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The First Weather Forecast Man
Gaon Hart did not go on to become a weather man,
today he’s a top lawyer with the Crown Prosecution
Service. The title of Britain’s first weather man goes to
Captain Robert FitzRoy, a rather fascinating chap.
From very aristocratic stock (his father was a fourth
great-grandson of Charles II and his grandfather was
the 3
rd
Duke of Grafton) he joined the Royal Navy aged
12 and served on the first voyage of HMS Beagle under
a Captain Pringle Stokes. From Tierra del Fuego he
brought home four natives including a boy he called
Jemmy Button, because he had, quite literally, bought
him for shirt buttons. FitzRoy stood for election as
Tory candidate for Ipswich but lost and went back to
sea on the second voyage of the Beagle in 1831, this
time as Commander. By now both his former Captain
on the Beagle, Captain Pringle and his uncle Viscount
Castlereagh had killed themselves and aware of a
tendency to depression within himself (which he called
the
blue devils
and which in the end did lead FitzRoy
to taking his own life too) and wary of the loneliness
of command FitzRoy asked Francis Beaufort at the
Admiralty to suggest a suitable gentleman companion
for the long voyage. Beaufort suggested the naturalist
Charles Darwin and the two men got along famously
during their five years together at sea although
FitzRoy’s mercurial and sometimes violent temper
didn't escape Darwin’s attention and earned him the
nickname
Hot Coffee
. Later Fitzroy spent two years as
Governor of New Zealand but was brought home early
for being too soft on the natives and was appointed
Superintendant of the Royal Naval Dockyard at
Woolwich. He finally made it to Westminster in the
1840s when he was elected Tory MP for Durham.
But it was as Beaufort’s protégé that he is remembered
today as the man who set up the “Met Office’ as an
them Daniel Defoe, but when Beaufort went on
to become Sir Francis Beaufort, Rear Admiral and
a top administrator in the Royal Navy in the 1830s
it was the Beaufort Scale that was adopted for
universal use.
The Beaufort Scale was first used officially during
Charles Darwin’s famous voyage on board HMS
Beagle under Captain Robert FitzRoy who was
later to set up Britain’s first Meteorological Office,
the Met Office, and give regular weather forecasts.
The modern Beaufort Scale, developed first and
foremost for ships out at sea, has adopted some
idiosyncratically British descriptions for land
conditions for each point on the scale.
Smoke rises
vertically
at Beaufort Number One (Calm, flat at
sea),
umbrella use becomes difficult
at Beaufort
Six (strong breeze, frequent foam crests) and
mobile homes and poorly constructed sheds are
damaged
at Beaufort Number 12 (hurricane, huge
waves, sea is completely white). How British is
that? Hurricane force winds and yet still time to
pour scorn upon your poorly built shed! And
without adding to the poor man’s burden it was a
keen caravanner, Mrs. Anita Hart from Hemel
Hempstead, who rang the BBC in October 1987 to
ask if there was a hurricane on the way. The Harts
were planning a trip in their caravan to Wales and
had rung their 21 year old son Gaon, who was
studying meteorology as part of his geography
degree at Manchester University for a weather
report. Gaon consulted the weather charts at the
university which at the time was
the
place for
meteorological study and told his mum there was
a hurricane on the way. She in turn telephoned the
BBC and the rest, as they say, is a piece of history
that Mr. Fish probably still wishes we’d all forget.
Beaufort
FitzRoy
Symons