The Big Freeze of 1963

1962/63 was the coldest UK winter for 200 years and lasted for 10 weeks.

[robertacofie]

I hadn’t given it a thought for so many years…..I am 80 now - I shall be showing this to my grandchildren, now teenagers with hardly any experience of snow!

[madgeordie]

I was eight years old when that winter occurred. I remember endless evenings out sledging in the snow with my friends and sleeping with coats on the bed for warmth. One thing that I remember being surprised by was how high all of the walls and fences were after the snow and ice melted. It had snowed so many times and it had been trodden down into ice for so long that there was about a foot of solid ice above the ground. I also remember that it was well into April before some of the larger snow piles eventually disappeared. Strange the things that stick in your

[hatjodelka]

The thing I remember most was the shortage of fresh food. Luckily my mum had a good larder and did a lot of preserving, being a country woman, albeit having moved to a town. I think that winter shaped my attitude to having an emergency stock of tins, pickled veg, preserved fruit and dry goods like flour and rice. It served me well in the first months of shortages in the pandemic.

[Spitalhatch]

My last winter in Britain. Emigrated to New Zealand on 25 January 1963. The hardest part was the 5-mile journey by bus from the village into town to catch the train to London. We actually sailed twice. The first time we left, the ship was turned back before it left the Thames because of the weather - then there was a week of storms travelling through the Bay of Biscay. Exciting times!

[jamesavenell]

Blimey you blokes, I recall this for a specific reason. The previous June I was demobbed from National Service & soon after I encountered the most wonderful thing that ever happened to me.
I met my future wife. To cut a long story short, she resided in Woking whilst Reading was my home town. We first seriously went out together on September 22nd & by December I had told her, on Woking Station, how I felt about her. We travelled to be with one another by rail & on the Sunday, it was pretty doubtful I would make it to visit her.
Wearing wellington boots I went for it, just praying a train would get away from the old Reading South to Guildford, where I would change for Woking. The steam loco connected, hissing & swearing, the carriages were freezing until the efforts of the loco began to heat us up.
Got away late & the Pompey electrics were doing ok through Guildford.
I eventually reached port whereby she was pretty surprised to see me that particular day.
Getting back home was a bit of a bugger & by a quirk of fate the Reading train left from further down the line where we were destined to live all our married life, 55 years, five months & 12 days. Tempus fugit is a sod but I would gladly live through it again.

[bernardthegwp]

Now we get Red alerts if a dusting of snow the same amount of icing sugar you get on mince pies.

[jameslaurencesmith]

i was out in that weather ! i was responsible for every railway signal light for a distance of 12 miles and climbing a frozen steel ladder with two arms full of signal lamps and a sheer drop of 20 feet or more, for a wage of £7 ..a week ! to go home frozen to the core !some of the trains just froze to the spot ! the greese in the axle boxes froze solid and there was i lighting oily rags under the axle boxes to try and melt the solid grees to no avail ! so.. another static train !, , blocking the line!! i have seen a coal train waiting at the signal to get to the marshalling yard and then go home.. and still being there 8 hours regards laurence

[annewillmott]

That was a wonderfully vivid memory return to a time when I was a new mum with a 3 month old baby living in the narrow lanes of very rural Somerset. It exactly reflects my own experience, thank you so much for making it available to us now as older folk ! 😊

[den]

I was ten years old then and remember standing in the school yard wearing plastic sandals on my poor wee feet. Brought tears to my lies. But that winter just never seemed to end. I remember the milk bottles popped their caps with the expanded frozen milk inside. Many small finches and bluetits would peck at the cream on top.

[mervynnel]

Tremendous documentary. Every aspect of that time was covered from start to finish. Well done.

[stephenowens]

The interviews with the public shows just how resilient people were back then.

[davidcollins]

The winter of 62/63 is my earliest memory. I was two and a half years old and sitting in my pushchair with a hot water bottle on my lap and wrapped up in a grey woolen blanket with red stitching around the edges. This was while being left in the middle of the ice on the frozen Royal Military Canal at Seabrook (near Folkestone, Kent) as Mum skated on the ice around me. At the time we lived in Sandgate, just outside Folkestone, on the side of the hill, and the canal at Seabrook was just over half a mile away,
Seabrook in those days had a small Police Station/Police House and every morning the local Policeman who lived there would walk across the ice and walk under a nearby footbridge (and Health & Safety was being considered as he would have a rope tied around his middle in case the ice broke!). If he was able to walk under the bridge with no cracking sounds he would declare the ice as 'safe' and people could start skating. Only after he declared the ice safe would anyone start skating and no one would dare to start beforehand.
The other thing I remembered from then was that Dad made a massive snowball by rolling it down the hill of the road we lived on. He had to shave the sides off it to fit it through the front entrance to the garden & using a ladder to place a smaller snowball on top for a head, making a snowman about 12 foot high.
The ground floor flat in our house was on a permanent let to the Army as married quarters for NCO's working at Shorncliffe Army Camp, (which was at the top of the hill behind our house) and the Sergeant living there at the time helped Dad lift the head up - and then decorated the snowman with some camouflage netting as a cape and spent brass Howitzer shell casings for buttons and eyes and a half-dozen or so 303 rifle shell casings to make his mouth. The Sergeant took them all back again when the snowman started melting. The last bit of the snowman finally melted at Easter.
Mum told me later that despite the steep road (with a hairpin bend) to get to our house & even steeper hill to get to the houses at the top of our road, the local Milkman never once missed making his morning delivery. Yes, if it wasn't collected from the doorstep promptly the milk froze, but it was always there. On days it didn't freeze if left too long then the Bluetits would peck through the silver caps to get to the cream.

[johnibbotson]

I have a lot to be thankful to this winter storm I was conceived in the January of this storm My parents were living in a caravan, but got the caravan inside an hay barn in Wales to stay warm.

[clivenaylor]

I was three, with a six-year-old sister. We lived in Skipton, where Dad was a postman. My most vivid memory was Dad bringing in the washing off the line: two pairs of kid's brown corduroy trousers, one somewhat larger than the other, standing up by themselves on the kitchen table. That's it, really.

[Brian.]

Just as an indicator of how extreme that winter was, piles of snow that had been shovelled off the main road in Bristol were still there in June!

[dewarfinch]

I remember sleeping in my bedroom in a victorian terrace house with no hot running water, no inside bathroom or loo, - that was in a brick shed at the bottom of the concrete yard frozen to death, just a plank over a pit with icicles hanging from it. My bedroom was so cold I slept with a pile of coats on top of me and there was ice on the inside of my sash window. Footpaths were frozen outside, which was fun for us kids as we would create slides on the way to school. Yes, the schools still remained open, there was none of this closing for cold weather, I think we were more hardy in those days. There was lots of fun to be had in the snow, snowball fights, building snow men.

[knifeprty]

My Dad talks about the big freeze of 1963. He was 15 at the time, and had to get from our small village into the nearest town 6 miles away every day. He would walk because the roads were not passable by bus or car for some time. The snow and ice was 8 feet high piled up on each side of the road with a small single lane path in the middle.
My mum was 10 and broke her arm sledging on the first day of snow, I think it was Boxing Day.

[richH]

It was fun. And it was miserable at times. But I wish I'd appreciated it a bit more.
As a nine year old with memory of only a few other winters I didn't realise that it was so unusual!
Most winters since have been a bit of a disappointment. :)

[philyew]

I was 14 going on 15 during this and it was my last year at secondary school. During that freeze I along with almost all the school, 504 boys, never missed a single day. The school was open, every teacher made it and us pupils were also expected to make it, and we did ! For me it was a walk of just over three miles each way, I was sent on my way about an hour and a half before start time after a steaming bowl of porrige and a huge mug of tea, and, a slice of toast and jam for when I got there. Arriving late was never even considered and no-one was sent home early. The younger kids aged 11, 12 and 13, todays years 7 and 8, still wore short pants, they were actually better off than us older kids because they only needed a towel, our long trousers had to be put on radiators to dry. You put your Gym shorts on while your pants dried. Never once was Games cancelled either, the answer you got was you can't wait to get out at break time for a snowball fight so you can get out for games period. Kids today, and their Parents, are soft.

[alejandrayalanbowman]

For us down in Essex, the temperature fell below freezing on Boxing day 1962 and didn't get above freezing again until 13th March 1963. I had a two hour bus journey on an unheated bus to get to work and the same back. I got frostbite.