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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.....
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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.
18:42The
18:43Worst hit of all were the sheep.
18:45In the murderous winter of 1947, four and a half million died.
18:49Not only the sheep, but the sheep.
18:49Nothing on that scale has happened yet.
18:51But 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.
19:25When?
19:54The
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. All racing was cancelled.
20:07No rugby league games took place and only five First Division football matches.
20:11But that was just a start. Since 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 and 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. At least it was a joke for some people.
21:15If you were a manager, a player or a pools promoter, the laugh became increasingly more expensive as the fixtures
21:20came 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 will play at home against either
21:35C or possibly D if it thaws.
21:38And 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.
21:53At Murrayfield, Scotland managed to play by using their new electric heating system.
21:57And the boys of Chelsea soccer team finally got themselves a game by fixing up an away match with a
22:02team 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 father, 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, there was
22:40still 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. Comparisons with the Blitz.
23:00Mr. John Pedder, the postmaster at Snowbound Linmouth in Devon, said this.
23:04There's a real touch of wartime spirit. A 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 than 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 had 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, two of them were finally located and rescued by helicopter.
23:48They were in a pretty bad way, but not as bad as the other four who were found here in
23:52a deserted house.
23:54After their tent had blown down in the gale and their boots had frozen so that they were impossible to
23:58get 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.
24:29The 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, they decided to move after all, if only
24:37for 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 out to one of the most
24:50desolate spots in the country.
25:00A high voltage cable to use great lengths of rope which could be run out, attached to the helicopter and
25:05flown over the cables.
25:13With the rope looped over to the cables, the men set out to walk, pulling the loop and knocking the
25:18ice off as they went.
25:19It was a long and bitterly cold operation, but 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, was from Filingdale's.
25:39This was the scene of the great airlift.
25:41But before the helicopters arrived, a 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 and 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, but not in Doncaster.
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, but the money changed hands, which after all is
26:27the only part that matters.
26:30By about the end of the first week in January, the story began to change.
26:35Up till then, it had been the story of snow.
26:37Now it turned into the story of ice.
26:41We'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 packouts.
27:08At 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.
27:27At 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.
27:42A 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, even the coast and harbour started to ice up.
28:49At several places, the sea froze, sometimes 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 at 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 for the first time in forty years.
29:21Car ferry services were cancelled and 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 that the Soviet Antarctic base in Queen Maudland
29:40had reported temperatures of thirty-nine degrees.
29:43Thirteen 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.
29:51The Navy had to use an icebreaker to keep Chatham Dockyard free.
29:57Of course, not everyone found the ice a menace.
30:00What you lost on the football pitch, you gained on the ice rink.
30:03Suddenly, Britain had become a winter sports resort.
30:09For most of us, the sport was improvised and unofficial.
30:12But in Lincolnshire, the 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 to 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 for 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, for only the second time since 1935,
31:25the great curling Bond spiel, the grand match,
31:28could be held on the lake of Menteeth.
31:30There were nearly 2,000 competitors.
31:33Motorcycle scrambling was one of the few outdoor sports
31:35that could carry on in uninterrupted by the weather.
31:38It set new problems, but 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.
31:56One 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 hasn't looked like this in living memory.
32:29Perhaps even more spectacular are the Aesgarth Falls,
32:32and while even this side may not reconcile you to this winter,
32:36at least it's one of the few items on the credit side.
32:47which is not as real to the sea.
32:50It's a perfect sunset.
32:51You're still looking for one of the most likely to be,
32:51but mainly the dumbest seats may not be
32:51asÐœent Faghts.
32:53It's a perfect sunset.
32:54Here's the biggest flicker in the sky.
32:55It's a perfect sunset.
32:56Well, it has been a perfect sunset.
32:59There are so many days,
32:59there are many places in the ocean.
33:01The Jack of the Aesgarth Falls
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, and in London, over 20,000 children stayed at
35:28home.
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.
36:19And practically no one in the country had full power right through the crisis.
36:22The electricity people's advertising slogan, plug in electric living, that's all you have to do, had by now a pretty
36:31hollow 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, were 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.
38:15British Railways 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.
38:28As a co-board official said, we were on a knife edge.
38:34Crisis.
38:36Crisis.
38:39Crisis.
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, but after being frozen stiff for 35 days,
39:15it 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, but whales caught a packet as well.
40:01The blizzards followed.
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.
40:57Scotland 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.
41:26Whitton Down wasn't equipped to take on a hundred cold and hungry visitors.
41:35The Marines couldn't get through on the first day, and nor could the snowplows.
41:39It was learnt that most of the castaways were spending the night in the village schoolroom.
41:44Next day, the snowplows were at it again.
41:47By the time the clearance squads got through, a hundred drivers had had a night to remember.
41:52It was the night when the south-west broke another weather record.
41:55Snow on the ground for 45 consecutive days.
41:58But by now, the hard-hit south-westerners 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, and a wall of water, four feet high,
42:20smashed through the village.
42:22Blood warnings were out all over Devon and Cornwall.
42:24The blizzard was still raging in Scotland, and 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 about the great
42:41winter of 1963.
42:43But it was left to the wife of the Minister of Power, Mrs. Richard Wood, to supply the bathos of
42:49the 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, gas rationing and coal shortages,
42:58Mrs. Wood was quoted as saying that English people don't wear enough clothes.
43:03And she allowed herself to be photographed in black fishnet tights and 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, but how did it happen?
43:18What's the explanation that our weather experts offer as the cause of it all?
43:23Well, stage one.
43:25On December 21st, this Siberian anti-cyclone started to move in our direction.
43:30But the westerly Atlantic winds, which usually keep it at bay, suddenly weakened,
43:35and the Siberian anti-cyclone moved right across to us.
43:41And by December 22nd, it had hit us.
43:44It was here, and the big freeze had begun.
43:47Then, stage two.
43:48Another anti-cyclone that usually stays in Greenland, up here, came 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, a belt of warm air tried to get up from the South.
44:06But by now, the cold front here was so dug in that it beat back the warm air.
44:12The result of this was a clash, and the blizzard which particularly struck the South West.
44:19Then came stage four.
44:21On January 4th, the warm air tried once again to get up to us.
44:25It got a bit further this time, but the cold air stayed dug in, and the warm air went over
44:32the top of the cold.
44:33So that you've got this curious layer thing, and the freezing rain was the warm front raining
44:38through the cold underneath it.
44:40On January 14th and 15th, it came stage five.
44:44Now, the two anti-cyclones, the Siberian one and the one from Greenland, split and started
44:48to go back where they came from.
44:50Now, what should have happened was that it should have let in this warm air from here,
44:54and there should have been a fall.
44:55But, oh no, because on the night of January 15th came 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 and went down here towards the Bay of Biscayne and the Atlantic.
45:09And the Siberian anti-cyclone, finding everything clear again, moved into the attack once more,
45:15and the blizzard began all over again.
45:17The air got colder and colder, and the really deep freeze was on.
45:21Anyway, that's how it happened.
45:23But why did it happen?
45:24Now, some American weathermen have come forward with a fascinating theory.
45:28If you remember, what started the whole thing off was those westerly winds.
45:32They should have kept out the Siberian anti-cyclone, but they didn't.
45:36Why didn't they?
45:37Well, the Americans say that the reason is to be found here, in the Pacific, of all places near Hawaii.
45:44There's a patch of Pacific Ocean, hundreds and thousands of square miles,
45:48that suddenly last summer got unusually warm,
45:50and has stayed like that during the autumn and winter.
45:53As a result, so much moisture has been sent up into the atmosphere here,
45:57that it switched all the upper air currents and exaggerated their north-south swings,
46:02so that the cold airs are being sent up first up the north,
46:05and then plunging down right down here to the south.
46:08In fact, the Gulf of Mexico has had an unusually bad winter,
46:10and swung up again, and then down descending on Europe.
46:14So, they say we can blame the freeze-up on the Hawaiians.
46:20And what does the big freeze cost?
46:22First, in human life.
46:24The latest unofficial estimates for this country put the death toll at 120,
46:28directly attributable to the very cold spell.
46:31The severe weather filled the nation's hospitals, and in the London area,
46:35the emergency bed service's red warning was in operation.
46:39Hospitals refused routine admissions so as to cope with emergencies.
46:43Babies and old people were particularly hit by the intense cold,
46:47but on the other hand,
46:48the rest of us have evidently had fewer common colds and flew this winter.
46:54Insurance claims for snow and ice damage are expected to top 15 million pounds.
46:59The road clearance bill is expected to come to over 20 million pounds.
47:03It's three million pounds at the most on average.
47:06And millions more will have to be spent in repairing the roads and motorways cracked by the freeze.
47:12Building and construction work has, of course, been at a standstill.
47:16In all, the interim estimate of the physical costs of the nation is said to be 150 to 200 million
47:23pounds.
47:24And many believe this to be an underestimate.
47:27But what the big freeze has shown is that the country is simply not geared to meet an abnormally savage
47:33winter.
47:33Techniques of snow clearance don't seem to have advanced much since the ark, let alone since 1947, the last major
47:40freezer.
47:41Many authorities still don't stockpile much rock salt, although a process has been developed for storing it in the open
47:47without it caking.
47:49Again, most county and borough surveyors are still saying that the expense of mechanized snow clearance isn't justified,
47:55although the cost of the most sophisticated piece of equipment is tiny compared with the millions this winter has already
48:01cost us.
48:01A big snow plower and blower, for instance, costs 7,000 pounds.
48:06And now that the power cuts are, we hope, behind us, are we going to forget about that gap in
48:11our electricity supply?
48:13When pushed to it, at the height of the power crisis, the electricity people said it would need 90 million
48:18pounds,
48:19the price, incidentally, of two Polaris submarines, to close the gap and give us a small margin of safety.
48:25Spreading this capital cost over 25 years, which is the normal accountancy procedure,
48:30it shouldn't add more than seven-pence halfpenny in the pound on every electricity bill, just the price of four
48:35candles.
48:37And what good has come out of the big freeze?
48:40So far, at least, one piece of parliamentary legislation is in the offering,
48:44and that is a long-last compulsory freeze-free domestic water system, interior plumbing, lagging, and so on.
48:51But only for new homes. It won't affect the 14 million old houses.
48:56Apart from that, we can only hope that the public and local authorities who are caught with their pants down
49:01will pull their socks up, if you see what we mean.
49:04For the rest of us, it's probably cured us of dreaming of a white Christmas for the next ten years
49:09or so.
49:10And for the history book, there's one more spectacularly cold winter to set beside the famous ones,
49:17like AD 764, 1684, 1740, 1881, 1940, and 1947.
49:27During the day, it's been snowing in most of southern England and Wales,
49:32and we're told it's freezing too.
49:34But at least we've been through the big freeze of 1963.
49:40Part One
49:49Part One
50:16What an extraordinary film.
50:19Amazing.
50:20And when you look at it, it's hard to imagine how we as a nation actually survived that.
50:26And if it happened today, I know one thing.
50:29There'd be a shovel shortage.
50:31But what that film didn't explain is what effect the big freeze had on our British wildlife.
50:38Winter is always a tough time for wildlife.
50:42It's not only the coldest time of year, but the days are really short and food is scarce.
50:47So wild creatures have to battle extra hard just to survive.
50:53Now some, like bats, hedgehogs and dormice, opt out altogether.
50:58They hibernate.
51:00Others migrate.
51:01Birds such as swallows and cuckoos leave our shores each autumn to spend their winter in sunny Africa.
51:10But many wild creatures can't hibernate or migrate, or they choose not to.
51:15For them, getting through the winter simply becomes a case of finding enough food to keep their energy levels up.
51:22For small birds, like these tits, that means eating about a third of your body weight every single day.
51:30It means feeding from dawn all the way through till dusk.
51:34Now in mild winters, finding food is relatively easy.
51:38But as soon as there's snow and ice on the ground, then things get really, really tough.
51:46Even during the fairly short cold snap in winter 2010, many creatures struggled to cope,
51:53as a thick layer of snow made it much harder for them to find food.
51:58All of our wildlife suffered, but birds were especially badly hit.
52:04So just imagine what it must have been like for them back in 1963,
52:09when it wasn't just incredibly cold, with snow covering virtually the whole country,
52:15but also it went on for so long.
52:20But some birds didn't hang around to see how bad things were going to get.
52:25Large flocks of lapwings, starlings and thrushes were seen heading south almost as soon as the first blizzards hit.
52:33But they were the lucky ones.
52:35Those birds that stayed to wait for the thaw were soon in big trouble.
52:41Imagine being a wren, weighing just a few grams.
52:45Well, wrens have to eat almost half their body weight a day just to get through the night alive.
52:51And when the entire landscape is covered with snow and ice, that's really, really difficult.
52:58And of course, it's not just wrens.
52:59All of those other birds that were trying to feed on invertebrates were in trouble.
53:04Things like goldcrests and long-tailed tits.
53:07And these birds didn't die in their tens of thousands.
53:11Sadly, they died in their hundreds of thousands.
53:16But it wasn't just the small birds that struggled to survive.
53:20As we saw, across the whole of the country, virtually every stream, pond, lake and river was frozen solid.
53:29The impact on Britain's water birds was absolutely catastrophic, cutting off their food supply and leaving them with nowhere to
53:38go.
53:38Now, back in 2010, we saw that birds that depended on water could radically change their behaviour in order to
53:46try and survive.
53:48Normally, shy birds, such as this bittern, became much less elusive as they searched desperately for something to eat.
53:55And water rails turned into ruthless predators.
53:58This one killed and ate an unfortunate meadow pipit.
54:02But of course, in 2010, we were only cold for a couple of weeks.
54:08Back in 1963, the whole of Britain was frozen to a standstill for two whole months, January and February.
54:17And our water birds really suffered.
54:20Now, when things get cold and nasty, species like kingfishers normally flee to the south and the west.
54:26But back in 1963, this didn't happen, particularly because the south and west, as we've seen, was hardest hit.
54:34But also because the sea froze.
54:37So kingfishers couldn't even find a refuge there.
54:43And it wasn't just the resident water birds that suffered.
54:47Every winter, Britain's coastal estuaries and marshes play host to millions of waders and wildfowl.
54:54Ducks, geese and swans that come here from the Arctic in search of a milder climate and plenty of food.
55:01Now, most years, that strategy certainly pays off.
55:04But how did they cope during the big freeze of 1963?
55:09Well, these wintering wildfowl did manage to last longer than many other species of birds.
55:15They are quite tough, and they also managed to find a few patches of open water where they could gather
55:20and feed.
55:21But as the winter went on, even they began to struggle.
55:27There's no doubt that for these birds, it was a really challenging time.
55:34So did any creatures actually benefit from the big freeze?
55:38Well, not surprisingly, with all of these birds dying, scavengers and predators did particularly well.
55:44So foxes, they were okay, and birds of prey like buzzards and kestrels, crows and magpies.
55:50But perhaps surprisingly, even some of our smaller species managed to get through by changing their diet.
55:57Starlings and sparrows, which normally eat grain, turned cannibal and started eating the corpses of their cousins that had died
56:05of starvation.
56:07By the beginning of March, with no sign of the snow melting, it must have seemed as if the big
56:13freeze would never end.
56:17But within a week, the thaw had finally begun, and it was time to count the cost.
56:22It was estimated that over half of all Britain's birds had died as a result of that terrible winter.
56:34Frankly, it's unimaginable, isn't it?
56:37And yet, really surprisingly, it didn't make that much difference to their numbers in the long term.
56:43Take the wren, for instance.
56:45Within just five years, it had bounced back to the levels its population was at before the big freeze.
56:52And by the mid-1970s, it had even become Britain's commonest bird.
56:57Now, it might seem odd that this big freeze didn't have the negative impact on our bird populations in the
57:04long term that we might have suspected.
57:06But then, you see, many of these birds have evolved to cope with these sorts of natural disasters.
57:12You see, they can have several broods a year and produce quite a lot of young.
57:16So as long as they can breed successfully, they can soon bounce back.
57:21But what would happen if we had another big freeze today?
57:25Which of Britain's birds would be the winners and which the losers?
57:30Well, our countryside has changed dramatically in the last 50 years,
57:34and as a result, I think that our farmland birds would be in big trouble.
57:39That's because, in our desire to produce cheap food, farming is now so efficient
57:45that there are virtually no spare seeds or grain left in the fields for the birds to eat.
57:52On the other hand, birds that visit our gardens would probably do much better than they did in 1963.
58:00We now provide enough food to give them a lifeline, even in the hardest winter weather.
58:06So, in just half a century, the span of my own lifetime,
58:11things have certainly changed for Britain's wildlife.
58:15What an extraordinary story of how we and our wildlife lived through the hardest winter in the last two centuries.
58:24Will it ever happen again?
58:25Well, given that we're experiencing more and more extreme weather events,
58:31which scientists are putting down to global climate change,
58:34I wouldn't be at all surprised.
58:36Goodbye.
58:48Dive into the warm waters of the Great Barrier Reef next,
58:51to then celebrate the best trashy movies with Inside Cinema, new at 10.
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