“Hot Tuesday” was one way of summing up yesterday’s weather across much of the UK, as hot air was drawn up from the near Continent and Spain, which is withering under a torrid heatwave and recently broke its national highest temperature record (Weather Eye, July 15).
It may sound like a pithy tabloid headline, but Hot Tuesday was the name coined for a heatwave 310 years ago today, on July 19, 1707. We don’t know exactly how hot it was, but the Rev William Derham in Upminster, Essex, described how the day “was so excessively hot and suffocating, by reason there was no wind stirring, that divers persons died, or were in great danger of death, in their harvest-work,” he recorded in the pamphlet Physico-Theology. “Particularly one who had formerly been my servant, a healthy, lusty, young man, was killed by the heat; and several horses on the road dropped down and died the same day.”
Derham was a keen scientific observer and kept a daily register of weather for Upminster. He was one of the first people in England to keep regular records of rainfall. He found that Upminster received 19in of rain annually, slightly less than the average for Essex, but about the same as Paris. Apart from his pioneering scientific work, he also rose in the church ranks and became a canon of Windsor.
As for Hot Tuesday, it was part of a short-lived heatwave that lasted from July 18 to 22. As so often happens in Britain, this ended with a bang with thunderstorms — as happened this week. Another interesting parallel with this month so far is how the weather of July 1707 fluctuated. It started out windy and wet early in the month before turning hot and finally ending in a thunderstorm, “a tempest of thunder great and loud, lightning, rain and hail”, as described in A General Chronological History Of The Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, &c , which added that much of August 1707 was cold.
