THE EXE FROZEN

It is no secret that the world is warming but the degree (le mot juste!?) to which winters in Exeter have changed is surprising,

 Mr James Commins, the corresponding tobacconist,  whose Reminiscences of Exeter Fifty Years Ago were first published in 1877, addresses his younger readers:   "The young reader must understand,"  he writes, "the winters were much more severe than now;  skating almost a certainty, and snow falling at various times for two or three days and remaining on the ground for several weeks."  

Have not old people been saying something like this to young  people for ever?  And were not the summers always sunnier?  Mr Commins is remembering the early years of the century, perhaps the same hard winters that inspired Dickens' white Christ masses (no other plural seems to me satisfactory) in Pickwick,  Christmas Carol  &c.    In Dickens' day not so old Exonians could tell tall tales, by way of example, of the excessive fall of snow of 1751 when the snow in Devon was three foot deep  and there were many melancholy accidents, waggons overturned, coaches axle-deep on the roads, sheep lost on the farms, extensive damage to property and death through accident..   

The  Januaries, however, of Mr Commins' own times seem severe enough to us today.  There was a heavy fall of snow on New Year's Day 1880 and the Exe froze in 1881.  Typical is the report of Trewman's Exeter Flying Post of January  4th  1871:  The Exe had again frozen over and "New Year's Day and Christmas Day were very much alike, and neither of them differed in any material point from the six days which intervened;  Sunday was, in fact, the twelfth day of hard frost." 

In February 1855,   the Gloucester Journal  had reported: "The whole of the country has alike been influenced by the long-continued frost.  The poor have suffered severely by being thrown out of  employment, and the prosperous and well-to-do have enjoyed themselves by various amusements on the ice,  The tiver Exe was frozen over at Exeter, and a dinner for a convivial party was cooked on the ice by means of a gas-stove; games of skittles and other amusements have taken place, and skaters have abounded on various parts of the river."

I  think it likely that even some of 'the poor' found time for fun and games on the ice but two centuries ago newspapermen, as today, liked to demonstrate a social conscience and to signal their own virtue,  not that I doubt there were enough citizens who suffered from the cold.   Skittles on the ice sounds fun and one would certainly have liked to have had an invitation to that convivial dinner-party.

There have been notably hard winters since then  but the trend is  clear.   Today as I write, the sun is shining and the temperature is at seven degrees centigrade - positively balmy!