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.
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