Saint Swithin’s Day.

St Swithin is not an Irish saint but he is well known in Ireland because of the folklore associated with his name. This Wednesday is the 15^th July and in the Christian calendar it is also known as Saint Swithin’s Day. According to an ancient tradition, if it rains on St Swithin's Day, it will rain for the next 40 days.

Saint Swithin was the Bishop of Westminster in England in the ninth century between 852 and 862. He was well known for building churches and restoring old ones, anonymously repairing them at his own cost.

He was reported as being something of a humble man who preferred to travel on foot rather that in a grand carriage which befitted the style of Bishop’s and when he hosted banquets he would invite poor peasants rather than the rich. Just before he died in 862, he asked to be buried outside the walls of Winchester Cathedral, so the rain would fall on his grave and the people of Winchester would walk above him. He wished to be buried as an ordinary man in the graveyard and not a fine tomb. His wishes were granted.

However, nine years later on 15 July 971, following the orders of King Edgar, Bishop Ethelwold and his monks moved Swithin’s remains to a new shrine inside Winchester Cathedral. A great storm was said to have developed during the moving of his body and it continued to rain for 40 days.

The countryside was flooded and the monks beseeched St. Swithin to intercede for them. It's said that he appeared to one of his monks and revealed to him how displeasing it was to God to spend their time in useless expenditures of time and money which might easily be spent with more advantage in the relief of the poor and needy; he also forbade the monks to ever interfere with his remains again.

People said that the saint in heaven was weeping because his bones had been moved away from the ordinary people. For going against his dying wishes it was believed that his curse was forty continuous days of rain.  In AD 963, the work on the mausoleum was finally completed, but, by then, the legend of St. Swithin as a rain-saint was firmly established. The shrine was destroyed in 1538 by King Henry VIII' s men during the Dissolution of the Monasteries.

The legend made its way to Ireland during the middle ages and is still remembered today in the words of the following rhyme.

St Swithin’s Day, if it does rain
Full forty days, it will remain
St Swithin’s Day, if it be fair
For forty days, t'will rain no more."

While most of us would rather not see rain on July 15th, apple-growers hope for it on this day, as it is believed that the saint is watering the crops. Some apple growers will tell you that if it fails to rain on Saint Swithin’s Day, the apple-crop will be a poor one. They also suggest that no apple should picked before July 15th and all apples growing at this time will ripen.

So if you are praying for sunshine, then may your prayers be granted. However, if you're in an area of drought, may you be blessed with a wet St. Swithin’s Day!

Sadly for those who like the romance of such folklore, there is no evidence to back up the prophecy.  It has been put to the test on 55 occasions by the Meteorological Office in the U.K., when it has been wet on St Swithin's Day and 40 days of rain did not follow.

However, the legend remains popular and even if no one takes it seriously, it usually gets an airing every on St Swithin’s Day every year.  So my advice to you would be:

If on St Swithun’s day it really pours
You’d be better off to stay indoors.

Oidhche na Gaoithe Móire. Part Two.

Oidhche na Gaoithe Móire. The Night of the Big Wind (Part Two).

Bridget Mooney and her four young brothers were putting the final touches on a large snowman outside their wooden cabin in County Mayo when the hurricane struck. The Mooneys did not know the hurricane was coming. Nobody in Ireland knew.

Today, we get on first-name terms with our hurricanes long before they threaten Irish shores. Charlie and Katrina, for instance. We watch them coming in on the weather forecast and we know it’s time to wrap up warm.

However, 170 years ago, on 6th January 1839, nobody even knew what a hurricane was. That night, the entire island of Ireland was subjected to a tempest of such ferocity that it became the date by which all other events were measured. The Night of the Big Wind - known as ‘Oiche na Gaoithe Moire’ - was the JFK assassination or the 9/11 of the 19th century. It was the most devastating storm ever recorded in Irish history and made more people homeless in a single night than all the sorry decades of eviction that followed it. If there was one place you didn’t want to be that dreadful Sunday night, it was inside a wooden cabin in County Mayo.

The calm before the Big Wind struck was particularly eerie. Most of the eight million people living in Ireland at the time were preparing themselves for Little Christmas, the Feast of the Epiphany. The previous day had seen the first snowfall of the year; heavy enough for the Mooneys to build their snowman. By contrast, Sunday morning was unusually warm, almost clammy, and yet the air was so still that, along the west coast, voices could be heard floating on the air between houses more than a mile apart.

At approximately 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the rain began to fall and the wind picked up. Nobody could possibly have predicted that those first soft raindrops signified an advance assault from the most terrifying hurricane in human memory.
By 6 o’clock, the winds had become strong and the raindrops were heavier, sleet-like, with occasional bursts of hail. Farmers grimaced as their hay-ricks and thatched roofs took a pounding. In the towns and villages, fires flickered and doors slammed. Church bells chimed and dogs began to whine. Fishermen turned their ears west; a distant, increasingly loud rumble could be heard upon the frothy horizon.

Mrs Mooney shouted for her children to come inside this instant. At Glenosheen in County Cork, a well-to-do German farmer called Jacob Stuffle began to cry. At Moydrum Castle in County Westmeath, 78-year-old Lord Castlemaine decided to turn in early and go to bed. In the Wicklow Mountains, a team of geographic surveyors headed up by John O’Donovan, finally made it to their hotel in Glendalough; they had been walking all day, often knee-deep in snow. Sailing upon the Irish Sea, Captain Smyth of the Pennsylvania studied his instruments and tried to make sense of the fluctuating pressures.

By 10 o’clock, Ireland was in the throes of a ferocious cyclone that would continue unabated until 6 o’clock in the morning. The hurricane had roared across 3000 miles of unbroken, island-free Atlantic Ocean, gathering momentum every second. It hit Ireland’s west coast with such power that the waves actually broke over the top of the Cliffs of Moher. Reading contemporary accounts, the impression is that if we did not have such magnificent cliffs forming a barrier along our west coast, the entire country would simply have been engulfed by water. The noise of the sea crashing against the rocks could be heard for miles inland, above the roar and din of the storm itself. The earth trembled under the assault; the ocean tossed huge boulders onto the cliff-tops of the Aran Islands.

Perhaps the most terrifying aspect of the hurricane was that it took place in utter darkness. People cannot have known what was going on. The wind churned its way across the land, extinguishing every candle and lantern it encountered. The darkness was relieved only by the lightning streaks that accompanied the storm and the occasional blood-red flicker of the aurora borealis burning in the northern sky.

All across the country, hundreds of thousands of people awoke to the sound of the furious tempest, their windows shattered by hailstones, their brick-walls rattling, their rain-sodden thatched roofs sinking fast. As the wind grew stronger, it began to rip the roofs off houses. Chimney pots, broken slates, sheets of lead and shards of glass were hurtled to the ground. (Rather astonishingly, someone later produced a statistic that 4,846 chimneys were knocked off their perches during the Night of the Big Wind).

Many of those who died that night were killed by such falling masonry. Norman tower houses and old churches collapsed. Factories and barracks were destroyed. Fires erupted in the streets of Castlebar, Athlone and Dublin. The wind blew all the water out of the canal at Tuam. It knocked a steeple off Carlow Cathedral and a tower off Carlow Castle. It stripped the earth alongside the River Boyne, exposing the bones of soldiers killed in the famous battle 150 years earlier. Roads and railway tracks in every parish became impassable. All along the Grand Canal, trees were pulled up by the roots and hurled across the water to the opposite bank.

The Mooney’s timber cabin was one of thousands destroyed by the storm. Surviving inhabitants had no choice but to flee into the pitch-black night in clothes that were presumably soon utterly drenched by the intense rains and snows which accompanied that cruel, piercing wind. The Mooney family sought shelter in a hedge outside Castlebar; they survived the night but the parents caught a fatal fever and died soon afterwards, leaving five homeless orphans.

Farmers were hit particularly hard. Hay-ricks in fields across Ireland were blown to pieces. Wooden fences and dry-stone walls collapsed, allowing fearful livestock to run away. Sheep were blown off mountains or killed by tumbling rocks. Cattle were reported to have simply frozen to death in the fields. The next morning, one of Jacob Stuffle’s neighbour recalled seeing the distraught German ‘standing high up on a hillock looking with dismay at his haggard farm … his comfortable well-thatched stacks swept out of existence. Suddenly, he raised his two hands, palms open, high over his head, and looking up at the sky he cried out in the bitterness of his heart, in a voice that was heard all over the village 'Oh, God Almighty, what did I ever do to You and You should thrate (treat) me in that way!'

Stuffle was not the only man who believed the hurricane, occurring on the night of the Epiphany, was of Divine origin. Many saw it as a warning that the Day of Judgment would soon be here. Some believed the Freemasons had unleashed the Devil from the Gates of Hell and failed to get him back in again. Others maintained this was simply the night the English fairies invaded Ireland and forced our indigenous Little People to disappear amid a ferocious whirlwind. (Irish fairies, of course, are wingless and can only fly by calling up the sidhe chora - the magic whirlwinds).

The well-to-do did not escape; many mansions had their roofs stripped off. Lord Castlemaine was fastening his bedroom window when the storm blew the windows open and hurled him ‘so violently upon his back that he instantly expired’. His brother-in-law, the Earl of Clancarty, later reported the loss of nearly 20,000 trees on his estate at Ballinasloe. Similar figures came in from other landed estates in every county; one landlord declared his woods were now ‘as bald as the palm of my hand’. On January 6th 1839, timber was a valuable commodity. 24 hours later, so many trees had fallen that timber was virtually worthless. Millions of wild birds were killed, their nesting places smashed and there was no birdsong that spring. Even crows and jackdaws were on the verge of extinction.

In his hotel room in Glendalough, John O’Donovan was fortunate not to share Lord Castlemaine’s fate. He was struggling with the shutters when ‘a squall mighty as a thunderbolt’ propelled him across the room. When he viewed the damage next morning, he described it as if ‘the entire country had been swept clean by some gigantic broom’.

Dublin resembled ‘a sacked city …the whirlwind of desolation spared neither building, tree nor shrub’. The Liffey rose by several feet and overflowed the quay walls. The elms that graced the main thoroughfare of the Phoenix Park were completely levelled, as were the elms at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham. The trees on Leinster Lawn outside the present-day Dail were uprooted and scattered ‘like prostrate giants on their mother earth’. The back wall of the Guinness Brewery collapsed killing ‘nine fine horses’. A witness next morning described how ‘the noble animals [were] stretched everywhere as if sleeping, but with every bone crushed by the ponderous weight of the wall’. Military sentry boxes were blown off their stands and ‘scattered like atoms’.

A glass shop on Nassau Street became ‘a heap of ruins’. On Clare Street, a chimney collapsed on a woman who had only just got into her bed, killing her instantly. Police stations and churches opened the door for thousands of terrified citizens who brought their young and frail in for protection. Even churches could not be trusted on this night of Lucifer. The steeple of Irishtown chapel caved in and the bell from the spire of St Patrick’s Cathedral came down like a meteorite; mercifully nobody died in either instance. Phibsborough Road was a bombsite of exploded windows and fallen chimneys ‘as if by shot and shell’. One of the 40 female inmates at the Bethesda Penitentiary on the north-side (where the National Wax Museum stands today) took the opportunity to ignite a fire that destroyed the building as well as the surrounding houses, school-house and chapel. Two firemen died trying to extinguish the flames.

The hurricane did not stop in Dublin. It pounded its way across the Irish Sea, killing hundreds of luckless souls caught at sea. It killed nearly 100 fishermen off the coast of Skerries. It killed Captain Smyth and the 30 people on board the packet-ship Pennsylvania. Ships all along the west coast of England were wrecked; dead bodies continued to wash up onshore for weeks afterwards. At Everton, the same wind unroofed a cotton factory that whitened all the space for miles around, ‘ as if there had been a heavy fall of snow’.

Estimates as to just how many died that night vary from 300 to 800, an astonishingly low figure given the ferocity of the storm. Many more must have succumbed to pneumonia, frostbite or plain old depression in its wake. Those bankrupted by the disaster included hundreds who had stashed their life savings up chimneys and in thatched roofs that disappeared in the night.

Even in those days it was ‘an ill wind that turned none to good’ and among those to benefit were the builders, carpenters, slaters and Thatcher’s. The Big Wind also inspired the Rev Romney Robinson of the Armagh Observatory to invent his world-famous Robinson Cup-anemometer, the standard instrument for gauging wind speed for the rest of the 19th century.

However, perhaps the most unlikely beneficiaries of the Night of the Big Wind were those old enough to remember it when the Old Age Pensions Act was enacted in January 1909, 70 years after the event and 100 years ago this month. The Act offered the first ever weekly pension to those over 70. It was likened to the opening of a new factory on the outskirts of every town and village in Britain and Ireland. By March 1909, over 80,000 pensioners were registered of whom 70,000 were Irish! When a committee was sent to investigate this imbalance, it transpired that few births in Ireland were ever registered before 1865.

As such, the Irish Pensions Committee decreed that if someone’s age had 'gone astray' on them, they would be eligible for a pension if they could state that they were ‘fine and hardy’ on the Night of the Big Wind. One such applicant was Tim Joyce of County Limerick. 'I always thought I was 60', he explained. 'But my friends came to me and told me they were certain sure I was 70 and as there were three or four of them against me, the evidence was too strong for me. I put in for the pension and got it'.

Oidhche na Gaoithe Móire Part One.

Oidhche na Gaoithe Móire. The Night of the Big Wind (Part One).

The Night of the Big Wind is now part of Irish mythology. Obscure accounts, real and imaginary, of events that took place on that famed night have been handed down through the generations.

On the evening of Saturday 5th January 1839 heavy snow fell throughout Ireland. The morning was completely calm and the sky was covered with motionless dense cloud. As the morning progressed the temperature rose well above the January average. The snow quickly melted.

Unknown to all a deep depression was then forming in the north Atlantic. As the warm front which covered the country gradually moved eastwards, and rose in the atmosphere, it was replaced by a cold front which brought with it high winds and heavy rain.

The rain commenced before noon in the west and spread very slowly eastwards. In Mayo, the late afternoon turned chilly while the east of the country still enjoyed the unseasonably high temperatures experienced in Mayo earlier that day. At dusk, wind speeds increased, conditions got colder and alternate showers of rain and hail began to fall.

By nine o'clock at night the wind had reached gale force and continued to increase.

By midnight it had reached hurricane force and remained at that level until five o'clock in the morning when it reduced again to gale force. During the hurricane the wind blew variously from the south-west, west and north-west. Gales continued until six o'clock on Monday evening.

From the ecological point of view the storm was a disaster. Millions of wild birds were killed causing the near extinction of crows and jackdaws. Their traditional nesting places were wiped out. When spring eventually came the absence of song birds was noticeable. Historic ruins such as Norman tower-houses and churches were badly destroyed never to be restored. Tombstones in cemeteries were knocked over. Roadways were rendered impassable by fallen trees thus causing havoc to transport and mail deliveries for the following week.

Sea water was carried inland by the force of the storm and flooded houses when it poured down chimneys. The most abiding memory of the night, and its aftermath, that remained with people was the smell of salt which lingered in houses for weeks. Seaweed too was carried inland for great distances. Herrings and other fish were found miles from shore.

There were people in every community who practiced weather forecasting (with a degree of success) using such factors as the lunar cycle, appearance of the sky and sea, wind direction, the behaviour of birds, animals, fish and insects and their own intuition. The concept of meteorology was alien to the vast majority who experienced the Big Wind. Amateur weather forecasters failed to predict the event. Consequently people sought their explanations elsewhere.

The superstitious, that numbered among its ranks the vast majority of the peasantry, were quick to attribute the storm to the fairies. Traditionally the 5th of January was the feast of St. Ceara, when, it was believed, the fairies held a night of revelry. The fairies, they thought, caused such ructions that the storm resulted. Others believed that on that night all but a few of the fairies of Ireland left the country never to return and that the wind was caused by their departure.

Freemasonry, traditionally seen by Irish Catholics as associated with demonic practise, was considered to be another possible cause. Some people were of the opinion that Freemasons had brought up the devil from hell - and couldn't get him to return.

The weather remained unsettled in the days after the Night of the Big Wind and occasionally the wind became gusty causing people to fear that the storm would return.

In mid-January the aurora borealis reappeared again stirring up panic. The ill wind blew well for some people: merchants, carpenters, slaters, Thatcher’s and builders in particular were busy renovating public buildings and the properties of the wealthy. The poor, who could not afford to hire such services, had to survive as best they could.

The Night of the Big Wind happened prior to the introduction of government relief measures and widespread insurance. The relationship between landlord and tenant dictated that the tenant made good damage caused by storms. What little reserve of cash was held by the poor was used up in rebuilding and restocking.

In many cases houses were re-built in sheltered locations at the bottom of hills, and for many years, until the advent of sturdier building materials, shelter from the wind was a primary factor in choosing a house-site Famine followed seven years later. It almost completely wiped out the class that suffered the most on the Night of the Big Wind.

As the century progressed, the Night of the Big Wind became a milestone in time. Events were referred to as happening before, or after The Night of the Big Wind.
Seventy years later, in 1909, old age pensions were introduced in Ireland entitling persons over seventy years, whose income did not exceed ten shillings per week, to an allowance of five shillings per week from the State. Those who met the means qualification, but had no documentary proof of their ages, were granted pensions if they affirmed recalling the Night of the Big Wind.

There were other big storms in Ireland's past - 856, 988, 1362, 1548 and 1703 AD. Despite the advances made by science since 1839, we still do not have the means to predict or prevent the next storm of its calibre.

The above article appeared in Vol. VIII of the South Mayo Family Research Journal published in 1995. The South Mayo Family Research Foundation publishes a journal annually containing articles of interest to historians and genealogists.

Part Two will follow in the next post.

The Big Snow.

Just to put the present weather into context.

THE BIG SNOWS OF 1947, 1963 & 1982

Glancing out his bedroom window in Ballymote, Co. Sligo, on the evening of Monday 24 February 1947, seventeen-year-old Francie McFadden shivered. The penetrating Arctic winds had been blowing for several weeks. Munster and Leinster had been battling the snows since the middle of January. It was only a matter of time before the treacherous white powder began to tumble upon Ulster and Connaught.

That night, a major Arctic depression approached the coast of Cork and Kerry and advanced north-east across Ireland. As the black winds began howling down the chimneys, so the new barrage began. When Francie awoke on Tuesday morning, the outside world was being pounded by the most powerful blizzard of the 20th century.[i]

1947 was the year of the Big Snow, the coldest and harshest winter in living memory. Long may it stay that way.[ii] Because the temperatures rarely rose above freezing point, the snows that had fallen across Ireland in January remained until the middle of March. Worse still, all subsequent snowfall in February and March simply piled on top. And there was no shortage of snow that bitter winter. Of the fifty days between January 24th and March 17th, it snowed on thirty of them.[iii]

‘The Blizzard’ of February 25th was the greatest single snowfall on record and lasted for close on fifty consecutive hours. It smothered the entire island in a blanket of snow. Driven by persistent easterly gales, the snow drifted until every hollow, depression, arch and alleyway was filled and the Irish countryside became a vast ashen wasteland. Nothing was familiar anymore. Everything on the frozen landscape was a sea of white. The freezing temperatures solidified the surface and it was to be an astonishing three weeks before the snows began to melt.

McFadden’s neighbour Jim Kielty was driving back from Dublin to Ballymote the night the blizzard struck. Kielty has driven over two million accident-free miles in his career as a hackney driver but he swears that was the hairiest journey he ever made. Through heavy snow and near zero visibility, he could see buses, lorries and cars abandoned all along the roadside.

Every field, road and rooftop was submerged under this dry, powdery snow. In many places, the snowdrifts were up to the height of the telegraph poles. When he got caught in the snow, Jackie Doherty of Liscarbon, Co. Leitrim, found his way home by clambering up a drift and using the telegraph wire to guide and maintain his balance. In the towns too, all the shop fronts, hall doors and gable walls vanished under the massive walls thrown up by the Arctic winds.

De Valera’s post-war Ireland ground to a complete standstill. The transport system was the first major thing to crumple. Every road and railway in the land was blocked, every canal frozen solid, every power cable and electricity pylon suffocated by snow. No amount of grit or rocksalt was ever going to compete. Nobody was going anywhere fast and nothing would be normal for nearly six weeks.[iv]
‘People said Ireland was finished’, says McFadden. ‘It was pure black frost, night and day constant, and the snow was as high as the hedges. A lot of the houses around here were backed up to the roof. You couldn’t go outside the door without a good heavy coat on you. And there was no sky to be seen at all, or no sun.’

Bicycles were ditched all over the country and quickly consumed by the ravenous mantle of snow. Johnny Gormley, a postman in Roscommon, was caught out in the rugged valleys on his bicycle and collapsed suffering from fatigue and hypothermia. By a stroke of luck, a farmer out searching for his sheep found him and brought him back to his house to recover.

Thomas Levins of Co. Kilkenny recalls how his father set out into the blinding snow to rescue his mother who had collapsed on the road outside Gowran, surrounded by ‘walls of snow the height of herself’.

Less fortunate were two colleagues of McFadden’s father who were caught in a snowdrift while returning from the bogs of Sligo. They were found four days later with the bags of turf frozen on their backs.

Another fatality was a Carriackmacross farmer found in the fields by his teenage son, Pat Joe Walsh. (The younger Walsh as the man who tragically bled to death following a botched operation at Monaghan General Hospital in 2005).

For the elderly, those three bone-chilling weeks presented a deadly nightmare. The plummeting temperatures triggered respiratory problems, heart attacks and strokes. If they had not stocked up on food and medical supplies, their situation was extremely precarious. Provisions were quickly rationed so that no individual was entitled to more than 6lb of bread, half a pound of sugar, half an ounce of tea and 2 ozs of butter. But the actual delivery of bread, milk, potatoes and vegetables was extremely difficult given the snowy roads. Grocers were also unable to access their potato and vegetable suppliers on the farms.

Petrol and gas supplies were also severely rationed. The fledgling electricity supply swiftly dwindled and most people were soon back on paraffin lamps and candlelight. More worryingly, by the close of February, there was a nationwide shortage of peat. It was estimated that half the houses in Dublin City had no turf for their fires. People began to hack up furniture while, in the countryside, countless trees were felled for firewood. Iced up wells and frozen pipes added to the misery. A marooned old timer in Killeshandra, Co. Cavan, packed a large cauldron with as much snow as he could gather and was dismayed to find that, when boiled, he only had a half pint of water.

Survival is a game that favours the young. Inaccessible to doctors and nurses, hundreds of elderly souls in rural Ireland, the children of the 19th century, must have succumbed during the Big Snow of 1947.[v]

Burying them turned out to be particularly difficult on account of the snow and the frozen ground. In several instances, coffins remained above ground or were temporarily buried in snow until the ground was sufficiently thawed to dig a grave. Coffins were often transported in improvised sleighs, usually barn doors taken from their hinges and pulled with ropes by horses. The quick-thinking bakers and milkmen of Boyle, Co. Roscommon, constructed similar sleighs to supply their snow-besieged customers with bread and milk.

The wintry conditions were particularly devastating for out-wintered livestock. In Britain, almost a quarter of the country's sheep died during the Big Snow and it took six years for the numbers to recover. Newspapers across Ireland carried similarly sorry tales of horses, donkeys, cattle and sheep killed by snowdrifts. ‘There was a lot of sheep smothered up in the hill’, recalls Hugh McCormick, a sheep farmer from the Glens of Antrim. ‘They died from the want of water and food.’ By day, the farmers dismally trawled their snowbound lands, seeking out the telltale signs of life from the breaths of animals trapped underneath.

Cavan’s Swanlinbar News reported that over 1,000 sheep had been lost in the snow. Maguire and Patterson, the match manufacturers, lost the entire herd from their farm in Donegal. On Mount Leinster, Carlow farmer John Cody became a local hero when he single-handedly shepherded a neighbour’s flock to safety. Even animals kept in sheds and byers required constant attention as fodder and hay were in short supply and the water troughs constantly froze up. Enormous numbers of chickens kept in poultry farms perished from the cold. Countless thousands of other birds, mammals and wildlife must have also died in the wild.

But as anyone experiencing these January snows will tell you, the snow provides a heaven-sent opportunity for youngsters to spend the days sledging, throwing snowballs and building igloos instead of studying Peig Sayers and doing their sums.[vi] Back in 1947, most Irish children walked to school. That was clearly a non-runner with the snow so the schools simply shut. Besides, all the ink had frozen solid in the inkwells so there was nothing to write with.

Beneath the bleak day sky and the clearer, brighter night skies, boys and girls across Ireland took to the slopes on an assortment of push cars, enamel basins and aluminium trays. In Co. Wicklow, the boys of the Sunbeam Orphanage outside Bray bombed down Bray Head on an old pram. They also made a giant snowman which they kept on building, day after day, higher and higher, thicker and thicker and Johnny Golden, one of its young architects, swears ‘that snowman was still standing in June or damned near it’.[vii]

When the seventeen springs of Co. Sligo’s Bellinascarrow Lake were found to have frozen to a depth of nine feet, a group of young lads took the shoes off their horses, loaded their carts up with several tons of sawdust from the Ballymote mills and poured it all over the icy surface. ‘And didn’t they set up a stage on the lake with poles and lights and big heavy batteries!’, marvels McFadden. ‘They had bands and done dancing on it and the music of accordions and bodhrans could be heard above Boyle.’ One foolhardy gent won a whopping £30 when he drove across the lake on a BSA motorbike. Another daredevil cycled the full 10km length of Lough Key for the ‘craic’.

Across the Irish Sea, a force of 100,000 British and Polish soldiers and German prisoners were put to work clearing snow from the railways and roads. Clearing the roads was certainly the most immediate and obvious solution to the crisis. By early March, men had gathered all along the roads of Ireland with shovel and spade, ready to do their bit. In towns and cities too, the people came out to remove the snow from the streets and footpaths.

The rural community at Ardmore in Co. Waterford had been effectively cut off by the blizzard and the 10-foot high drifts. It took a lot of shoveling but the reward was manna itself when the bread van from Youghal finally reached the village.

For others it was not such satisfying work. Charlie McAlister of Co. Antrim recalled how he and seven other men ‘were shoveling snow from January until the 17th March … and every time you shoveled it away it just come back, every day you just had to restart.’ Eventually they started shoveling the snow directly onto a lorry which carted the snow down to the beach and dumped it into the salt water.

On 13th March, the snow was still window high in Buncrana. Four days later, on St Patrick’s Day no less, the great thaw finally began as the mighty slabs of ice slid from the rooftops and crashed onto the ground below. There was so much snow to dispose of that it was several weeks before normal travel could resume. To make matters worse, the thaw was accompanied by prolonged heavy rain, making it the wettest, sludgiest March in almost 300 years. When at last the green fields of Ireland reappeared, the countryside looked as if it has been pummelled by a twister – it was a veritable ocean of mangled bicycles, broken poles, fallen trees and the corpses of dead animals.

An unexpected positive was that the Big Snow appears to have done the arable farmers a favour for the yields of corn and potatoes in the summer of 1947 were as lush and bountiful as any there has ever been. This lends some credence to the old theory that frost and snow are good for ridding the soil of pests and disease.

When the world turns white, everyone has a memory. It was a time of extraordinary collaboration and resourcefulness, fun for children, almost unbearable for adults. There is no doubt that the Big Snow of 1947 was an event that was clearly etched on everyone’s mind. As with the present crisis, snow slows everything right down. The only solution is to be patient and wait until the melt begins. Perhaps inevitably, de Valera’s stumbling Fianna Fáil government got the blame for the lousy weather. As with Britain’s Labour government across the water, they were slung out of power in the ensuing General Election.

COLD WINTERS PAST

The winter of 2010 will undoubtedly be a cold one. But how will it compete with the other whoppers of times past? The winter of 1683–84 remains the coldest on record with the Thames freezing solid all the way up to London Bridge and the longest frost ever

In 1740, the big freeze combined with a famine to wipe out an estimated 16% of Ireland’s population. The winter of 1878-79 slammed the country with back-to-back months where temperatures averaged below zero. The blizzard that struck Ireland on the day of the General Election of February 1917 was the worst in living memory at that time. Another came in 1932 which, according to blacksmith Jack Lowry of Mountrath, Co. Laoise, who was nine at the time, levelled the whole country so that ‘you’d only see the top of the trees and there were places where there was twenty feet of snow.’

THE BIG FREEZE OF 1963

Elvis Presley’s ‘Return to Sender’ was the Christmas Day No. 1 in Ireland in 1962, and that was a title that must have appealed to many of those who watched the powdery snow flakes tumbling from the sky that day. That evening, all along the eastern half of the country, the snow froze solid; temperatures would remain on or below zero until early March in what was to prove the coldest winter since 1814. Over 17 inches of snow fell on New Year's Eve alone. It was to be the soberest start to a new year that anyone could remember. Nobody wanted to brave conditions that had already frozen the Shannon at Limerick.

Bitter Siberian easterly winds and further blizzards continued to pummel the country over the next week, creating snowdrifts up to 15 feet in height. Leinster and Ulster were paralysed, as villages were cut off, roads and railways blocked, telephone wires collapsed, food stocks ran low and farmers were unable to reach their livestock with deadly consequences for thousands of sheep, ponies and cattle. The freezing fog and low temperatures were also fatal for huge numbers of birds who literally fell from their perches and died. For the hundreds of thousands living in rural Ireland, often in thatched houses with just a turf fire to keep them warm, this was a time to brace oneself. In some instances, food and medical supplies had to be airlifted in.

By mid-January, men were being pulled off the dole, handed shovels and sent out in lorries to clear the roads. However, Arctic winds brought another four inches of snow causing complete turmoil to relief efforts, as well the sporting calendar. In early February, the Siberian cold returned with a phenomenal snowstorm that smothered the west of Ireland in white powder. The price of fresh food shot up 30%.

Britain likewise ground to a halt and in London the Thames froze to such a depth that there was a car rally on the ice. The big freeze was followed by a gentle thaw brought on by a dreary drizzle in the early days of March. Be warned though, Cliff Richard seized the opportunity to cheer everyone up with a song called ‘Summer Holiday’.

THE BLIZZARD OF 1982

January 1982 probably stands as the best month ever to be a school kid in Ireland because for much of the month, there was no school. Three short but intense snowstorms painted Ireland white for the best part of three weeks. The heaviest fall was a 36-hour blizzard which began on January 7th. The east was the worst affected area, with Dublin City notching up some 2.5-ft in some parts, while the drifts rose to five and six feet in the suburbs. Hundreds of motorists were rescued from their cars on the Naas dual carriageway.

There were a further two weighty falls over a ten day period which, combined with snow showers drifting in from the Irish Sea, added to the snow that had already frozen and compacted on the ground. That made for ideal tobogganing conditions, not least because temperatures were mild either side of the snowstorm, and the hills were alive with youngsters jetting off down the slopes on wooden sleighs, old car bonnets and fertilizer bags.

Postmen, milkmen and council workers got around with snow chains while snowmobile sales also rocketed. The government duly appointed the late Michael O’Leary, subsequently nicknamed the ‘Minister for Snow’, to coordinate emergency services. Power cuts and bread and milk shortages were widespread for a while but, talking to anyone who remembers it, you get an overriding sense that everybody secretly loved it.

FOOTNOTES

[i] The anticyclone had been slowly rolling south from Greenland into the Atlantic since January. Snow began to fall across Ireland in uneven measures over the early part of the month, sleeting down upon the thousands of mourners who attended Jim Larkin’s funeral in Glasnevin. The freezing temperatures were often accompanied by easterly gales and high rolling seas. On the night of 8th February, the SS Ary, a coalship belonging to the Great Southern Company, set sail from South Wales across the Irish Sea with a consignment of 640 tons of coal for Waterford. The steamer was commanded by a 55-year-old Estonian national, Captain Edward Kolk, with a crew of fifteen men. A cruel east wind slowly turned the ocean into a swirling cauldron of troughs and waves, until the coal cargo began to shift to one side and the whole ship started to capsize off the Irish coast. At midnight, Captain Kolk gave the order to abandon the sinking ship and the two lifeboats were launched into the bitterly cold night. Six men jumped into the starboard lifeboat; none survived. Nine men clambered into the portside lifeboat; by the morning only one was still alive. The 19-year-old Pole managed to stay alive for three days before making it to dry land at Dungarvan. Both his legs and several fingers were amputated in the effort to save his life. Over the next 10 days, the gale force easterlies drove the bodies of the other men on around the coast as far as Youghal. Twelve of the bodies were recovered and buried in a mass grave in the shadow of Ardmore’s thousand year old Round Tower. Even as the coffins were lowered on 18th February, the snow began to fall. Reports in the Anglo-Celt from that same day reported that Cavan’s Lough Gowna had frozen over, and people could walk across it for the first time in over thirty years. Four days later, the cold spell stopped and the sun appeared for the first time in nearly three weeks. Anyone who imagined the harsh winter was over was to be sorely disappointed.

See: 'The Loss of the ss. Ary, Ardmore, Co. Waterford (8-18 February 1947)' by Kevin Gallagher and 'The greatest snowfall of the century' by Christy Wynne.

[ii] Recalling the 1932 snowstorm, blacksmith Jack Lowry of Mountrath, Co. Laoise, who was nine at the time, leveled the whole country, said: ‘You’d only see the top of the trees. There were places where there was twenty feet of snow. There was very little food around then. A loaf of bread, some flour, a few eggs. Some were near starving because they couldn’t get to their neighbours. People got out and started digging along the road and finally they got into Mountrath the following week and that was the relief. There was never the like of it came since.’ In fact, 1947 could have been worse. The following December 26th 1947, heavy snow buried New York City under 26.4 inches of snow in 16 hours; the severe weather was blamed for some 80 deaths.

[iii] Winter 1947: Monthly Weather Report for February 1947, The Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office.

[iv] Mick Higgins, a railway porter from Claremorris, walked the line from Claremorris to Kiltimagh, a distance of 9½ miles, to assure people that the snowplough train was coming soon. The drifts were up to his hips in places and the gallant porter required an urgent thaw when he reached Kiltimagh.

[v] Amongst those who died during the cold spell were 66-year-old Viscount Powerscourt, chairman of the hospital’s committee who managed the Irish Sweepstake.

[vi] “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven” – Wordsworth.

[vii] Milk froze in bottles so that children could break the glass and eat the milk like lollipops.

Article by Turtle Bunbury Writer and Historian (http://www.turtlebunbury.com/history/history_irish/history_irish_big_snow.htm)

Images are of our cottage in Westport County Mayo.