If current indications from the weather charts prove to be correct, this week is going to be a washout. Rain bands are swirling around an entrenched atmospheric trough in the eastern Atlantic and promising to bring a soggy conclusion to the summer.
Statistically, August is a curious month. The highest temperatures ever recorded have all fallen in August, though overall it ranks as only the second hottest month of the year, a notch behind July.
It can produce some particularly foul days too. Arguably, the worst August day in the past 200 years fell on August 9, 1843, when intense thunderstorms drove through the southeast Midlands and East Anglia.
These thunderstorms wreaked havoc, with heavy rain, wind squalls, hail, and reports of tornados. Everything in the paths of the storms was damaged.
JJ Enstone, describing the arrival of the hail in a letter to the Oxford Journal, noted an “extraordinary roar, quite distinct from the intonation of thunder or the rushing sound of the wind which heralded the approach of the hail”.
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He went on: “All of the hailstones had a general ball-like or spherical form. When taken up in the hand the common observer would have stated them to be masses of smaller hailstones congealed together.”
Such was the devastation to the countryside, that the General Hail Insurance Company was formed to offer protection from the perils of extreme weather.
The insurance company’s corporate message to countryside and city dwellers during the winter of 1843 promised to “grant policies of insurance against loss by hail storm to crops of corn, turnips, and other farming and gardening produce, as well as glass in dwelling houses, hothouses, greenhouses, and other buildings”.
This fear of the weather prevailed enough to ensure that the company stood the test of time. It was eventually acquired by a company that was to subsequently become Norwich Union just before the turn of the century.