The big freeze

Predicting last week’s raging gales would subside in time for the Saturday football programme, a BBC weatherman forecast, nicely I thought, ‘a weather-free sports weekend’. Sixty years ago this week it was by no means that as an unrelenting 48-hour Arctic blizzard on Thursday and Friday, 23 and 24 January 1947, entombed  Britain in a monochrome inertia. It froze solid, and for the next 40 days and nights, only twice and by a fraction — on 11 and 23 February — did the temperature on the Air Ministry roof edge above freezing. Skaters waltzed on the Tyne, the Trent and the Thames; above the latter, wartime totem Big Ben couldn’t even ‘bong’, its hammer ice-glued to the bell for a month. I was a frostbitten nine-year-old, iglooed in a Welsh borders’ prep school where, by dawn rollcall for morning mass, the bedwetters found themselves frozen to their sheets. We were sent out by day to tear boughs from trees and drag them back for the schoolmaster-monks to light fires in the hearths of their monastic cells. When we ran out of porridge and potatoes, aircraft from RAF Hereford dived low to drop food supplies as if we were cattle. The monks couldn’t have sent us home if they’d wanted: roads stayed impassable; railway trains buried in drifts were simply abandoned; factories were closed, hundreds of thousands laid off work; no gas, no electricity, no mail. On 1 January, the Attlee government had gleefully achieved its ‘sacred’ nationalisation of the coal mines. Cruelly, by 31 January every shovel of it remained icebound at the pits. 

And sport, as those of you of a certain age will teeth-chatteringly recall, was most assuredly not ‘weather-free’. The 1946-47 winter was the first ‘proper’ postwar League football season.