- 5 weeks ago
Temperatures dropped to as low as -20°C across parts of Britain, Heavy snowfall began on Boxing Day, snowdrifts reached heights of 15 to 20 feet, completely isolating rural villages and halting transport infrastructure....
The "Big Freeze" of 1963 was the coldest winter recorded in the United Kingdom since 1740. Lasting for over two months, the extreme weather paralyzed the country with record-breaking snowfall and freezing temperatures, an event famously revisited in the BBC Winterwatch archives and the classic.....
记录了当地生态系统和动物如何在零度以下的环境中艰难求生, 河流、湖泊，甚至近海的部分海域都结成了坚冰, 由于冰雪覆盖持续时间过长，英国的野生动物和鸟类面临着极度饥饿和高死亡率的威胁.
The "Big Freeze" of 1963 was the coldest winter recorded in the United Kingdom since 1740. Lasting for over two months, the extreme weather paralyzed the country with record-breaking snowfall and freezing temperatures, an event famously revisited in the BBC Winterwatch archives and the classic.....
记录了当地生态系统和动物如何在零度以下的环境中艰难求生, 河流、湖泊，甚至近海的部分海域都结成了坚冰, 由于冰雪覆盖持续时间过长，英国的野生动物和鸟类面临着极度饥饿和高死亡率的威胁.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:01Welcome to Winter Watch with a Difference.
00:05And if you think it's a bit chilly outside, then think again.
00:09We're going back 50 years to the big freeze of 1963
00:14and we're going to be asking what impact this horrid winter had on us and of course our wildlife.
00:47As a naturalist, I really love winter. There's all sorts of exciting things going on.
00:53From the simple, like the barking of foxes or the hooting of tawny owls,
00:58through to some of our greatest natural spectacles.
01:03Vast flocks of waders gathering at their high tide roost.
01:10Millions of starlings performing their fabulous aerial acrobatics.
01:16And the sound of wild geese filling the air.
01:21And of course, with all the leaves off of the trees,
01:24it's often the very best time to actually see the wildlife.
01:28As I'm finding out here at Winter Watch HQ at the Agus Field Centre in the Highlands of Scotland.
01:36But let's not forget that this is also the most challenging time of year, both for us and for the
01:42wildlife.
01:43Especially as our weather is becoming more and more topsy-turvy, more unpredictable.
01:50In some winters, like this one, the whole country is virtually underwater.
01:56But in others, Britain is covered with ice and snow, as in the winter of 2010.
02:07But that was nothing compared to 50 years ago.
02:11Now I was just 18 months old back in 1963.
02:16When we experience not just the worst winter in living memory,
02:21but the worst winter for 200 years.
02:25From Boxing Day 1962 to early March 63,
02:30the whole country lay under a thick blanket of snow and ice.
02:33And for a while, it really did seem as if it would never come to an end.
02:40It was called the winter to end all winters.
02:43But it's gone down in history simply as the big freeze.
02:51In a few moments, we're going to take a look at a documentary that was made towards the end of
02:56this terrible winter.
02:58And it really does illustrate just how hard it was.
03:01But whilst you're watching this fascinating footage,
03:04do spare a thought for the plight of our British wildlife,
03:08something that the filmmakers at the time didn't seem to fully appreciate.
03:14After you've seen the film, I'm going to explore what happened to our wildlife during the 63 winter
03:19and what might happen if we suffered a similar Arctic freeze-up today.
03:26For the next 45 minutes,
03:28snuggle up in your centrally heated living rooms
03:31as we're going to take a trip back through time
03:33to when there weren't colour or widescreen TVs.
03:37It's the big freeze of 1963.
03:44Now it's Siberia.
03:51Worse for 82 years, more to come.
03:58Britain is snowed to a standstill.
04:05Babies in peril.
04:10It's Britain's most costly winter.
04:17It's chaos.
04:23The great power scandal.
04:34For London, it was the coldest January since records were first kept in 1841.
04:39For Manchester, it was the coldest since records were first kept in 1888.
04:44For Aberdeen, it was the coldest since at least 1895.
04:48For Southampton, Bognor Regis and Worthing, it was the coldest since their records were started in 1900.
04:56When you've been through the sort of weather we've all endured these last seven weeks,
05:01there's some gratification in knowing that it's been more than just bad weather.
05:05This one has already earned its place among the five most spectacularly bad winters of the last hundred years.
05:12It will go down in history and folk memory as that terrible winter of 1963.
05:18The events of it have hit us in a series of nasty, cold, isolated chunks.
05:24But if you put them all together, they form a continuous and developing story.
05:28It is this story we're now going to tell.
05:31By the way, when we talk of temperatures, we'll be using the old Fahrenheit scale.
05:36The big freeze began on December the 22nd.
05:39On December the 24th, Christmas Eve, the BBC's one o'clock news bulletin said this.
05:44It is snowing heavily in parts of Scotland, and Glasgow will be having its first white Christmas since before the
05:50war.
05:51In southern England, there is a chance of snow, but it won't be coming before Boxing Day.
05:56The forecast was right, and for most of Britain, the 26th of December turned out to be everything a Boxing
06:02Day should be.
06:03The snow came down and lay where it fell, and the holiday was somehow complete.
06:10The new white world created in the night was something to be enjoyed for the sake of Christmas.
06:17Snow-covered buses still ran, and there was no reason to think that this was anything more than just another
06:22cold snap,
06:22like last year or the year before.
06:25If from our fire course the whole thing was just perfect, the more the better.
06:29Now this was beginning to look something like a winter.
06:41Every sledge and toboggan was out, and those who hadn't even a tea tray made do.
06:45This was a holiday, and although it may seem fantastic now, far from spoiling the fun, for most people the
06:51snow just completed it.
06:54So far, the snow was fun.
06:56Mercifully, all the thousands of parents and children who'd built snowmen on Boxing Day didn't realise that they would still
07:03be there in February.
07:05The first inkling we had that we were in for something exceptional came the weekend after Christmas.
07:10Before the first snow had even looked like melting, in fact while most of it was still lying where it
07:15had fallen,
07:16there came another, and even greater, blizzard.
07:21It was the worst blizzard for 15 years, and in southern England the worst avalanche of snow in living memory.
07:37Again, it was the south-west that bore the brunt, but it swept all the south and east of England.
07:42There were gusts of nearly 90 miles an hour, and it was bitterly cold.
07:56The wind was so cold that the sea froze on the Essex coast.
08:00In places, temperatures went down to 19 degrees.
08:03It was in this blizzard that three people died battling against the snow,
08:07and two more were suffocated in a snowbound car.
08:19With this blizzard on top of the heavy Boxing Day fall, there were now drifts of 15 and 20 feet.
08:25Motorists were advised to take no journeys whatsoever, not even essential ones.
08:29Hundreds of villages were isolated, and so were towns like Weymouth, Oakhampton, Tavistock, Ridport and Blandford.
08:36Dartmoor was like Siberia, and the prison and princetown were cut off for days.
08:43By the time this blizzard had finally blown itself out, 200 main roads were impassable,
08:49and 95,000 miles of road were snowbound.
08:52The dislocation of Boxing Day had become the chaos of New Year's Eve.
08:561962 went out with the southern half of Britain littered with abandoned cars.
09:17In the last few weeks, most of Britain's motorists have gained a lifetime of experience of driving in snow.
09:24The Boxing Day snow had caused bad enough blockages, but that had been at holiday time.
09:28Now, we were shivering to work again, and a way had to be cleared for essential supplies,
09:33lorries to docks and factories and shops, routes for buses and coaches and so on.
09:38But the residential roads, the roads where most of us live, they didn't have that sort of priority.
09:43By now, the pedestrian, like the motorist, has had plenty of experience in coping with snow and ice.
09:48We've learnt the hard way.
09:52To add insult to injury, many dustpins weren't emptied for three weeks.
09:56We discovered that our dustmen were also the road-clearing party.
10:00This was the result.
10:02We were even accused of causing a milk bottle crisis by hiding our milk bottles in the snow.
10:07Finally, after five days battling, milk roundsmen had to take the day off from exhaustion,
10:12and 15,000 London housewives went without milk.
10:16As we said, the worst area hit by the blizzard was the south-west, where almost all the roads were
10:23blocked.
10:23In fact, the A39 from Linton to Forlock here was blocked on December the 30th, and is still blocked to
10:29this day.
10:30It was a similar story of abandoned vehicles and snowbound roads in Wales and the Midlands.
10:36And, of course, the M1 did keep open throughout the road from London up to Birmingham and Coventry and the
10:42Midlands,
10:42although it was reduced to single-lane traffic on occasions.
10:46Now, except for the A681 up here, the Todd Morton to Baker Road, all roads crossing the Pennines closed at
10:55some time or another.
10:56The Snake Pass, the A57, which goes from Sheffield to Gossip, was blocked then and is still blocked now,
11:02and it will be two weeks before they make any attempt to clear it because of the great walls of
11:08snow.
11:08Scotland, of course, was badly hit up here. The A939, for example, which goes from Cockbridge to Timmontool,
11:18and the A941 from Dufton to Rhiney, the roads there are blocked and have been blocked for some 50 days
11:25so far this winter.
11:26And if, like me, you've been motoring down in the south-east of England, it's been almost as bad.
11:31During the days of the big blizzard, so few cars reached London from the outlying areas
11:35that the parking meters, usually crowded in central London, went begging.
11:39It was estimated that only one in ten were in regular use.
11:44Road clearing throughout Britain was held up by a shortage of rock salt, or rather by snow hindering the deliveries
11:50of rock salt.
11:51The first snowfalls quickly used up stocks in the cities and towns.
11:55Some 1,100 tons went in Westminster alone in the first few days,
12:00and the lorries couldn't get through to replenish them.
12:03But it wasn't just our road system that was chaotic.
12:06There was serious dislocation on the railways, too, as any of you who had to travel by a rail that
12:11first weekend of the blizzard
12:12don't have to be reminded.
12:14The 11.20 a.m. newspaper train from Manchester down to Brighton showed up, was snowed up for two days.
12:23Now, perhaps you grumbled like the rest of us in London at the tubes running up to 50 minutes late
12:28because of snow on the exposed part of the line.
12:31Or there were, again, perhaps some of you who were some of the hundreds, if not thousands of passengers
12:36who spent the chilling hours stuck or snowed down in the snows here on Dartmoor or else between Edinburgh and
12:43Carlisle.
12:44Or perhaps between London and Birmingham here.
12:48The tracks disappeared under drifts of snow, but the trains miraculously kept moving, or at least most of them did.
12:55But points froze everywhere, and in many places rolling stock froze solid and refused to move.
13:01There were casualties.
13:02In Lancashire, a signalman collapsed and died in the cold on his way to work.
13:06On Boxing Day, 18 people were killed and 30 injured when the Scottish Express, in a snowstorm,
13:13ran into the back of a slow train at Crewe.
13:15On all regions, trains were cancelled or delayed.
13:18In many cases, it was a matter of waiting for the ploughs to get through.
13:28On top of Arctic conditions, the demands on the railways got even heavier than usual.
13:33In badly hit areas, trains were often the only form of communication.
13:38Men worked all day and all night to keep branch lines clear.
13:41These lines, already fighting against redundancy, suddenly became vital links.
13:46Trains were diverted.
13:48Birmingham to London went via Oxford.
13:50Expresses were cancelled and schedules thrown out of the window.
13:54Up in Scotland, the main line between Edinburgh and Carlisle was blocked by an avalanche a quarter of a mile
13:59long.
14:06Not until hundreds of tons of snow and rock had been blown onto the line was it considered safe to
14:12start shoveling.
14:13And then it took 24 hours to get through.
14:20One goods train on Dartmoor got completely buried.
14:24Two other engines went out to its rescue with snowplows, but a blizzard was blowing.
14:28The drifts were 20 foot high and they got buried too.
14:32After which, the whole lot froze solid and it took 80 men over a week to dig them out and
14:38get them running again.
14:39Luckily, this wasn't the main line.
14:43If things were bad on the railway, they were equally chaotic at airports.
14:47Planes were frozen in.
14:48At London, one runway was kept going and flights were cancelled by the dozen.
14:54BEA lost a quarter of a million pounds from cancellations.
14:58The paralysis of our roads, railways and airports was sudden and dramatic
15:02and the nation's resources of snowplows, shovels, rock salt, dynamite and muscle
15:07were quickly turned to getting the long distance lorries and the main line trains moving again.
15:13But that was cold comfort if you happened to live away from one of the Ministry of Transport's trunk roads
15:18or else at the end of a British railway's branch line.
15:21For our villages and hamlets and farms, the big blizzard was the beginning of a monstrously memorable winter, of a
15:27tragic winter.
15:28By New Year's Day, at least 11 people had died as a direct result of the blizzard.
15:32At Marbury in Wiltshire, a 60-year-old woman went out to exorcise her dog.
15:36She was later found dead with a dog whimpering beside her.
15:42You had to go up in a helicopter to see the full effect of the blizzard.
15:46And the effect was total paralysis.
15:49Farmers had stopped thinking about producing to survive.
15:51It was now a question of surviving to produce.
15:54For villages and farms all over southern England, the telephone was the only remaining link with the rest of the
16:00world.
16:18Britain was no longer one island surrounded by water.
16:21It was hundreds of islands surrounded by snow.
16:24Many places were running short of food.
16:26A Wiltshire orphanage with 30 children under five years old was cut off for three days and desperate for fresh
16:32milk.
16:32And trapped in the deep snow were some people needing medical supplies and help.
16:37And expected mothers with babies due.
16:39It's no wonder the helicopters had the busiest week in their history.
16:56Devon and Cornwall were worst hit.
16:58But people were marooned all over the country.
17:01Fourteen were stuck in a pub with a shortage of everything except whiskey.
17:05Others weren't so lucky.
17:06The helicopters got supplies through to the prisoners of Princeton.
17:10Who by now included all the prison officers and the whole population of the village as well.
17:18As blizzard followed blizzard, more and more farms needed supplies from helicopters.
17:23Medical supplies, fresh vegetables, baby foods, even a load of coal on one occasion.
17:28If you were snowed up in the countryside, you really were snowed up.
17:32Sometimes to the ease.
17:33People in towns who complained about clearing the front path never had to undertake an engineering project on this scale.
17:42But farms have to get food out as well as in.
17:45Many couldn't even get it out of the ground.
17:48And when they did, they couldn't get it away.
17:50That was when we had the vegetable shortage.
17:52Prices of cabbages and carrots and potatoes shot up.
17:55Over half the nation's broccoli crop was destroyed.
17:58Sugar beet factories closed for lack of supplies.
18:00The milk situation was nearly desperate.
18:03Dorset farmers threw away a quarter of a million gallons in three days.
18:07Because milk lorries couldn't reach collecting points.
18:11And of course, there were the animals.
18:13Six thousand of them on Dartmoor went without any food for four days.
18:17Again, only helicopters could help.
18:19than ever.
18:45Number one of them is also items.
18:49Nothing on that scale has happened yet, but it's been a terrible time for lambing.
18:59The full effects of the weather on sheep can't be measured yet,
19:02because many ewes who haven't yet lambed may have been critically weakened.
19:06But other animals who look less well-equipped for the snow have fared better.
19:10All the deer in Richmond Park have come through,
19:12but they've had to have three times the normal amount of supplementary feed,
19:16and still they're getting thinner.
19:18All the same, the picture isn't one of universal dumb misery.
19:22These three stallions in Norfolk, for instance, had a high old time in the snow.
19:55Chaos on the roads and railways, chaos on our farms and villages, but also chaos for British sport.
20:02The Boxing Day programme was the first to be hit.
20:05All racing was cancelled.
20:07No rugby league games took place, and only five first division football matches.
20:11But that was just a start.
20:13Since then, little organised sport has in fact taken place.
20:16The football league fixture list and the FA Cup tie programme is in a glorious, chaotic mess.
20:23The latest count of matches, postponed or cancelled, is approaching the 500 mark,
20:28and the season's already been extended once, and it looks like being extended again.
20:32And again.
20:34Over a thousand rugby games have been put off, and not a single race meeting has taken place since the
20:39snow started.
20:40And at a couple of greyhound meetings, even the electric hair froze.
20:45For ordinary winter events, conditions were as bad as they could be.
20:49All the race courses were the same, and there was no need even to go out and inspect the course.
20:53One despairing glance was enough.
20:55In fact, the going was so soft, there was only one way of getting round the track at all.
21:04A few horses did manage to get some exercise, but the majority were snowed up in their stables.
21:11The big joke was football.
21:13At least it was a joke for some people.
21:15If you were a manager, a player, or a pools promoter,
21:17the laugh became increasingly more expensive as the fixtures came and went unplayed.
21:25When it came to making the draw for the cup, the proceedings had a distinct air of farce.
21:29It became a case of, the winners of the match between A or B
21:33will play at home against either C or possibly D, if it thaws, and it didn't.
21:42Shoveling continued more as a gesture than anything else.
21:45One rugby league ground was cleared by using 500 pounds worth of chemicals.
21:49But for most, it was useless even to try.
21:52At Murrayfield, Scotland managed to play by using their new electric heating system.
21:57And the boys of Chelsea's soccer team finally got themselves a game
22:00by fixing up an away match with a team in Malta.
22:03Others had to content themselves with decisions from a panel of experts under Lord Brabazon,
22:08which decided who would have won the matches if they'd been played.
22:14But for most of us, Saturday afternoons were the time for the big dig-out.
22:18The business of finding your own car, pouring it out, and finally persuading it to move.
22:25With no sport to distract farther, it was a case of find the shovel and get clearing.
22:35And when the steps and the pavement and the front path and the back yard were all clear,
22:40there was still the roof.
22:42All over Britain, the streets rang to the sound of shovels.
22:47And inevitably, the big snows of 1963 were compared with the big snows of 1947.
22:53But now, people were making comparisons of a different kind.
22:56Comparisons of adversity.
22:58Comparisons with the Blitz.
22:59Mr. John Pedder, the postmaster at Snowbound Linmouth in Devon, said this.
23:05There's a real touch of wartime spirit.
23:07A tremendous community feeling.
23:09People who've been enemies for years are chatting with each other again.
23:13A single week was bringing more stories of grim endurance and courageous rescue
23:17than ordinarily in a whole year.
23:24On Dartmoor, a party of soldiers had a very narrow escape from freezing to death.
23:29Six young recruits with only three months army experience
23:31had been sent out on a map reading exercise.
23:34It very soon turned into a survival test.
23:42After two days of blizzard and 18 degrees of frost,
23:45two of them were finally located and rescued by helicopter.
23:48They were in a pretty bad way,
23:49but not as bad as the other four who were found here in a deserted house.
23:54After their tent had blown down in the gale
23:56and their boots had frozen so that they were impossible to get on,
23:59the four men had struggled to shelter in their stocking feet.
24:02Three of them had to be carried out to the helicopter.
24:14All of them were frozen stiff and had severe frost flight.
24:17It had been quite a lesson, but not in map reading.
24:22Helicopters were also used to rescue two old ladies on Exmoor.
24:25Both of them were over 75 and for a long time they refused to go.
24:30The RAF had been supplying them with food and they could see no reason to budge.
24:33But in the end, they got so bored with their own company,
24:36they decided to move after all, if only for the trip.
24:43In Monmouthshire, there was another urgent job for helicopters.
24:46Here, it was to pick up electricians and carry them and all their gear
24:49out to one of the most desolate spots in the country.
25:00A high-voltage cable to use great lengths of rope,
25:03which could be run out, attached to the helicopter and flown over the cables.
25:13With the rope looped over to the cables, the men set out to walk,
25:17pulling the loop and knocking the ice off as they went.
25:19It was a long and bitterly cold operation,
25:22but it cleared the wire and kept the steelworks going.
25:33The longest walk of all, or at any rate what must have seemed like the longest walk,
25:37was from Filingdale's.
25:39This was the scene of the great airlift.
25:41But before the helicopters arrived,
25:43a hundred stranded civilians took to the moors and walked back to civilization.
25:55It was only four miles, but the drifts were fourteen feet deep,
25:59and the snow was very soft.
26:01By the time they reached the railway, most of them were done in.
26:08Luckily, the line was still open, and they reached home by train.
26:13With racing cancelled, the betting shops were as deserted as the courses,
26:17but not in Donkister.
26:19Here, a bookie had the brilliant idea of running his own races on the premises.
26:22The mice did show a tendency to fall off the course,
26:25but the money changed hands, which, after all, is the only part that matters.
26:30By about the end of the first week in January, the story began to change.
26:34Up till then, it had been the story of snow.
26:38Now it turned into the story of ice.
26:42We'd already had blizzards on an almost unheard-of scale.
26:45Now the unrelenting frost.
26:48Nothing poured.
26:49Nothing melted.
26:50And the frost went deeper and deeper into the earth.
26:54The roads and railways had had their turn.
26:57Now it was the waterways.
26:58Ice two feet thick on the river Yair stopped shipping between Norwich and Great Yarmouth.
27:03The car ferry service to Fishbourne in the Isle of Wight was stopped because of dangerous pack ice.
27:09At Torquay, the sea froze as it crashed over the promenade.
27:12The channel froze at Dover and Eastbourne,
27:14and across at Dunkirk, the ice stretched for five miles.
27:18So it looked as if we were going to be joined with Europe, whether de Gaulle liked it or not.
27:22At Windsor, a man was seen riding a bicycle on the frozen Thames.
27:26At Kingston, the Thames froze from bank to bank for the first time since 1895.
27:32At Oxford, one Charles Easter drove his Austin Southern across the Thames to work.
27:37The first Carr River rally ever was held on the Thames at Bablock Hive.
27:41A school of mullet was frozen in the ice at Southampton Dock
27:45and provided a freshly chilled picnic for some lucky gulls.
27:48But it was surely those two commuters skating to work in Leicestershire
27:52that provided the picture of the big freeze.
27:57The canals froze first, just about all of them.
28:00The Grand Union was a strip of ice running from Brentford to the Midlands.
28:04But the bulk of our water transport goes along natural waterways,
28:07and most of the busy ones stayed navigable, just.
28:20But many rivers froze up along the edges of the navigable channel.
28:24On some, the ice was two feet thick,
28:26and an iceberg ten feet high was sighted at Greenwich.
28:29It grew so cold that diesel oil froze solid,
28:32and beer and lemonade bottles burst.
28:44As the bitter weather went on,
28:46even the coast and harbour started to ice up.
28:49At several places, the sea froze,
28:51sometimes for a hundred feet out from the shore.
28:53There was pack ice in most ports.
28:55On the Humber, it forced a light ship adrift,
28:57and there were sheets of ice in the docks
28:59at Chatham, Liverpool, Bristol, and Southampton.
29:01It was like a polar landscape.
29:12Ships at their moorings were frozen in everywhere,
29:14and some under way stuck fast.
29:17At Walton, lifeboatmen couldn't get to their boat
29:19for the first time in 40 years.
29:21Car ferry services were cancelled,
29:23and so was the London-Paris train.
29:26The coastline of Britain was like an enormous deep freeze.
29:35It was about then that we learnt
29:37that the Soviet Antarctic base in Queen Maudland
29:40had reported temperatures of 39 degrees,
29:4313 degrees warmer than London.
29:45For the first time in living memory,
29:47the medway froze right across from Chatham to Rochester,
29:50with ice two feet thick.
29:52The Navy had to use an icebreaker
29:53to keep Chatham Dockyard free.
29:57Of course, not everyone found the ice a menace.
30:00What you lost on the football pitch,
30:02you gained on the ice rift.
30:03Suddenly, Britain had become a winter sports resort.
30:09For most of us, the sport was improvised and unofficial,
30:12but in Lincolnshire,
30:13the freeze made the professional ice race championship
30:15of Great Britain possible for the first time since 1959.
30:24At Ryslip, the water skiers managed to adapt themselves
30:26to the new conditions.
30:28With a car instead of a motorboat to do the towing,
30:30a new sport was born.
30:32A pointless one, but new.
30:38It is also perfect weather
30:40for another more orthodox winter sport,
30:42ice yachting.
31:06If you hadn't got a nice yacht of your own,
31:08you could always adapt to sailing dinghy.
31:21It froze so hard that,
31:23for only the second time since 1935,
31:25the great curling Bond spiel,
31:27the grand match,
31:28could be held on the lake of Menteith.
31:30There were nearly 2,000 competitors.
31:33Motorcycle scrambling was one of the few outdoor sports
31:35that could carry on uninterrupted by the weather.
31:38It set new problems,
31:39but it also gave it a new interest.
31:51As the curl got deeper still,
31:53the landscape of Britain took on a totally new appearance.
31:57One result of the deep and enduring frost
31:59was to produce fairyland sights no one had ever seen,
32:02and no one may ever see again.
32:04This waterfall on Exmoor
32:06hasn't looked like this in living memory.
32:29Perhaps even more spectacular are the Aesgarth Falls,
32:32and while even this site may not reconcile you to this winter,
32:35at least it's one of the few items on the credit side.
32:54So it was really great.
32:55The newке of Discovery
32:55is in the water.
32:55It was an incredibly good year of green made plaques,
32:55but now it's been a much moreover descendant.
32:59And for해도 happens,
32:59it's the sea of the sun and spring.
33:01It was just a day of Miss Hal sed,
33:02and you became a wonderful six-d 건데
33:02as a day of tears
33:02with it.
33:02It was really nice,
33:06while managing capital 통
33:06andHD Tacoma
33:40In other parts of the country, things weren't quite so beautiful.
33:44Chaos turned into crisis.
33:46It soon became clear that we simply couldn't cope with the cold spell of this severity and duration.
33:52Salt, water, gas, electricity, paraffin, milk, milk bottles, vegetables, coal, candles, disposable nappies.
34:02All of these were difficult or impossible to get at some time or other.
34:06And the water crisis is by no means over yet.
34:09In London alone, the Metropolitan Water Board have had well over 3,000 burst mains reported since the cold weather
34:15started.
34:16In Birmingham, hundreds of underground service pipes froze solid.
34:19And in the Manchester area, the number of bursts of all kinds approached the 200,000 mark.
34:25In many parts of the country, water rationing was the order of the day, and the emergency water tanker became
34:31a familiar sight.
34:35But for thousands of people, this was the only supply of water there was, apart from melted snow.
34:43In other places, tanks were set up in the street.
34:45But even they froze up, and you needed hot water to thaw out the tap before you could get cold
34:50water to make hot water with.
34:57And after all this, when you'd found enough buckets and kettles, carried them along the street, filled them up, and
35:02carted them back again,
35:03you still couldn't do the washing up because the waste pipe was frozen and the water wouldn't run away.
35:13The only ones who didn't mind were the children.
35:15School lavatories froze, and that was the end of school.
35:19In parts of South Wales, even the 11-plus was put off.
35:22120 schools in Hampshire never opened at all after the holidays,
35:25and in London, over 20,000 children stayed at home.
35:29Down every street, in every town, the same plea was heard.
35:33Please send the plumber.
35:37But the worst failure was in electricity.
35:39The grid simply couldn't deliver the power fastener.
35:42We got used to power cuts, at least in the London area, during the power workers go slow early in
35:48January.
35:49But once that unofficial dispute had been settled, we assumed, wrongly as it turned out,
35:54that there was going to be enough electricity to go around everywhere.
35:58It soon became apparent that someone had underestimated our electricity requirements, even for a normal winter.
36:04And the buck of blame was passed pretty smartly around, almost as quickly as the electricity was going through the
36:10grid itself during those frenetic days.
36:13The electricity board admitted that they'd had to make massive disconnections in the southeast,
36:18and practically no one in the country had full power right through the crisis.
36:22The electricity people's advertising slogan,
36:26Plug in electric living, that's all you have to do, had by now a pretty hollow ring.
36:33In Piccadilly, the lights went out for the first time since 1949.
36:38Hospitals were cut off without warning.
36:40Canterbury Cathedral blacked out in the middle of a service.
36:43Shops and offices kept going by candlelight.
36:45As the load increased, the supply dropped.
36:50And then came the worst electricity cables from Britain's largest power stations,
36:55were short-circuited by freezing fog.
36:58Men worked non-stop for 72 hours to clear the ice and get the supply going again.
37:04And of course, when electrical power was cut, everyone turned to gas.
37:09Many people, in fact, kept their ovens on and open for heating.
37:12Faithful, constant gas.
37:14You can rely on gas, the ad said.
37:17But, alas, we couldn't rely on gas.
37:20Gas couldn't cope either.
37:22The demand for gas rose everywhere.
37:25And where they could deliver, they couldn't keep up with the demand.
37:28If you wanted cope for the fire, you had to go and fetch it for yourself.
37:39Reserves of the coal yard shrunk.
37:41The solid, frozen heaps got smaller, and the demand became more desperate.
37:45But the coal couldn't get through.
37:47Coal for gas for industry.
37:49Coal to run the railway engines to pull the coal trains.
37:52Coal to make electricity.
37:54And after that, coal for the ordinary consumer.
37:56The old and the sick.
37:57The ones who depended on coal to keep warm.
38:02And when the coal did arrive, it was frozen solid in the trucks and had to be thawed out before
38:07it could be unloaded.
38:08The heaps were hard as rock, but valuable as gold.
38:15The British Railway has introduced a coal lift.
38:18Twenty special trains carrying 650 tons each, shuttled backward and forward to the south of England.
38:25Emergency lorries ran through the ice and snow in a never-ending stream.
38:29As a co-board official said, we were on a knife edge.
38:36Crisis, crisis, crisis.
38:41What would have happened to the country if the freeze had gone on for another week?
38:44We shall mercifully, we hope.
38:46Never know.
38:48On January the 25th, warmer air moved in from the Atlantic to cover Scotland, Northern Ireland and Northern England.
38:54And by the morning of the 26th, covered the whole of Britain.
38:58And that was the thaw.
39:02We never thought slush could look so beautiful.
39:05People even started to see their lawns for the first time since Christmas.
39:09Of course, it brought out the bursts.
39:11This one closed London, Southampton Row.
39:13But after being frozen stiff for 35 days, it was a small price to pay.
39:18It wasn't even the fast, dangerous thaw we'd been warned of.
39:22It was slow and mild.
39:24It seemed too good to be true.
39:27It was too good to be true.
39:34Three days after the thaw, the freeze was back with a vengeance.
39:39The blizzards followed.
39:40Again, the West Country took the first onslaught.
39:43But Wales caught a packet as well.
40:01When the blizzards stopped, we took stock again and found it was worse than ever.
40:06On the 8th of February, 70 people were marooned in cars and lorries around Dartmoor.
40:11If they'd gone by train, they wouldn't have fared much better.
40:14Thirty people were trapped in a train on Dartmoor too.
40:17Fifty in Argyllshire and another 18 in Ayrshire.
40:21The London train was eight hours late to Edinburgh.
40:24London to Stranraa passengers were 17 and a half hours late.
40:28All the same, rail travellers were at least spared the ultimate indignity.
40:39All over Britain, motorists and highway authorities started digging out yet again.
40:44This time, it was worse than ever before.
40:46Again, 200 main roads were blocked.
40:49And now, not 90,000, but 130,000 miles of highway were obstructed by snow.
40:55Most of them paralysed.
40:56Scotland and Cornwall were completely cut off.
41:03Again, there were large-scale rescue operations.
41:06The chief one was the relief of Whitton Down.
41:09This party of Royal Marines from Limpstone were digging their way to the village
41:12where a hundred motorists and lorry drivers who'd abandoned their vehicles
41:16had taken shelter from the blizzard.
41:18When it was over, five feet of snow had fallen.
41:21And it was known they were desperately short of food and blankets
41:24and that the power had failed.
41:27Whitton Down wasn't equipped to take on a hundred cold and hungry visitors.
41:35The Marines couldn't get through on the first day
41:37and nor could the snowplows.
41:39It was learnt that most of the castaways
41:41were spending the night in the village schoolroom.
41:44Next day, the snowplows were at it again.
41:46By the time the clearance squads got through,
41:49a hundred drivers had had a night to remember.
41:52It was the night when the southwest broke another weather record.
41:55Snow on the ground for 45 consecutive days.
41:58But by now, the hard-hit southwesterners were being warned of another new danger.
42:03A quick thaw with high winds and floods.
42:07The floods came.
42:14The river near Boscastle in Cornwall burst its banks
42:17and a wall of water four feet high smashed through the village.
42:22Blood warnings were out all over Devon and Cornwall.
42:24The blizzard was still raging in Scotland
42:27and in Boscastle they'd have willingly had it back in exchange for this.
42:33Of course, the freeze has had its lighter moments as well as its tragic ones.
42:37And in the years to come, most of us will have some kind of story to tell
42:40about the great winter of 1963.
42:43But it was left to the wife of the Minister of Power,
42:46Mrs. Richard Wood, to supply the bathos of the big freeze.
42:50I refer, of course, to the tale of the black woolly pants.
42:54While her husband was bothering himself with power cuts,
42:56gas rationing and coal shortages,
42:58Mrs. Wood was quoted as saying
43:00that English people don't wear enough clothes.
43:03And she allowed herself to be photographed in black fishnet tights
43:06and black woolly pants
43:08with a little bit of white trimming at the knee.
43:11The big freeze has happened.
43:14It takes its place in our history.
43:16But how did it happen?
43:18What's the explanation that our weather experts offer
43:21as the cause of it all?
43:23Well, stage one.
43:25On December 21st,
43:27this Siberian anticyclone started to move in our direction.
43:30But the westerly Atlantic winds,
43:33which usually keep it at bay,
43:34suddenly weakened,
43:35and the Siberian anticyclone moved right across to us.
43:41And by December 22nd,
43:43it had hit us.
43:44It was here,
43:45and the big freeze had begun.
43:47Then, stage two.
43:48Another anticyclone that usually stays in Greenland up here
43:51came down to join the Siberian one,
43:53and this brought a lot of freezing air from the North Pole with it.
43:57That was the Boxing Day snow.
43:59Then came stage three.
44:02The weekend after Christmas,
44:04a belt of warm air tried to get up from the South.
44:06But by now,
44:07the cold front here was so dug in
44:10that it beat back the warm air.
44:12The result of this was a clash,
44:14and the blizzard,
44:15which particularly struck the Southwest.
44:19Then came stage four.
44:21On January 4th,
44:22the warm air tried once again to get up to us.
44:25It got a bit further this time,
44:27but the cold air stayed dug in,
44:29and the warm air went over the top of the coal,
44:33so that you've got this curious layer thing,
44:35and the freezing rain was the warm front
44:38raining through the coal underneath it.
44:40On January 14th and 15th,
44:42it came stage five.
44:43Now,
44:44the two anticyclones,
44:45the Siberian one and the one from Greenland,
44:47split and started to go back where they came from.
44:50Now,
44:50what should have happened
44:51was that it should have let in
44:52this warm air from here,
44:54and there should have been a fall.
44:56But, oh no,
44:56because on the night of January 15th
44:58came stage six.
45:00The warm air changed its mind.
45:03It didn't come down to us at all.
45:04It bared right away from us,
45:06and went down here
45:07towards the Bay of Biscayne,
45:08and the Atlantic.
45:09And the Siberian anticyclone,
45:11finding everything clear again,
45:13moved into the attack once more,
45:15and the blizzard began all over again,
45:17the air got colder and colder,
45:18and the really deep freeze was on.
45:21Anyway,
45:21that's how it happened,
45:23but why did it happen?
45:24Now,
45:25some American weathermen
45:26have come forward
45:27with a fascinating theory.
45:29If you remember,
45:29what started the whole thing off
45:30was those westerly winds.
45:32They should have kept out
45:33the Siberian anticyclone,
45:35but they didn't.
45:36Why didn't they?
45:37Well,
45:37the Americans say
45:38that the reason is to be found
45:39here,
45:40in the Pacific,
45:42of all places,
45:42near Hawaii.
45:44There's a patch of Pacific Ocean,
45:46hundreds and thousands
45:47of square miles,
45:48that suddenly last summer
45:49got unusually warm,
45:50and has stayed like that
45:52during the autumn and winter.
45:53As a result,
45:54so much moisture
45:55has been sent up
45:56into the atmosphere here
45:57that it switched
45:58all the upper air currents
45:59and exaggerated
46:00their north-south swings,
46:02so that the cold airs
46:03are being sent up
46:04first up the north,
46:05and then plunging down
46:06right down here
46:07to the south.
46:08In fact,
46:08the Gulf of Mexico
46:09has had an unusually bad winter,
46:10and swung up again,
46:12and then down,
46:13descending on Europe.
46:14So,
46:15they say we can blame
46:16the freeze up
46:16on the Hawaiians.
46:20And what is the big freeze cost?
46:22First,
46:23in human life.
46:23The latest unofficial estimates
46:25for this country
46:26put the death toll
46:27at 120,
46:28directly attributable
46:29to the very cold spell.
46:32Severe weather
46:32filled the nation's hospitals,
46:34and in the London area,
46:35the emergency bed service's
46:37red warning
46:37was in operation.
46:39Hospitals refused
46:40routine admissions
46:41so as to cope
46:42with emergencies.
46:43Babies and old people
46:44were particularly hit
46:46by the intense cold,
46:47but on the other hand,
46:48the rest of us
46:48have evidently had
46:49fewer common colds,
46:51and flew this winter.
46:54Insurance claims
46:55for snow and ice damage
46:57are expected
46:57to top 15 million pounds.
46:59The road clearance bill
47:00is expected to come
47:01to over 20 million pounds.
47:03It's 3 million pounds
47:05at the most on average.
47:06And millions more
47:07will have to be spent
47:08in repairing the roads
47:09and motorways
47:10cracked by the freeze.
47:12Building and construction work
47:13has, of course,
47:14been at a standstill.
47:16In all,
47:17the interim estimate
47:18of the physical costs
47:20of the nation
47:20is said to be
47:21150 to 200 million pounds.
47:24And many believe this
47:26to be an underestimate.
47:27But what the big freeze
47:29has shown
47:29is that the country
47:30is simply not geared
47:31to meet an abnormally
47:33savage winter.
47:34Techniques of snow clearance
47:35don't seem to have advanced
47:36much since the arc,
47:37let alone since 1947,
47:39the last major freezer.
47:41Many authorities
47:42still don't stockpile
47:43much rock salt,
47:44although a process
47:45has been developed
47:46for storing it in the open
47:47without it caking.
47:48Again,
47:49most county and borough
47:50surveyors
47:51are still saying
47:52that the expense
47:53of mechanized snow clearance
47:54isn't justified,
47:55although the cost
47:56of the most
47:56sophisticated piece
47:57of equipment
47:58is tiny compared
47:59with the millions
47:59this winter
48:00has already cost us.
48:01A big snow plower
48:03and blower,
48:03for instance,
48:04costs 7,000 pounds.
48:06And now that the power cuts
48:08are, we hope,
48:09behind us,
48:10are we going to forget
48:10about that gap
48:11in our electricity supply?
48:13When pushed to it,
48:14at the height
48:15of the power crisis,
48:16the electricity people
48:17said it would need
48:1890 million pounds,
48:19the price, incidentally,
48:20of two Polaris submarines,
48:22to close the gap
48:23and give us
48:23a small margin of safety.
48:25Spreading this capital
48:26cost over 25 years,
48:28which is the normal
48:28accountancy procedure,
48:30it shouldn't add
48:30more than seven
48:31pence halfpenny
48:32in the pound
48:32on every electricity bill,
48:34just the price
48:35of four candles.
48:37And what good
48:38has come out
48:39of the big freeze?
48:40So far,
48:41at least,
48:41one piece of
48:41parliamentary legislation
48:43is in the offering,
48:44and that is
48:44a long-last compulsory
48:46freeze-free
48:47domestic water system,
48:49interior plumbing,
48:50lagging,
48:50and so on.
48:51But only for new homes,
48:53it won't affect
48:53the 14 million
48:54old houses.
48:56Apart from that,
48:57we can only hope
48:58that the public
48:59and local authorities
49:00who are caught
49:00with their pants down
49:01will pull their socks up,
49:02if you see what we mean.
49:04For the rest of us,
49:05it's probably cured us
49:07of dreaming
49:07of a white Christmas
49:08for the next
49:09ten years or so.
49:10And for the history book,
49:11there's one more
49:13spectacularly cold winter
49:14to set beside
49:15the famous ones,
49:16like A.D. 764,
49:201684,
49:211740,
49:221881,
49:231940,
49:24and 1947.
49:27During the day,
49:28it's been snowing
49:29in most of
49:30southern England
49:31and Wales,
49:32and we're told
49:33it's freezing too.
49:35But at least
49:35we've been through
49:36the big freeze
49:37of 1963.
49:40Part 1.
49:47Part 1.
50:16What an extraordinary film.
50:19Amazing.
50:20And when you look at it,
50:21it's hard to imagine
50:23how we as a nation
50:24actually survived that.
50:26And if it happened today,
50:27I know one thing,
50:29there'd be a shovel shortage.
50:31But what that film
50:32didn't explain
50:33is what effect
50:34the big freeze
50:35had on our
50:36British wildlife.
50:38Winter is always
50:40a tough time
50:40for wildlife.
50:42It's not only
50:42the coldest time of year,
50:44but the days
50:44are really short
50:45and food is scarce.
50:48So wild creatures
50:48have to battle
50:49extra hard
50:50just to survive.
50:53Now some,
50:54like bats,
50:55hedgehogs,
50:56and dormice,
50:57opt out altogether.
50:58They hibernate.
51:00Others migrate.
51:01Birds such as
51:02swallows and cuckoos
51:03leave our shores
51:04each autumn
51:05to spend their winter
51:06in sunny Africa.
51:10But many wild creatures
51:12can't hibernate
51:13or migrate,
51:14or they choose not to.
51:15For them,
51:16getting through the winter
51:17simply becomes a case
51:18of finding enough food
51:20to keep their energy levels up.
51:22For small birds,
51:24like these tits,
51:25that means eating
51:26about a third of your body weight
51:28every single day.
51:29It means feeding
51:31from dawn
51:32all the way through
51:33till dusk.
51:34Now in mild winters,
51:36finding food
51:37is relatively easy,
51:38but as soon as there's
51:39snow and ice
51:40on the ground,
51:41then things get
51:42really, really tough.
51:46Even during the fairly
51:48short cold snap
51:49in winter 2010,
51:51many creatures
51:52struggled to cope
51:53as a thick layer of snow
51:55made it much harder
51:56for them to find food.
51:58All of our wildlife
51:59suffered,
52:00but birds
52:01were especially badly hit.
52:04So just imagine
52:06what it must have been like
52:08for them back in 1963,
52:10when it wasn't just
52:11incredibly cold
52:12with snow covering
52:14virtually the whole country,
52:15but also
52:16it went on
52:17for so long.
52:20But some birds
52:21didn't hang around
52:22to see how bad
52:23things were going to get.
52:25Large flocks
52:26of lapwings,
52:27starlings and thrushes
52:28were seen heading south
52:29almost as soon
52:30as the first blizzards hit.
52:32But they were the lucky ones.
52:35Those birds that stayed
52:36to wait for the thaw
52:37were soon in big trouble.
52:41Imagine being a wren
52:42weighing just a few grams.
52:45Well, wrens have to eat
52:46almost half their body weight a day
52:49just to get through the night alive.
52:51And when the entire landscape
52:54is covered with snow and ice,
52:56that's really, really difficult.
52:58And of course,
52:58it's not just wrens.
52:59All of those other birds
53:01that were trying to feed on invertebrates
53:03were in trouble.
53:04Things like goldcrests
53:05and long-tailed tits.
53:07And these birds
53:08didn't die in their tens of thousands.
53:11Sadly,
53:12they died
53:13in their hundreds of thousands.
53:16But it wasn't just
53:17the small birds
53:18that struggled to survive.
53:20As we saw,
53:21across the whole of the country,
53:22virtually every stream,
53:24pond,
53:25lake and river
53:26was frozen solid.
53:29The impact on Britain's waterbirds
53:31was absolutely catastrophic,
53:34cutting off their food supply
53:35and leaving them
53:36with nowhere to go.
53:38Now,
53:39back in 2010,
53:40we saw that birds
53:42that depended on water
53:43could radically change
53:44their behaviour
53:45in order to try and survive.
53:48Normally,
53:48shy birds,
53:49such as this bittern,
53:51became much less elusive
53:52as they searched desperately
53:54for something to eat.
53:55And water rails
53:56turned into ruthless predators.
53:59This one
53:59killed and ate
54:00an unfortunate meadow pipit.
54:03But of course,
54:04in 2010,
54:05we were only cold
54:06for a couple of weeks.
54:07Back in 1963,
54:10the whole of Britain
54:10was frozen to a standstill
54:12for two whole months,
54:15January and February.
54:17And our waterbirds
54:18really suffered.
54:20Now,
54:20when things get cold and nasty,
54:22species like kingfishers
54:24normally flee
54:25to the south and the west.
54:27But back in 1963,
54:28this didn't happen,
54:30particularly because
54:31the south and west,
54:32as we've seen,
54:33was hardest hit.
54:34But also,
54:35because the sea froze.
54:38So kingfishers
54:39couldn't even find
54:40a refuge there.
54:43And it wasn't just
54:44the resident waterbirds
54:45that suffered.
54:47Every winter,
54:48Britain's coastal estuaries
54:50and marshes
54:51play host to millions
54:52of waders and wildfowl.
54:54Ducks, geese and swans
54:55that come here
54:56from the Arctic
54:57in search of a milder climate
54:59and plenty of food.
55:01Now, most years,
55:02that strategy certainly pays off.
55:04But how did they cope
55:06during the big freeze of 63?
55:09Well,
55:10these wintering wildfowl
55:11did manage to last longer
55:13than many other species of birds.
55:15They are quite tough
55:16and they also managed to find
55:17a few patches of open water
55:19where they could gather and feed.
55:21But as the winter went on,
55:23even they began to struggle.
55:27There's no doubt
55:28that for these birds,
55:29it was a really challenging time.
55:34So, did any creatures
55:36actually benefit
55:37from the big freeze?
55:38Well, not surprisingly,
55:39with all of these birds dying,
55:41scavengers and predators
55:42did particularly well.
55:44So, foxes,
55:45they were okay,
55:46and birds of prey
55:47like buzzards and kestrels,
55:49crows and magpies.
55:50But perhaps surprisingly,
55:52even some of our smaller species
55:54managed to get through
55:55by changing their diet.
55:57Starlings and sparrows,
55:58which normally eat grain,
56:00turned cannibal
56:01and started eating the corpses
56:03of their cousins
56:04that had died of starvation.
56:07By the beginning of March,
56:09with no sign of the snow melting,
56:11it must have seemed
56:12as if the big freeze
56:13would never end.
56:17But within a week,
56:18the thaw had finally begun
56:20and it was time
56:21to count the cost.
56:22It was estimated
56:24that over half
56:25of all Britain's birds
56:27had died
56:28as a result
56:29of that terrible winter.
56:34Frankly,
56:35it's unimaginable, isn't it?
56:37And yet,
56:37really surprisingly,
56:39it didn't make
56:40that much difference
56:41to their numbers
56:42in the long term.
56:43Take the wren,
56:44for instance.
56:45Within just five years,
56:47it had bounced back
56:48to the levels
56:49its population was at
56:50before the big freeze.
56:52And by the mid-1970s,
56:54it had even become
56:55Britain's commonest bird.
56:57Now, it might seem odd
56:59that this big freeze
57:00didn't have the negative impact
57:02on our bird populations
57:03in the long term
57:04that we might have suspected.
57:06But then, you see,
57:07many of these birds
57:08have evolved
57:09to cope with these sorts
57:10of natural disasters.
57:12You see,
57:12they can have several broods a year
57:14and produce quite a lot of young.
57:16So as long as they can breed successfully,
57:18they can soon bounce back.
57:21But what would happen
57:22if we had another big freeze today?
57:25Which of Britain's birds
57:26would be the winners
57:26and which the losers?
57:30Well, our countryside
57:31has changed dramatically
57:32in the last 50 years
57:34and as a result,
57:35I think that our farmland birds
57:37would be in big trouble.
57:39That's because,
57:40in our desire to produce cheap food,
57:42farming is now so efficient
57:45that there are virtually
57:46no spare seeds or grain
57:48left in the fields
57:49for the birds to eat.
57:52On the other hand,
57:54birds that visit our gardens
57:55would probably do much better
57:57than they did in 1963.
58:00We now provide enough food
58:02to give them a lifeline
58:03even in the hardest winter weather.
58:06So, in just half a century,
58:08the span of my own lifetime,
58:10things have certainly changed
58:12for Britain's wildlife.
58:15What an extraordinary story
58:17of how we and our wildlife
58:19lived through the hardest winter
58:21in the last two centuries.
58:24Will it ever happen again?
58:26Well, given that we're experiencing
58:28more and more extreme weather events,
58:31which scientists are putting down
58:32to global climate change,
58:34I wouldn't be at all surprised.
58:36Goodbye.
58:48Dive into the warm waters
58:50of the Great Barrier Reef next,
58:51then celebrate the best trashy movies
58:53with Inside Cinema,
58:55new at 10.
58:56The Great Barrier Reef.
58:58History of the Great Barrier Reef.
58:58We'll see you next time.