FitzRoy

"West backing south 4 or 5, occasionally 6 for a time"


You know where you are with the Shipping Forecast. It's up there with bangers & mash, Wimbledon, Marks & Spencer, roast beef & Yorkshire pudding, queuing, rain... Good old British staples that are missed by & yearned for by expats in all four corners of the globe.

I was brought up listening to it, despite living 63.9 miles from the closest coast! It was, on father's good authority, the weather forecast to be relied upon, regardless of whether you were bobbing along in a boat on the English Channel or Bob on a roof in West London. I guess if you spent all your working hours out in the elements 30-40ft above ground, you would appreciate advance warning of a gust getting up! I've been fascinated by it ever since.

2017 saw the 150th anniversary of the Shipping Forecast. Issued by the Met Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, it's broadcast by Auntie Beeb on Radio 4 four times a day. We Brits often forget that we are an island nation and, as such, how crucial the forecast is for our seafarers and those using our open waters. Fishermen, cargo ships, cruises, energy providers -- all indebted to a tragedy off our coast nearly 160yrs ago. October 1859 and the British registered Royal Charter had set sail from Melbourne, Australia bound for Liverpool. The voyage had been uneventful until the night of 25-26 October: as they rounded the north east coast of Anglesey, the stormy weather progressed to Hurricane force 12 and, despite all attempts, she was overcome by the sea as she hit the rocks.

450 souls perished that night and, as a result, Vice Admiral Robert FitzRoy, a protege of Francis Beaufort, set about developing charts for weather predictions: for what has become another staple of the British institution, the weather forecast. Himself a seafarer, having joined the Royal Navy aged 13, FitzRoy was to later become the Commander of HMS Beagle and undertook a survey expedition with Charles Darwin, a journey that would take 5 years and take them to South America, the Galapagos,  Tahiti, the Antipodes and home via South Africa. To think, how huge the world must have been back then! It's nothing now to circumnavigate the globe and how simple it has become. The Vice Admiral most certainly had the knowledge and the experience so was well equipped in his quest to make shipping safer from the elements and a daily weather forecast began being published in The Times from 1861. All thanks to him.

Of the 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles:
9 are named after islands;
6 are named after sandbanks;
6 are named after estuaries;
2 are named after islets;
2 are named after towns;
1 is named after a curve on the North East Europe coastline;
1 is named after the northern most tip of Ireland;
1 is named after a Sea;
1 is named after a Cape;
1 is named after a Bay.
And, in 2002, after 53 years of broadcasts, we heard the last referral to Finnisterre as it passed into history and was replaced by FitzRoy, after the great man himself.

You can catch an episode on BBC Radio 4 (LW) daily at the following times: 0048; 0520; 1201 & 1754. Tune in and enjoy.