It went down in meteorological, social and cultural history as the long, hot summer of 1976. For those of us who lived through it, the three-month drought and associated heatwave conjure up memories of endless summer days, with blue skies and glorious heat.
Oddly, perhaps, few temperature records were broken that year – August 1990 and 2003 recorded higher peak readings. One difference, though, was that some of the hottest days were in June and July: 35.6C in Southampton, on 28 June, was the highest ever recorded in the UK for the month of June, while the highest overall temperature in summer 1976 was 35.9C in Cheltenham, on 3 July.
What made summer 1976 exceptional was both the relentless heat – it remains the hottest summer, overall, in recorded history – and the lack of rainfall: parts of south-west England saw more than 40 consecutive days without any rain. This led to what the tabloids dubbed a “plague” of ladybirds, as billions of them took to the skies in search of food.
But the weather did, eventually, break: and, of course, this happened on August Bank Holiday – just after the Labour government had finally appointed the luckless Denis Howell as “Minister for Drought”.
