Britain’s Wild Weather – 1960
By Paul Homewood
Every year there seems to be a competition amongst the TV channels to see who can produce the most fraudulent documentary on Britain’s “wild weather”. The format is always the same – show a few clips of a storm, flood or bit of sunny weather, and claim that we never had anything like it before.
So far this year, however, they will be stretched to find anything to scare the public with. A nice summer that was nowhere near as hot as 1976, or for that matter 1826, and which was only the sixth driest. And that is just about it!
Heaven knows what Justin Rowlatt and his chums would have made of the 1960s, which, for anybody who is old enough to remember knows, showed what wild weather really looked like.
In an occasional series I will review the decade, starting with 1960.
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Britain’s Wild Weather in 1960
The year started with some heavy snow in mid-January, but nothing out of the ordinary. And the weather behaved itself throughout the next few months. However June brought a sign of things to come.
The month began dry and sunny, with temperatures reaching 85F. But this was followed by thunderstorms which led to extensive flooding, particularly in the Midlands. Towards another outbreak of thunderstorms spread from Dorset to Suffolk with exceptional rainfall:
The summer carried on going downhill. July was cool and wet, and so too was August. Heavy rain early in the month caused widespread and damaging floods in Sussex, with Brighton hit by two months of rainfall in 3 days. Later in the month it was to be Norther Ireland, SW Scotland and the Midlands which suffered disastrous floods:
The weather was to get much worse though, with a series of heavy rain systems crossing the country in September, causing more extensive flooding:
But it was Exeter which really bore the brunt at the end of September:
For the month as a whole, Exeter and the surrounding area received 250% of its monthly average rainfall.
People were entitled to think that it could not get any worse. But it did!
Statistically large parts of England had three times the average rainfall in October, which was the second wettest on record. The total rainfall for July to October was also said to be the highest on record:
But statistics only tell part of the story.
The South West, which had already suffered dreadfully in September, was hit by yet more exceptional rain at the beginning of October, and the South East was hit badly too:
And on the 7th, an almost unbelievable 7 inches of rain fell on Horncastle 5 hours. (This has since been confirmed by the Met Office as less than 3 hours):
There seemed to be no let up to the misery, as storms continued to batter much of England for the rest of the month:
Even Scotland did not escape:
November proved to be little better, with more extensive flooding, particularly in Kent and Sussex, and even a damaging tornado in Cheshire. The South West also continued to suffer with more renewed flooding:
The weather had one more trick up its sleeve, with December bringing some of the worst floods in history to South Wales:
As far as the weather was concerned, 1960 was a truly dreadful year for many in England and Wales. It was certainly as bad as anything seen lately.
We’ve seen the basic facts, but let’s finish with some of the British Pathe films of the time:
Exeter – October
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/floods-hit-the-west
Kent & Sussex – November
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/kent-sussex-floods-hit-peak
Hereford – December
https://www.britishpathe.com/video/deluge-over-britain
South Wales – December
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
How could this be? We had not thought up global warming/climate change/whatever yet.
We have had rain, rain, rain…..rain/cool; rain/hot, but rain since last spring in West Virginia. Finally we are having a nice October. The last week or so has been mostly dry, sunny and warm with no killing frost yet for me. Saturday evening (fall burning now on and cannot burn until after 5:00pm), I finally got my brush pile burned. I had been trying since mid-September, but too wet.
Fortunately, “weather” is less permanent than “climate change”.
Re. Hereford.
Only being around four and a half at the time, I don’t recollect these particular floods, but I do remember Belmont roundabout (what’s being shown in the film) being flooded on several occasions throughout the decade.
I was at school on the IoW in 1960 and I remember the rain very well. The playing fields were flooded to such an extent we were unable to play any sport for most of the Michaelmas term. The countryside was so water logged that even cross country running was out of the question.
I am just a bit too young to remember 1960, but I recall the great lee-wave gale in February 1962*, the winter of 1962-3, the exceptional dryness of 1964, the eight day barrage of thunderstorms in mid August 1967 which included the catastophic floods at Wray and Slaidburn, the violent thunderstorms of July 1968 when Bradford (Yorks) flooded and finally a nice heatwave in 1969. Makes me wonder whether “extreme” weather is more prevalent in a cooling period rather than in a warmer one.
(*although we lived near Keighley, 40 miles north of Sheffield where the greatest destruction occured, the experience was still frightening as gusts of wind slammed into the house, trees came down and next door’s garage ended up on our lawn.)
Oops. Should have said I WAS a bit too young in 1960!
My family moved from Devon to Yorkshire in the early 1969s, I think it was Jan/Feb 61. I was 7 years old but clearly remember the storm damage to buildings as the train passed through Sheffield.
Of course, I may be mistaken as I am repeatedly being informed by the MSM/BBC bad weather only started from circa 1990 onwards!
Some of us remember the terrible winter of 1946–1947, followed by the extreme summer of 1947.
1saveenergy:
YES INDEED.I remember it well. I was 12 at the time and my parents had just moved down south to a remote house on the edge of Dartmoor. I was at a boarding school near Liverpool, it was very cold but not a great deal of snow.
My parents were marooned for weeks and only survived as there was an hotel/club nearby able to keep them fed. The diesel generator worked fine but the access roads were covered up to almost the telegraph pole level and totally impassable.
When I eventually got home by rail, things were greatly improved but many items of furniture etc. had been lost in transit during the move due to major floods around Worcester I believe.
We survived by just blaming the weather without any hysteria about CO2 and mass hysteria. If I recall we called it RESILIENCE.
Before my time (vintage 1956), however, when my uncle passed away I found he and my aunt had kept a sort of scrapbook of their early post war years. In 1946 they had cycled with all their worldly possessions out from Hull to a disused air force base to set up home in what were glorified sheds with no power nor water/drainage supply. It makes one wonder how incredibly dire the accommodation must have been in the city at that time for anything at all to be better!
By the end of the year though they, and about 150 others, had set up a community with a water supply, cess pool drainage and an old Victorian steam ploughing engine providing a generator to recharge lead acid batteries recovered from old aircraft for electricity. They had somehow managed to have a coal fired cooking/heating system to supply hot water and keep a couple of rooms adequately warm…..and then came the winter of early 1947. For the 3 worst weeks the community was effectively cut off completely. Despite this they all somehow manged to stay warm, healthy and with enough to eat (albeit pick axing vegetables from the surrounding fields at times).
It does make you wonder what would happen these days under such harsh conditions.
I got married on 6th June 1960. We honeymooned along the west coast of Wales. It was wet but we didnt care. I kept temperature records in those days and every winter seemed to get colder than the last, apart from a few exceptions
Readers might be interested to know that Robertson NSW record daily rainfall is over two feet/640mm. This year’s total (measured at my place) is 3338mm to date. It was about as wet as this in 1950; average is about 1670mm.
Robertson is about 100 km south of Sydney, but at around 750 metres above sea level.