Rain and bad light stopping play are the curse of cricket matches, but exactly 45 years ago extraordinary weather brought play to a standstill across much of England.
On 2 June 1975, snow an inch thick covered the pitch at Buxton in a match between Derbyshire and Lancashire, and snow stopped play at several other county cricket matches. Snowflakes even briefly fell on the Lord’s cricket ground in London.
Raw Arctic winds swept across the UK that day with -3.3C (26F) recorded at Gleneagles, in Perthshire, more like the depths of winter than early summer. Sleet was even reported as far south as Portsmouth, and although the snow melted quickly across southern areas of Britain, it lingered on the ground for a few days in parts of Scotland.
But maybe the snow on 2 June wasn’t such a big shock after all, following on from a very chilly May. That bitterly cold outbreak of weather of early June was then followed by another astonishing surprise on 6 June, when it turned into a heatwave.
And that extraordinary somersault in weather was followed by a long hot summer, in what became the precursor to the record-breaking scorching heat and drought of the famous summer of 1976.
