"Teignmouth" wrote in message
...
Those were the days!

December 1981 and January 1982 contained some of the coldest, snowiest
and severest winter weather ever recorded in the UK


The coldest December since 1890 and the snowiest since 1878, December
1981 with a CET of 0.3 was one of the severest winter months of the
20th Century and yet it began mild and benign with double figure
maxima.


Read on
http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/foru...d=6681&start=1

Sunday 13 December 1981 ~ the only blizzard in the true sense of the
word I have experienced in this country. Near Salisbury Plain at the
time, and a little before 1:30pm, I remember watching the spire of
Salisbury Cathedral 10km to the south vanish in an instant as a wall
of snow rapidly approached. Within minutes, the visibility dived to
50 metres in heavy snow with a full gale. By evening, 'level' snow,
where it could be measured, was 30cm with drifts to at least 4 feet.
A switch in the wind to west, maintaining gale force 8, introduced
mild air that melted most of the snow by the next morning.

Friday 8 January 1982 ~ a successful journey using three different
modes of transport in such adverse conditions that in today's world
would impossible to achieve. After dark from Shinfield Park near
Reading in Berkshire, a colleague from Guernsey (Tim - who said he
had never driven in snow before) drove us safely to Southampton in
a hire car via the M3, strewn with abandoned vehicles on both the
hard shoulder and in the outside lane, leaving just one lane open in
places.

I don't think Tim ever made a flight to Guernsey that weekend and I
was anxious about the rest of my trip to the Isle of Wight after hearing
that Red Funnel were not running their ferries because of ice floes in
Southampton Water. Upon discovering that the Portsmouth to Ryde
route was still going, I caught a British Rail shuttle train, pulled by a
diesel which made for a cold trip to Portsmouth Harbour but at least
it completed its route (must have been the right kind of snow!)

The most entertaining part of the journey was boarding the rocking
Sealink passenger ferry by way of a narrow, frozen spray covered
wooden gangway, firstly having to throw my luggage up the moving
30 degree slope to be grabbed by a member of staff and then heaving
myself onboard. Needless to say, there were few passengers on this
ferry which rolled and pitched across the Solent in a gale force SE'ly.
Docking at the end of Ryde Pier was a challenge for the captain and
then I had to face a slide down the ice covered ramp, followed by a
15 minute slide along the wind buffeted pier to the esplanade in the
dark. The air temperature at the end of the pier was -3C but the wind
chill was something else.

Given the same conditions today, the M3 would be chaos, the trains
wouldn't work, Health + Safety would scupper any chance of gaining
access onto the ferry (catamarans now ply that route and don't run in
winds much above force 6), and the pier would be closed due to ice.

Thanks for highlighting those memorable months, "Teignmouth". The
last two winters produced some interesting snowy days but they didn't
compare with those two remarkable days in the early eighties.

Nigel