BILL FOGGITT won international recognition for the accuracy of his quirky home-spun weather forecasts. Based on family records and on his close observations of the behaviour of animals, birds, plants and insects, his predictions equalled and on occasion bettered those supplied by professional forecasters, especially in the era before theultra-powerful computers became available.
Foggitt’s early attempts to champion the superiority of nature over multimillion-pound computers often attracted amused scepticism. But the unassuming Foggitt’s regular appearances on television made him a household name in his native Yorkshire — where people would chuckle about “Bill and his seaweed” — and then nationally.
A high point of his self-made career came in 1993 when he was invited by Professor John Gilbert of Reading University to participate in a project, based on remote sensing in science education, which would become a standard element in the national science curriculum.
Foggitt, whose family folklore was a significant factor in the project, was later described by Gilbert as a living legend who was still practising methods of weather forecasting used as far back as the 15th century.
William Foggitt was born in Sowerby, Thirsk, in 1913 into a family whose love affair with meteorology was already several generations old, dating back to 1830. His great-grandfather Thomas, awed by historic accounts of the disastrous River Tees flood of 1771 which caused great loss of life, began to study the weather preceding the flood and went on to compile a series of statistics, including wind direction and air temperature.
Advertisement
As time went on he noticed that the weather followed a pattern of cycles which, he claimed, led to climactic conditions “balancing out” over the years, and these observations were carried on by later generations of the family. Thomas’s son William extended his studies to botany and, with his friend John Gilbert Baker, became fellows of the Linnean Society. Baker went on to be curator of the Herbarium at Kew Gardens. The family’s private meteorological records were continued by William’s son, Benjamin (Bill Foggitt’s father), whose interests extended to detailed studies of the behaviour of birds.
Bill, the youngest Foggitt, would eclipse his better-qualified ancestors, at least in terms of media coverage. He overcame typhoid as a boy and eventually started work in his father’s chemists’ business, which at the time rivalled Boots. He was not, however, an apt apprentice and became interested in the Methodist Church, in which he was still active as a local preacher more than 50 years later. His attempts to join the Methodist ministry ended in failure, however, so he directed his ambitions to the Church of England, and attended theological college at Lampeter in Wales.
He served in the Army from 1942, and on return to civilian life was bitterly disappointed to be turned down by the Anglican Church. He married Winifred, a vicar’s daughter, and became a teacher in Stoke-on-Trent but failed to strike the right chord in that profession as well, and eventually undertook an assortment of jobs in Birmingham.
He and Winifred soon separated. They saw each other only once in 50 years but, being devout Christians, they never divorced, and Foggitt was at his wife’s funeral nearly five years ago.
Returning home to Yorkshire from Birmingham in 1966 he found himself out of work and then nearly lost a leg in a road accident outside his home.
Advertisement
His mother suggested that he study the family weather records and see if they could be put to good use. This proved to be a lifeline. Foggitt applied himself to all aspects of meteorological behaviour and renewed the observations of nature’s creatures in relation to the weather which he had begun as a youth in the country lanes around his home.
Before long his quirky observations about the behaviour of seaweed (which becomes slimy before rain) and pine cones (which close up when wet weather threaten) attracted attention, and Yorkshire Television gave him a regular slot alongside its own forecaster as an “alternative” weatherman. He based his long-range predictions on the invaluable family records.
YTV’s former forecaster, Bob Rust, later admitted that Foggitt’s predictions were often so accurate that until the arrival of more sophisticated equipment he and his colleagues became apprehensive when their predictions were pitted against Foggitt’s creatures. He noticed that when frogs spawned in the deepest water of a pond it predicted prolonged dry weather; that flowers protected their pollen by closing their petals before rain; that sheep moved down from the hills long before snow; and “lazy flies” tended to attach themselves to humans in thundery conditions. These observations attracted much media curiosity, but it was in the winter of 1985 that he finally found himself internationally acclaimed.
The Met Office had issued a warning that the prevailing Arctic conditions would continue, but Foggitt disagreed. He had seen a mole poking its nose above the snow, and he declared that warmer weather was imminent. He turned out to be right, and immediately found himself lionised by national television and radio. Camera crews from as far away as Japan, Germany and the US beat a path to his door, and a BT phone-in line for “Foggitt Forecasts” attracted callers from as far away as Australia. And Foggitt once beat Michael Fish in a newspaper-organised forecasting competition.
In recent years Foggitt, a kind and trusting man with little interest in money, was afflicted by failing eyesight and loss of memory, and, sadly, most of the family weather records were lost — some were even thrown away by mistake — though some material was saved by the Met Office at Bracknell.
Advertisement
Bill Foggitt, amateur weather forecaster, was born in June 11, 1913, and died on September 13, 2004, at the age of 91.