June is not normally considered a very eventful month weather wise: it is rarely the wettest of all the months – though this year it got off to a wet start – and never the hottest. Indeed we rather enjoy the gentle warmth and generally pleasant weather.
But from time to time, June throws up a curveball, in the shape of unusual and hard to predict meteorological events.
Of these, the widespread appearance of snow across England and Scotland on 2 June 1975 has been perhaps the best known. That year a cricket match at Buxton in Derbyshire had to be abandoned when “snow stopped play”. The West Indies player Clive Lloyd, who was born and brought up in tropical Guyana, later recalled that this was the first time he had ever made a snowball.
Also on a sporting theme, in June 1930 heavy rain, accompanied by bolts of lightning, soaked and terrified racegoers at Royal Ascot, causing flooding and killing one unfortunate bookmaker. Many years later, on 20 June 2002, that race meeting was interrupted by a whirlwind.
Waterspouts and tornadoes have also been recorded at this time of year. In 1760 the founder of the Methodist Church, John Wesley, wrote of a huge waterspout off Cornwall’s coast, seen late May. The waterspout, which he said “rose out of the sea near Mousehole”, knocked a rider off her horse, picked up 18 stacks of corn and a large haystack and scattered them “abroad”.
