![]() ![]() And all those whimsical nouns are real places, regions of the ocean around Great Britain named by the Met Office. Marine forecast guide via the MetĮventually Jefferson learned that numbers are wind speeds, directions refer to the wind and the isolated adjectives like “good” or “poor” are descriptions of visibility conditions. He just read the words in front of him as best he could. He was not a sailor and the forecast sounded like nonsense to him. At first, he didn’t even understand what he was reading. ![]() He had heard it as a radio listener, but never imagined he would be the one reading it. Peter Jefferson worked for the BBC for decades starting in the 1960s as a news announcer - and one of his jobs was to read the forecast. Various announcers have voiced these forecasts over the century since. Two years after the BBC was founded in 1922, their first Shipping Forecast went out. Eventually his forecasts were published in the newspaper, and while they were often ridiculed by readers at the time, they were pretty accurate, and they became indispensable for sailors and fishermen.ĭecades after his death, FitzRoy’s forecast would expand its reach and become a British spoken word love poem to the sea, all thanks to a new technology: radio. Worried that people might associate his predictions with some kind of esoteric witchcraft or superstition, FitzRoy avoided the term prophecy in favor of forecast, and coined the phrase “weather forecast.” He delivered his forecasts by telegraph around the United Kingdom, where signal flags were hoisted in harbors to warn ships heading out to sea. He wished he could have done more to warn people, and decided to devote his life to saving lives at sea by predicting the weather. The Royal Charter sunk, and over 450 people drowned. A big storm blew in and FitzRoy, who was sitting at home in London at the time, saw on his barometer that the pressure had dropped, but had no way to warn anyone. Many of the passengers on board were miners, returning home from the Australian gold mines. Then, one day in 1859, a ship called the Royal Charter was sailing from Australia to Liverpool. He had a barometer, and he would use it to try and figure out what was about to happen with the weather. So when he was appointed head of the nation’s new Meteorological Office, he poured all his energy into the study of air pressure. People were just beginning to understand the connection between air pressure and storms, which piqued the captain’s interest. In FitzRoy’s time, lots of ships sank at sea due to weather. HMS Beagle in the Straits of MagellanįitzRoy had a long, sometimes controversial career, but later in his life he became fascinated with the study of weather prediction.īarometric Prophecies An Admiral Fitzroy’s Storm Stick Barometer, signed Negretti & Zambra, Instrument Makers to Her Majesty, via Tennants He was the captain of the Beagle, the ship that brought Charles Darwin to the Galapagos. The story of this radio program starts (well before the BBC itself) in the 1850s with a man named Admiral Robert FitzRoy. Even now, as an adult, he sets his alarm so he can tune into the early morning forecast. People regard it as poetry.” Connolly grew up listening to the forecast. The Shipping Forecast is “part of the culture here,” muses Charlie Connolly, author of Attention All Shipping: A Journey ‘Round the Shipping Forecast. “It’s a much loved institution. “Viking, North Utsire southwesterly five to seven occasionally gale eight rain or showers moderate or good, occasionally poor.” Cryptic and mesmerizing, this is the UK’s nautical weather report. “And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency,” says the voice over the wire. Four times every day, on radios all across the United Kingdom, a BBC announcer begins reading from a seemingly indecipherable script.
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