1954 : Global Weirding In Europe

Posted on September 22, 2011 by Steven Goddard

http://trove.nla.gov.au/

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One Response to 1954 : Global Weirding In Europe

Blade says:

September 22, 2011 at 2:11 pm

Here is the plaintext …

The Advertiser (Adelaide, SA : Monday 26 July 1954)

TREVOR SMITH’S LONDON DIARY

U.K., Europe Have Worst Summer For Years

LONDON. July 25.

From London to Lisbon, from Paris to Prague with almost nowhere excluded, this year’s European ‘summer’ weather has been about the worst since records were first kept. Rains, floods, gales and snow have swept thousands of square miles when annual holidays should be at their peak and people should be wallowing in sunshine.

HOLIDAYS, crops and tempers alike have suffered, and the bill will run into some millions of pounds sterling.

Cancellations of bookings have brought a crisis in some areas, and hard-hit hoteliers and boarding house keepers in some places abroad and at home have been seeking legal redress.

But somewhere the sun is shining. Seven hundred holiday-makers have just returned to Britain with a rich suntan acquired not in the south, but, of all places, in the extreme north. They spent 13 days aboard a liner in the Arctic Circle.

Scientists say that the Arctic Ocean itself is warming up, and ships may be sailing it 25 years hence.

Explanations

As always happens when the weather is painfully adrift, victims are looking for explanations.

Inevitably atomic bombs exploding in Australia or Nevada or the Gobi Desert, get blamed by letter writers to the newspapers.

Other letter writers are counter-attacking.

One recalls that Lord Chesterfield wrote in June, 1767: — ‘Everybody has fires and their winter clothes as at Christmas.’

And the previous year there was not ‘one single day without rain’ – from March to August.

Other writers recall that during World War I, rain was blamed on the big guns in France and in World War II, on the barrage balloons.

Whatever and whoever is right or wrong, London has been having central heating in July, something never before remembered, and people are despairingly saying that they will post pone their holidays until Christmas, when midwinter ought to offer milder weather.

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