This week’s weather has been outrageous for June, and it’s even more shocking coming after a warm dry spring. In fact, spring was the warmest on record in Central England in temperature records dating back from 1659 — the longest weather archive in the world. This spring averaged 10.27C, beating the previous record of 10.23C in 2011.
Perhaps spring will be remembered most for being dry, hitting crops especially hard and raising fears of water shortages for many areas in summer, although that’s now a distant memory.
Summer has arrived wet and cool, but it’s not without precedent. In 1787, the writer and politician Horace Walpole was thoroughly fed up with the weather: “Our [British] summers are often, though beautiful for verdure, so cold, that they are rather cold winters.”
Walpole experienced a run of terrible summers, especially bad in 1768. That year began freezing cold, followed by disastrous floods in February before turning into an exceptionally dry spring. But it rained throughout the summer, as Walpole lamented on June 15, 1768 from his grand home at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, southwest London. “I perceive the deluge . . . It began here but on Monday last, and then rained near eight and forty hours without intermission,” he wrote. “My poor hay has not a dry thread to its back. I have had a fire these three days . . . The best sun we have is made of Newcastle coal. In short, every summer one lives in a state on mutiny and murmur, and I have found the reason: it is because we will affect to have a summer, and we have no title to such a thing.”
In fact, 1768 was the start of seven wet summers, possibly caused by a powerful volcanic eruption of Cotopaxi in Ecuador. That eruption shot up a veil of volcanic ash across the world that set off cold winters as well as wet summers. By 1774 Walpole had clearly had enough, “The way to ensure summer in England is to have it framed and glazed in a comfortable room.”