Of climates past: 1963, the last time the River Thames froze
By rob hopkins 8th December 2015
I don’t remember a winter as mild as the one the UK is currently experiencing. Today was only the second frost of the year and it’s the 9th of December. That comes, of course, in the context of what climatologists argue looks 97% likely to be the hottest year on record. My father passed away a couple of years ago, and when my sister and I were clearing out his house, we found lots of photos that he took (he was a keen photographer) when he lived in London in the 1960s. One set of rather beautiful photos capture an event which feels unimaginable today, the Great Freeze of 1963, when the River Thames froze. The photos are taken from the Hampton Court Road.
January 1963 was the coldest January since 1814, the last time the Thames had frozen. I share them today for several reasons, firstly because they are very beautiful photos, published here for the first time. Secondly in memory of my dear dad. Thirdly because the offer an insight into a very different climate, one we have left behind. And lastly because, as someone who has come off his bike several times on patches of black ice, I’m intrigued as to why anyone would think it a good idea to cycle on a frozen river?
11 Comments
In 1963 I was a 9 year old and remember well just how cold it was. I also remember we were all told, by government experts, that we were heading for a mini ice age. My mother ordered in extra ‘nutty slack’ and dad fixed clear plastic film on all the windows that rattled with every puff of wind.
Daft as it might sound today it was as serious to folk as climate change is today, the difference we didn’t have anything to blame.
Certainly no one superglued bums to pavement. We servived.
Superglue didn’t exist then nor did the means of measuring the climate damage that over population and consumption of resources has had on our planet. I don’t see the logic in the inference of the government being wrong then makes it so now. Even if one denies man made climate change isn’t it desirable to reduce pollution, waste, consumerism and green house gases.
I remember the winter of 1963 as I was at prep school in Ipswich. Our bottles of milk that we had at break were always frozen but we all made long slides in the playground. We made a giant snow ball which was about 5 feet high which we proposed to roll down a slope. It became too big to move though. It was a pity when the cold ended.
Excellent story !! Thank you for sharing. I am sure you dad would be well chuffed.
Did it freeze in 1947?
I was three years old and living in the eastern United States in 1963. I find this interesting because the eastern USA also had an extremely cold winter that year. I still have an early memory of that very cold winter. I don’t think we will be seeing winters like that again.
I remember ’63. I was born in ’48 and lived in north London so I was 14, 15 in the July, it was a very cold and very long winter. I also remember my grandmother, born in 1880, telling me tales that her grandmother had told her about the Thames freezing over in the early 1800’s. My now wife’s brother was a bricklayer and was off work the whole winter, you can’t build brick walls and houses in below freezing weather.
As I was young it meant little to me at the time, I do remember the snow, loads of it, I built a huge snowman in my garden almost as tall as me and there was still some of it left in the June. I also remember there were no snow days off school, as we have now, I had to walk to school every day through the snow. At the time it was great fun for kids, snowball fights, ice slides.
I’m going to add I don’t accept this global warming we are currently being scared with, if you look through history there have been cold periods and warm periods since records were kept. Historians speak of the “Greek cold period” from about 1500 BC. The “Roman warm period” from about 100 BC to about 600 AD, when grapes were grown in Britain and fine wines were produced. (We can barely do that now) The “dark ages cold period” 600 AD till 900AD. The “Medieval warm period.” from 900 to about 1300 AD then the “MIni ice age” from 1400 to 1800. I believe we are now just in another warm period.
What I remember about the winter of 1963 was watching the weather forecast for days on end hoping the temperature would rise above freezing – it didn’t. While there no games for most of the winter term because the ground was frozen solid, my grammar school in rural Worcestershire never closed. Curiously we also had no snow!
Re the Global Warming argument above: All this info is correct. However Ron omits to mention the fact that these previous climate changes resulted in many people dying from famines, despite there being far fewer people! The Great Famine of 1314-1317, where it rained almost every day in the UK is considered to have killed more in Europe than the later Black Death pandemic.
What is different now is the rate of temperature increase -far faster than before. All responsible scientists agree this will continue if we do not do something about it -which thankfully we can. If not there will be world wide massive crop failure with millions dying of starvation, as well as people will dying from the excessive heat, as they did in France in 2019. Perhaps Ron is one of the wealthy with their air-conditioning able to pay the high prices for what little food there is left?
Yes, anthropogenic global climate is a FACT, NOT a “theory.” Any Fool who denies it is claiming the Power to REWRITE the Common Table of Elements!
But Carbon doesn’t CARE what Fools think, or want. It just IS what it IS, and DOES what it DOES.
Re Richard Barney:
You are baiting and switching.
Global warming fears are separate from overpopulation and overconsumption, and environmental damage, unless you wish to conflate all those to trick people into actions that help your other causes, legitimate as they may be.
The reason the 1963 Thames freeze is a pertinent point is that the local climate (a 30 year average) is not stable. How much natural variation exists is still unknown. Computer models suggest CO2 is THE dominant factor since only 1950, with one 2002 paper I read, suggesting 1980. However, you and we were all told all (even >100%!) of temperature rise since 1850 is CO2. The AGW crisis has serious uncertainties in the science as well as the modeling. We also had “experts” saying England would no longer experience snow, a false expectation driven by a false confidence in modeling AS IT EXPLAINS shorter term conditions. We still don’t know how well the models will predict the next 30 years, and the IPCC is forthright about this: they offer NO predictions but only “scenarios “. And if you look at the last IPCC report, you will see it is no more confident on the outcome in 80 years since the first, despite 33 years of post-Gore research.
As for overpopulation etc, I am with you if you are saying our 1st world lifestyle can’t be extended to the planet’s population. You will be pleased to know the European populations (“White”) uniformly in a negative population growth situation. European immigrants have less than 2.1 kids per couple, down to 1.1 in some countries. That’s why UK, American and Canadian politicians push immigration numbers. For some strange reason, automation, AI, robotics and Smart Technologies can’t do what lower skilled workers from India can do. And for another strange reason, a declining population can’t handle a disproportionately declining GDP.
All said, nowhere is a country saying a reduction in population helps its citizens by concentrating its resources.
And, to give you more awkwardness, to promote a population reduction, one must be overtly racist: the only populations still expanding are bown and black (plus North American indigenous). Your (and that of Extinction Rebellion) call for an end to breeding is saying you want Brown and Black people to be given birth control pills or be sterilized on a massive scale. The rest of the world is already fizzling away.
Ironic, isn’t it.
In the late summer of 1962 I was 15 yrs old and I started work as an Apparentness Carpenter working on construction sites.
November of that year I was transferred to a large construction site (York Gate, London).
During the whole of that winter I worked outside in the snow.
My main job was to collect any unwanted wood and keep the sites braziers alight so the concrete did not frees.
It certainly hardened me up for future life.