A beautiful homage to the poetry of the Shipping Forecast
The Shipping Forecast was first broadcast on radio in 1924, and Meg Clothier begins her book of the same name – written to celebrate the centenary – with a succinct and insightful summary of the forecast’s appeal. It is, she says, “beautiful and useful. It’s saved lives; it sparks joy. It’s unapologetically geeky, but always stylish and slick. It whispers to us of adventure, of a life less ordinary, while being every bit as comforting as tea and toast.”
Clothier writes beautifully about the forecast’s poetic, literary and quasi-mystical aspects, and the way that, twice a night on BBC’s Radio 4, it floats an idea of “fortress Britain, a little world apart, moated by water, walled by weather, [lying] somewhere between fiction and fantasy.” These broadcasts, she says, go out “at the liminal hours, at 0048, when true night begins, and at 0520, when night’s shadows flee”. The forecast is “part of the hypnagogia, that strange interregnum when we’re not quite awake, not quite asleep, when our conscious minds no longer have a firm hand on the tiller of reality, but have yet to quit the deck to take a watch below... This neverland is a precious place, and the Shipping Forecast is our pilot, our psychopomp, our Charon.”
It’s also “a slipway to understanding a surprising amount of our history and our culture, our literature and our lore”. FitzRoy, the largest of the 31 areas covered by the forecast, is named after the forecast’s founder Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, whom Parliament laughed at after he claimed to be able to predict the weather. (Perhaps they too had had enough of experts). The FitzRoy area was Finisterre until 2002, when its renaming inadvertently invalidated the final couplet of Carol Ann Duffy’s evocative Prayer: “Darkness outside. Inside, the radio’s prayer/ Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.”
Clothier brings pivotal moments from history to life by imagining what the forecast might have said were it around at the time. Try the Spanish Armada, in August 1588: “Humber, Thames, Dover, south or southwest, six to seven, showers, moderate, occasionally very poor.” The fleet were undone not just by Sir Francis Drake but also the caprices of the weather: “the wind blew strong during the night, and the Armada ran blind before it.” Or, exactly a century later, when William of Orange’s invasion was temporarily halted by “German Bight, Humber, Thames, south to southwest five to six, veering westerly seven or gale force eight later.”
With references as varied as Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Tennyson’s Crossing The Bar, J G Ballard’s The Drowned World and Blur’s This Is A Low, there’s something here for everyone. But at around 200 pages of reasonably large and well-spaced type, the book feels way too short for Clothier’s ambition and skill: a historical novelist and former Moscow journalist, she’s a writer of some hinterland.
Here, however, she skitters fast and wide like a pond-skater across shallow waters, barely skimming the surface of one topic before hastening onto the next: there are just two pages about the Second World War anthrax experiments on Gruinard Island, three on the micronation of Sealand, and six about the 1979 Fastnet race, when 15 sailors were killed in savage weather.
This last in particular feels like an opportunity missed. Like many others, I instinctively think of that race every time I hear the name, and what little Clothier does write of it captures well the unfolding nature of the disaster (“Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea, south to southwest veering westerly seven to severe gale nine, locally storm ten in Fastnet”), the impossibility of recalling the boats once they were out on the open sea, and the fact that the challenge of rough conditions is one of the things which most draws sailors to ocean racing.
Of her own encounter with a force 10 – she has sailed from England to Alaska – Clothier writes “when the breaking cross-sea reared up to port, 20, 30, 40, God only knows how many feet high, in that frozen moment of time before we were knocked flat, a part of me recognised it, a part of me thought, aaaaah, there you are, I’ve been waiting for you”.
It’s passages like that which make me wish she’d written much more: she’s easily a good enough writer to have done so. But if the worst you can say of a book is that it should have been twice the length, there is much praise in that faint damnation.
The Shipping Forecast is published by the BBC at £16.99. To order your copy for £14.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books