, we will eventually be coerced into it and it will become compulsory. Because Net Zero is to be enforced in law. So the law will decide we all must have one.
If you consider what is going on with so many things – the WHO IHRs the latest example – it does not matter what elected politicians do – we are getting all of this regardless and regardless of the law.
Who the hell has that kind of clout to shut up the legacy media over so many issues: the IHR, Covid, killing the elderly during lockdowns with Midazolam etc, the excess deaths, the dangerous Covid vaccines which don’t work. the fake climate crisis, net zero ….
Please add to the list.
And if Labour win the election with a massive majority we are truly screwed.
Wes Streeting scares the crap out of me – all dogma and no common sense – who thinks being NUS chairman and working for Stonewall were real jobs which make him not the usual politicians whereas he is steeped in dogma up to his neck and beyond.
It all emanates from the One World Government people. The UN and WEF. We are now governed by unaccountable bureaucrats controlling the worlds wealth and how we all live our lives, and the disturbing thing is our own political class are fully onboard with this global socialism.
those black and white checkered ones seem very popular at the mo.
I haven’t stopped using mine ever since the record-breakingly hot summer of last year and I don’t really expect I will. Maybe for a week or two in August which will then just be long enough for a single “Everything’s gonna turn into a DESERT!!!” howl.
Should such thing come to pass it will, of course, be necessary to institute more taxes and create a new quango. A new Minister will be appointed at Whitehall (with immediate copycats in Edinburgh and Cardiff) to oversee a co-ordinated SNAFU and an emergency committee appointed with fairly broad terms of reference and a wide ranging remit to ensure that absolutely nothing happens.
The science will be followed. Religiously.
And heretics burnt to provide warmth for the Nomenclatura class.
Nailed it 👍
The weather for the past couple of decades in the UK has generally been quite benign. It’s certainly going to chuck something extreme at us eventually, and, of course, it will all be our fault!
“What if the Winter of 1895 Strikes Again?”
More a case of ‘when’ not ‘if’
We’ve become accustomed to mild winters over the last 40 odd years but, that doesn’t mean it’s here to stay, these wave patterns in the weather have happened since forever and its likely it will turn back to the colder snowier winters of the 1960s and 70s in the not to distant future (Good luck with your heat pump and your ev!)
Hence the need to introduce Agenda 21/30 and restrict people’s freedoms, before the penny drops. Though the penny might not drop for a while, because Labour is top in the polls.
The man holding the ball now is Nigel Farage. He could definitely sway things.
As a farming family with grandparents born from the 1880s to 1900 yes I had.
I am also interested in local history (as a novice) so yes.
And previous and subsequent.
My father born in 1918 remembered combining in November one year. I can’t remember which.
Climate in Britain is so variable government can tell us anything they like about it and it will sound believable. But ofcourse science isn’t about how things sound or whether they are believable. That is what politics is all about, and that is exactly what the weaponisation of the weather is all about —POLITICS. Climate in this country changes on all time scales. Year to year, Decade to Decade and so on. I remember back in 1995 that from April all the way to September we had blue skies every single day with hardly a cloud. I was starting to take it for granted that much that by the middle of June I was automatically putting on shorts in the morning. Then one day in the middle of September I was quite astonished to see this black mass of clouds coming over the horizon from the west. That was the end of our “unprecedented summer”, and you can imagine ofcourse that if we get another one of those that the Global warming alarm industry will have a field day. Greta will be foaming at the mouth. No one will be able to get near an airport for superglue activists and stores will have run out of tomato soup. —–PS If anyone wants to check for themselves what 1995 was like the please go ahead.
I remember this summer as well. I was in Cornwall at that time and tankers were supplying some of the (Bodmin) moor farms with drinking water. I’ve been on and off wondering what the professional climate hysterics would be doing should this happen again.
Correction: The summer I remembered, with at least 19 weeks of no rain anywhere in the south, must have been 1989 or 1990. I remember being pissed off by weird British laws prohibiting me from drinking beer as I wasn’t eighteen yet despite I had been allowed to do this in Germany since I had turned sixteen.
Yes but Google it. You will find there was “unprecedented high pressure all over the Northern Hemisphere” for months in 1995. ———-Climate is naturally variable, and even the IPCC say they cannot tell the difference between natural changes to climate and climate changes allegedly caused by humans.
All I remember was it was hot, had my 18th birthday in Centre Parks somewhere in East Midlands. Glorious weather.
Is nobody proof reading?
“Grenadier Gardens.” Where’s that then? It is the worst but please…
🙂 “Some speak of Alexander and some of Hercules … the British Grenadier Gardens”
“By February 14th the Serpentine in London had 9.5 in (24 cm) of ice and a 600-strong battalion of Grenadier Gardens performed manoeuvres on it.”
Moderator here: Well spotted, those damned gardeners get everywhere nowadays, with their ‘green’ fingers…
Thank you H.
Grenadier gardeners, maybe? With everything frozen, they presumably had little else to do.
Moderator here: Well spotted, and hair shirt put on……….
There would be no electricity to power the devices which spread the propaganda.
All you could hope is to stay huddled together in one room sharing out your few tins of Spam and obtaining water from the snow outside.
Don’t eat the yellow snow.
😂
Maybe just the wireless, even the Nazis in their death throes were spreading propaganda like…’Hitler died fighting’ etc.
We face a major catastrophe in the future and it is starkly obvious as the Covid lies and fallout of the illegal incarcerations were. It is yet another reason, if you needed one, to vote Reform: the only party who see through the Climate lies.
It’s a simple process to work out what will happen. Both Labour and Tory talk about “Energy Security” but what they are actually doing is outsourcing to France our “Security”. Let’s say Europe gets a serious winter, which is not an if, it’s a when, what will the French do? Pull the plug because they are always going to supply France first and us last.
Off go the lights. All deliveries stop. All businesses stop. All TV, wi-fi, heating, lighting stop. In cold weather there will be no home-grown electricity, there will be no wind and precious little sunlight.
The result is catastrophic numbers of dead people who cannot even be moved to a non-functioning morgue.
People say “Use your vote wisely”, there has never been a time when this advice was more apt. This election is, literally, a choice of life and death.
“The result is catastrophic numbers of dead”
Which is precisely the intention.
And the people like Nick Cleg will se safely out of the UK. It was people like him that signed the death nail for Coal Power stations.
Nothing like 1885, but I remember the winter of 1963, snow started on Boxing Day 1962 ice and fog lasted until end March. For several years I am Dreaming of a White Christmas was not played.Was released from playing rugby all that term.Last of the old famous London pea souper fogs.
I remember it well. My school was a 14 mile round trip, but my mother was always determined to get me there, and I can’t recall missing any schooling. The school never closed either. These days they close for an inch of slush. Continual snow would have the schools (and many other things) closed for months.
When people lose all forms of media because of lack of power, perhaps they might wake up and start thinking for themselves.
My dad bought me a sledge and I remember not sliding down the hill on it as such, but I used to drag it about loaded with boxes pretending I was Scott of the Antarctic. That was in 1963. ——Climate changes on all time scales, no two years are the same
Not sure if it matters if TPTB brings us Genocide by Nuclear Armageddon by then. They are or will be in shielded bunkers away from main targets.
That’s going to be their own downfalls as they won’t be able to maintain their accustomed standard of living without lots of population working for them.
What a beautiful painting of Victorians ice-skating, ever so gracefully, even though none of them wore Lycra sports clothing! It’s astonishing that even the women managed to ice skate in full-length skirts without tripping up, even in such crowds. I wonder what the name of the painting is, and who painted it??? And with just the faintest touch of winter fog as well. Superb.
Hi, It is by Lucien Davis, and is titled, Skating on the Serpentine, painted in 1895. A link to his other works: Victorian British Painting: Lucien Davis, ctd (19thcenturybritpaint.blogspot.com)
Oh thank you, SteveT, for that information and the link— it’s a regular treasure-trove! And in one painting there, called “The Washington Post” (1898), the artist managed to show that, even when surrounded by all those women in gorgeous attire, the men were just as graceful in their own way.
It is one of the basic axioms of meteorological science that extreme weather event are caused by the temperature difference between the equator and the poles, known as the latitudinal temperature gradient. Since the poles warm faster than the equator, a warming climate will produce fewer less intense weather events.