Hardy cyclist David Joel cycling on a frozen Thames near Windsor Bridge in London during the 1947 cold snap
Writing in Master Resource, Robert Bradley Jr noticed a recurring theme, and we should learn from history.
For the future Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, growing up in Penge, South London, the atrocious weather meant that his bricklayer father was laid off work and no money came in. “There wasn’t enough food to go round, so he’d hit a couple of us, send us to bed without any dinner,” one of Bill’s brothers recalled. ‘Get to bed, don’t argue!’”
The rationing coupons that still had to be presented for everything from eggs to pieces of scraggy Argentine meat, from petrol to bed linen and “economy” suits, seemed far more squalid and unjust than during the war.
That was quite the winter in the UK.
The UK hardship was documented by David Kynaston in his January 2010 Daily Mail piece, Cheer Up! At Least it’s Not 1947.
On Thursday, January 23, snow began to fall in the South East. It was the start of Britain’s most severe and protracted spell of bad weather during the 20th century.
Housewife Florence Speed was one of millions who shivered. ‘I was frozen today,’ she noted in her diary. ‘Gas is on at such low pressure. Worked with scarf over my head, mittens on, and a rug round my legs.’
The big freeze continued to tighten its grip. By the 29th, the coldest day for more than 50 years, poor Florence was borrowing a balaclava to wear in bed.
She was not the only one to feel the cold. The lights went out all over the country; electricity was off for long spells; gas in most big cities was at about a quarter of its normal pressure; and amid huge snow drifts, transport virtually ground to a halt.
‘Wearing my snow boots and fur-lined coat I was not once warm,’ grumbled architectural historian James Lees-Milne.
‘All my pipes are frozen, so a bath or a wash is out of the question. WC at the office frozen likewise. And we live in the 20th century. Even the basic elements of civilisation are denied us.’
A visitor to London at this miserable time was the author of Goodbye To Berlin, Christopher Isherwood, over from America for the first time since before the war.
He felt that Londoners themselves ‘didn’t seem depressed or sullen’ – though ‘their faces were still wartime faces, lined and tired’, while ‘many of them stared longingly at my new overcoat’ – and his only criticism of their prevailing stoicism was that ‘perhaps the English had become a little too docile in their attitude toward official regulation’.
By contrast, he found London’s physical shabbiness ‘powerfully and continuously depressing’. As for the snow, he said, ‘it soon assumed the aspect of an invading enemy. ‘The newspapers spoke of it in quasi-military language: “Scotland Isolated”, “England Cut in Half”… everybody in England was shivering. I remember how the actors played to nearly empty houses, heroically stripped down to their indoor clothes, while the audience huddled together, muffled to the chins in overcoats, sweaters and scarves. […]
‘We endured with misery and loathing the continual fuel cuts, the rooms private and public in which we shivered in our exhausted overcoats, while the snow blizzards swept through the country again and yet again.
‘Were there to be no fruits of victory? The rationing coupons that still had to be presented for everything from eggs to pieces of scraggy Argentine meat, from petrol to bed linen and “economy” suits, seemed far more squalid and unjust than during the war.
‘Worse, still, to my increasingly disillusioned eye, was the kind of mean puritanism that the newly triumphant Labour MPs and their officials appeared to have decided was the proper wear of the day. Too many of them seemed to think there was a virtue in austerity and shabbiness, in controls and restrictions.’
The snow continued. On February 3, there was a heavy fall in the north and Midlands. Retired teacher Mary King noted in Birmingham: ‘Tonight, 17,000 employees will be idle at the Longbridge Austin Motor Works through lack of fuel. Many other firms are in the same plight. It is a dreadful thing to face.’
Two days later, her anxiety deepened: ‘One thinks of the shortage of fuel, and home comforts, such as blankets & sheets – the scarcity of food – and the unemployment of thousands of workers in factories due to lack of coal materials. Never in my lifetime have I known such a period of history.’
There’s much more at the link and it’s very interesting. But what did I mean about learning from history? This week, in Houston, Texas, and it’s cold there as it is all across North America, rolling blackouts are happening, just as they did in 1947 in the United Kingdom, and as they do every summer in California, and as have been announced here in Nebraska as well. where we saw 0° F for the first time in most of a week today. In each of these cases which have never happened before, Houston is, in fact, Texas’ energy capital, what is going wrong? Well in every case, it is down to government interference. Theodore Vail’s brilliant idea of regulated monopoly in the case of utilities (he was head of AT&T at the time) in return for universal service has been violated by the government mandating ‘renewable’ energy. What happened in Texas, and I suspect Nebraska, where 180, or more mile long trains of coal traverse daily, is that the windmills have frozen up.
You see there is a direct correlation between coal (or gas) and baseload power, which is always available, renewables are not and cannot be made to be. And so here in the energy rich United States, we are watching our power being shut off some days because our green idiot government has decided that we should use windmills, even frozen ones, and solar at night to reduce the amount of energy.
The results will be the same or worse than they were in Britain in 1947.