Weatherwatch: hard times in the bitter winter of 1947

Rush hour traffic chaos along Oxford Street, London, in winter 1947, when snow and ice meant only one side of the road could be used. Photograph: PA Archive/PA Photos

I’m (just) too young to remember the big freeze of 1962-63, the hardest winter of the 20th century. But my late mother used to tell me about what she remembered as an even worse winter: 1946-47. There were two reasons why this winter was so tough.

A bus forces its way through the floodwater at Bray in Berkshire in March 1947, as the snow and ice of the preceeding month melted. Photograph: Fox Photos/Getty Images

The second world war had ended less than two years earlier, and food rationing was still in force. Another reason the cold weather hit people so hard was that it came so late. December 1946 and January 1947 were chilly, but nothing out of the ordinary. But February 1947 was one of the coldest months on record. The effect on people was bad; for Britain’s birdlife it was catastrophic. Small birds need to eat between one third and one quarter of their body weight each day just to survive; and as the winter went on, their fat reserves were used up. So, when the freeze began, they were already at a dangerously low ebb. Finally, around the middle of March, the snow and ice began to melt and the weather returned to normal. But by then, tens of millions of birds were dead.