The Shipping Forecast by Meg Clothier: How to stay calm in stormy weather
The Shipping Forecast by Meg Clothier (BBC Books £16.99, 224 pp)
Why is listening to the Shipping Forecast on the radio so magically, perennially appealing – even though we’re unlikely ever to work on a deep sea trawler out in Rockall or Malin, force 7, gusting 8, SW?
It’s because, says author Meg Clothier: ‘It whispers to us of adventure, of a life less ordinary, while being every bit as comforting as tea and toast.’
It helps that the author of this delightful tribute to the Forecast – to tie in with its 100th anniversary this year – is an experienced sailor herself, so knows all about the wild storms of Biscay.
Indeed, the first time she and her brother sailed a boat alone, when she was 21, they met a force 7, gusting 8 – ‘sort of fun and sort of not’ her logbook wryly recorded.
Clothier starts off decoding for the layman and landlubber some of the shipping forecast’s evocative but mysterious phrases.
In practical terms, a ‘severe gale’ isn’t necessarily going to trouble a tanker or a container ship, she explains, but it could be a ‘total nightmare’ for a smaller boat. Throw in some wintry extras like ‘snow, poor visibility and icing’ and you have a serious danger to life.
But what exactly is icing? Well, in frigid enough conditions, ice builds up on the superstructure of a ship, as a Grimsby fisherman explains, and can turn a half-inch cable four inches thick in an hour. ‘We get the axes out and start chopping away. Too much top ice will turn the ship over.’
Founder: Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy invented an early version of the Shipping Forecast that we have come to love
The founding father of the Forecast was Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy. His initial forecasts were transmitted across mid-Victorian Britain by telegraph, then signalled to ships at sea with a weird contraption involving cones. Sounds dotty, but it worked.
FitzRoy eventually died by suicide in 1865, but has saved countless lives since with his brilliant innovation, and the largest of all forecast areas is named in his honour.
Clothier also entertains us with some shrewd estimates about how the Shipping Forecast might have sounded at key moments in our history.
From Julius Caesar’s own written accounts of his stormy invasion of Britain in 55BC, she suggests: ‘DOVER, cyclonic 5 to 6, increasing 7 or gale 8, occasionally severe gale later in west.’
A rather startling bit of our history she reminds us of is that when James Thomson wrote Rule, Britannia in 1740 – Britons never will be slaves – ‘Britons, in large numbers, very much were slaves.’ They were captured and enslaved by North African pirates, as was the fictional Robinson Crusoe, who spent two years a slave in Morocco.
Do the Lefty prudes who wish to ban Rule Britannia realise it’s one of the earliest anti-slavery protest songs? Oh the irony!
Closer to the present, Clothier writes movingly of the Fastnet tragedy in 1979, when the famous sailing race from Plymouth to Ireland and back, over 600 nautical miles, was hit by a terrifying storm 10. Of 303 boats that started out, only 86 finished, and 15 sailors drowned.
As landlubbers rarely appreciate, racing for a coastal haven doesn’t work once a storm is nearly upon you. About the last place you want to be is ‘close to land, in shallower water, in bad visibility’. Most ships ride out storms head on, far out to sea.
In danger?: A ‘severe gale’ isn’t necessarily going to trouble a tanker or a container ship but it could be a ‘total nightmare’ for a smaller boat.
The Shipping Forecast is one of our great institutions, robustly life-saving yet also oddly poetic, even ‘dreamy’, says Clothier, and her wonderful book closes with some evocative lines from poet Carol Ann Duffy:
‘Darkness outside. Inside the radio’s prayer –
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.’