One hundred years ago this month, Britain stood in silence to commemorate the first anniversary of the end of the “war to end all wars”.
November 1919 was – and remains – the UK’s coldest November on record. It was so severe it rivalled January 1963 and February 1947 as the worst cold snap the country had experienced.
The whole of autumn 1919 had been chilly because of a prevailing northerly airstream bringing Arctic weather to the UK, making it the coldest ever October.
But nothing prepared the country for the cold snap that struck at the end of the first week of November and remained for the rest of the month.
In the village of Braemar in Aberdeenshire, the site of the equal lowest temperature ever recorded in the UK (-27.2C, in January 1982), the mercury fell to -23.3C, with similar temperatures measured across a swathe of the Highlands.
Record lows in some parts of the country in November – across much of Northern Ireland, northern England and Wales – were often accompanied by heavy snow stretching as far south as the Isle of Wight.
Unusually, though December tends to be colder than November, the following month was mostly wet and mild.
