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The Rain Man
Brookland church out on the Walland Marsh (usually
lumped in with the more generically used name of
Romney Marsh) has some curious contents – a set of late
18th century weights and measures, a chest said to have
come from the Spanish Armada and the odd item shown
in the photograph below. What could it be? If you think
it looks rather like a sentry box, you’re quite close. It was
designed to provide shelter for the priest taking a funeral
service in the churchyard when the wind and rain were
whipping across the Marsh. And in particular to keep his
wig dry, for the hudd, or hud (presumably from hood) is
an 18
th
century Georgian design. The Brookland hudd
is a piece of plain and practical joinery just about light
enough to trundle out into the churchyard when needed
and it’s just about big enough for one man.
George Symons was born in Pimlico in 1838 and went
to the gorgeously named Normal School of Science,
which later became part of Imperial College, itself an
arm of the University of London, to study to become a
school master. Of fellow alumni, HG Wells became
interested in time travel and wrote stories; Brian May
became a rock star with Queen but George Symons?
Well George became the rain man. When we hear the
statement
since records for rain began
, those records
began with George, the rain man. Symons
was a meteorologist with the Board of
Trade at that time in British Victorian
history when this august institution was a
hotbed of innovative talent. Had there been
a staff canteen or God forbid a water cooler,
Symons may have rubbed shoulders with
such luminaries as John Burn, Edwin
Chadwick and Joseph Bazalgette. George
Symons was the godfather of rainfall
devising a pioneering system of getting
householders across the British Isles to
collect and measure rainfall so that annual
records could be compiled and so increase
our understanding of the weather. Because
of George Symons our modern day
television weather presenters can entertain
us with news that this has been the wettest
May or the driest January since records
began.
When Symons died in 1900 he was buried
in the über-fashionable Kensal Green
Cemetery in London, where over the
following century his headstone, much
rained on, became unreadable. Mark Weir
ran the Honister Slate Mine just a mile from
Seathwaite in the Lake District, which is
fittingly and officially the UK’s wettest
recorded place every year. The mountaintop
mine is also just a few miles from Keswick,
arm of the Board of Trade. The invention of
several barometers is attributed to him and
examples sometimes turn up in auction houses
inscribed with
Admiral Fitzroy’s special remarks
.
It was the dreadful loss of the passenger steam
clipper Royal Charter off the coast of Anglesey
with the loss of 460 lives in a terrible storm in
1859 (a 12 on the Beaufort Scale) that inspired
FitzRoy to develop charts to enable predictions to
be made. And it was FitzRoy who first used the
term
weather forecast
to describe his gale
warnings, which used the new telegraph system.
The year after the Royal Charter tragedy
FitzRoy’s first daily weather forecasts were
published in
The Times.
And the year after that
the hoisting of storm warning cones at principal
ports began and simple barometers known as
storm glasses were distributed to the many small
fishing communities around the British Isles.
In 2002 the shipping forecast area Finisterre was
renamed Fitzroy by the Meteorological Office in
honour of their founder and thus it is that he is
remembered on many nights in that most soporific
of British mantras:
Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy,
Sole, Lundy, Fastnet…. Zzzz.