The warmth and dryness of May and early June may well be a distant memory but this time 40 years ago Britain was in the midst of the hottest, driest summer on record. Here’s a look back.

Article from Daily Mail last July

Think we’re having a heatwave? Last week was Arctic compared to the sizzler of 1976:

And those who lived through it will never forget it, writes BRIAN VINER

• In 1976 Britain was in the grip of a gruelling heatwave that last months
• At Wimbledon last week, temperatures were degree hotter than 1976 record
• But in 1976, 400 people were treated in single day for ‘sun exposure’
• Big Ben also suffered its first and still only major breakdown in its lifetime 

The highest temperatures ever recorded at the Wimbledon championships, spectators suffering heatstroke, ballboys fainting, players wilting, South-West London hotter than Honolulu . . . no, not the past few days, but the scorching summer of 1976.

For those were the Wimbledon headlines almost four decades ago, during a heatwave that knocks this July’s sweltering conditions of the past few days into, if not a cocked hat, then certainly a makeshift sombrero.

At the All England Club last Wednesday, the mercury reached 35.7C (96.2f). That, meteorologists told us excitedly, eclipsed the previous record of 34.6C, set in 1976.

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But their fleeting references to 1976 hid a catalogue of remarkable extremes for that summer — above all a spell of searingly hot weather, from mid-June to the end of August (including 15 consecutive days of 32c or more), more prolonged than any within living memory.

They hid the story of a nation so traumatised by the heat and accompanying drought that those who lived through it will never forget it. After all, Britain then was a country even more feebly equipped than it is now for extreme weather — as I learned researching the ‘scorcher’ of 1976 for a book, The Last Hot Summer.

We knew much less then than we do today about the need to protect the skin, and to stay hydrated. At Wimbledon alone, while Sweden’s so-called ice-man, Bjorn Borg, was powering towards the first of his five consecutive men’s singles titles, 400 people in a single day were treated for ‘exposure to the sun’.

Extraordinary heat in London SW19 called for extraordinary measures: it was in 1976 that Wimbledon umpires were allowed to remove their jackets for the first time since the tournament began 99 years earlier. A few days later, the same unprecedented indulgence was also granted to stewards at the Henley Royal Regatta (though they were not permitted to remove their ties).

At the House of Commons, by contrast, there was no slackening of ties or of rules. Bar staff were ordered to keep their green jackets on — and promptly walked out in protest.

High above them, on August 5, the Big Ben clock suffered the first and still the only major breakdown in its long lifetime due to metal fatigue. It stopped working for three weeks, and seemed another sign that Britain was grinding to a halt in the heat.

The ravens would doubtless have left the Tower of London, too, had it not been too hot to fly.

Across the country, it was too hot to do lots of things. Play football, for instance. In the course of a First Division match between Manchester City and Aston Villa on August 25, the City players collectively lost 4st in weight and their captain, Mike Doyle, begged for an end to ‘summer soccer’.

Other energetic activities ceased, too. One popular newspaper, reporting that couples all over Britain had put their love life ‘in cold storage’, published ‘25 hot tips to keep you cool when you start to feel fresh’.

Its tips on how to make love in a heatwave included passing an ice-cube from mouth to mouth during intercourse. And afterwards, to ‘sprinkle some scent on a large paper fan, and waft the fragrance over each other’s bodies’.

Being taught lovemaking by The Sun, however, was the least of the indignities suffered by the public that summer. With a strict hosepipe ban in most places, patrol vans prowled the streets and people were actively encouraged to rat on their neighbours.

A group of militant Surrey housewives — an oxymoron if ever there was one — forced their local golf club to stop using sprinklers, first by harassing the greenkeepers and then staging a sit-in. It was a summer that told us a great deal, both good and bad, about what it meant to be British.

For example, the National Water Council took out full pages in newspapers rather patronisingly lecturing us on how to ‘beat the drought’. If we absolutely had to take a bath, then we were to do so in no more than 5in of water.

And with industry imperilled by the chronic water shortage, on no account must anyone break the hosepipe ban because ‘as you’ll appreciate, people and jobs are far more important than a pretty flower bed’.

Gardens, we were told severely, ‘are just going to have to suffer’. Ladybirds did, too. There were more that summer than anyone had ever seen; battalions of them everywhere, and it was almost impossible not to crunch them underfoot.

But the catastrophic drought actually began during the hot summer of 1975. An unusually dry autumn, winter and spring followed, so by the time everyone realised summer 1976 was turning out to be even hotter than the year before, many reservoirs and rivers had all but dried up.

As water supplies dwindled, fires raged through forests, across heathland and even damaged Royal Birkdale on the Lancashire coast, where that year’s Open golf championship took place while parts of the tinder-dry course visibly smouldered. As temperatures hit all-time highs last week, nine fire engines attended a blaze across 30 acres of Thetford Forest in Norfolk.

But again, that was nothing compared with the scenes in 1976, when more than 300 residents of an old people’s home on the edge of the New Forest had to be rapidly evacuated, some of them wheeled away in their beds, as fire bore down on them at 40mph.

In many parts of Britain that summer, the landscape looked as if a ravaging army had lain waste to everything in its path. When a Herefordshire farmer’s wife, Evelyn Cox, wrote a book called The Great Drought of 1976 two years later, her striking opening line was: ‘In the summer of 1976 Britain had a glimpse of doomsday’. It was not hyperbole.

Across the country, tens of thousands of acres of crops failed, leading to ominous predictions of huge price increases. The ghastly spectre of the ‘3p sprout’ was even discussed in parliament, as an example of how the crop failures would have consequences through the winter and beyond. In Ayrshire, a company making waterproof sportswear had to shut down, due to a lack of people getting wet.

The cities were besieged, too, if not by the drought then by the relentless heat. Even before June was out, the Metropolitan Police dealt with 600 more daily calls than normal to domestic disturbances, as tempers melted.

Some of the anger was directed at street traders, who cashed in by charging outrageously inflated prices for cold drinks. In London’s Hyde Park, the going rate for bottles of Coke was 40p, while across Park Lane in the swanky Dorchester Hotel, they cost a mere 22p.

In New Oxford Street, a 43-year-old Defence Ministry clerk called Colin Holroyd, who had taken to cycling to work in tailored shorts, was told that the sight of his knees was no longer acceptable. He was ordered to cycle home again (more than ten miles, to Hounslow) and return in long trousers. ‘Holroyd sometimes has to take papers to top people,’ was the Ministry’s terse explanation.

At least he didn’t have to suffer the Tube. On the London Underground, hundreds of frantic Bakerloo Line passengers stuck on a train smashed windows to relieve the life-threatening temperatures, though not before dozens of people, and one dog, had fainted. In Birmingham, a man nicknamed the ‘Heatwave Rapist’ took horrifying advantage of bedroom windows left open at night.

The heat also ignited the British sense of humour. Those National Water Council warnings informed us it was ‘the worst drought we’ve known in England and Wales for 500 years’ and implored people not only to limit bathwater, but share it too. So T-shirt manufacturers and badge-makers exploited the crisis with a cheekily suggestive slogan: ‘Save Water — Bath With A Friend’.

For those of us then in our early teens, chance would have been a fine thing.

Despite the standard British stoicism and humour, and little though I knew as a 14-year-old schoolboy only too delighted a) to have an unfailingly sunny summer holiday, and b) to have an excuse not to wash, the situation was genuinely desperate.

As James Callaghan’s Labour government actually drafted emergency plans to bring water by tanker from Norway, a Drought Act was hurriedly passed.

On August 24, the Minister for Sport, Denis Howell, was also made Drought Minister, and promised to set a good example. His wife Brenda appeared on the Mail’s front page the following day, at home in Birmingham cheerfully washing the family clothes in used bathwater.

Yet there wasn’t much to be cheerful about. With supplies already turned off at peak times in parts of the country, and areas of Devon, Cornwall, South Wales and Yorkshire down to their last 30 days of available water, Howell had to consider drastic steps.

One was a plan to start laying water pipes along the fast lane of the M5, with traffic in the other lanes, so that water might be pumped from the slightly less arid Midlands to the scorched south-west.

But that plan remained, metaphorically if not literally, in the pipeline. A week after Howell’s appointment he was ceremonially turning on a stopcock at a housing estate in Yorkshire, when it began to rain. And rain. And rain.

It wasn’t the first downfall of that longest and hottest of long, hot summers. There had been a short burst in London a few weeks earlier, so welcome that spectators at a cricket match at Lord’s actually cheered when rain stopped play.

But that only lasted 15 minutes or so. This was a proper, stair- rodding downpour. Howell had to stand under an umbrella talking to a local TV crew about the need to conserve water.

Instead of being mocked he was lionised, albeit ironically. The Drought Minister became known as the ‘Rainmaker’, a reputation that even reached Tashkent, in what was then the Soviet region of Uzbekistan.

During a goodwill trip there later, in appalling heat, he was asked if he could visit on them his famous talent for getting the heavens to open? It hadn’t rained in Tashkent for two years. ‘I could only reply,’ Howell later wrote in his memoirs, ‘that anything could happen.’

Something did. That night, there was a spectacular electric storm, followed by a sustained deluge.

Here in the UK, our parched land needed months rather than days of rainfall to recover, but that late August downpour was a start.

However, those bizarre weather conditions may have been a start, too, of what we now know, or think we know, as global warming.

‘We should perhaps have picked up on that at the time,’ says the former BBC weatherman Michael Fish. He distinctly recalls getting bored, slapping magnetic suns onto maps of the British Isles in every bulletin day after day, but in fact something very interesting was going on.

‘What happened in 1976 was like nothing we’d ever seen,’ says Fish now. ‘And that was largely because of the remarkable drought, a rainfall deficit like nothing we’d seen before, certainly in my lifetime.’

This recent heat, too, may have been record breaking in some ways. But so far it’s been nothing, nothing at all, like the summer of 1976.

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From Wikipedia

The 1976 United Kingdom heat wave led to the hottest summer average temperature in the UK since records began. At the same time, the country suffered a severe drought.^[1][2] It was one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers (June/July/August) in the 20th century, although 1995 is now regarded as the driest. Only a few places registered more than half their average summer rainfall. In the CET record, it was the warmest summer in that series. It was the warmest summer in the Aberdeen area since at least 1864. It was the driest summer since 1868 in Glasgow.^[3]

Heatwave and drought effects[edit]

Heathrow had 16 consecutive days over 30 °C (86 °F) from 23 June to 8 July^[4] and for 15 consecutive days from 23 June to 7 July temperatures reached 32.2 °C (90 °F) somewhere in England. Furthermore, five days saw temperatures exceed 35 °C (95 °F). On 28 June, temperatures reached 35.6 °C (96.1 °F) in Southampton, the highest June temperature recorded in the UK. The hottest day of all was 3 July, with temperatures reaching 35.9 °C (96.6 °F) in Cheltenham, one of the hottest July days on record in the UK.

The great drought was due to a very long dry period. The summer and autumn of 1975 were very dry, and the winter of 1975–76 was exceptionally dry, as was the spring of 1976; indeed, some months during this period had no rain at all in some areas.

The drought was at its most severe in August 1976. Parts of the south west went 45 days without any rain in July and August. As the hot and dry weather continued, devastating heath and forest fires broke out in parts of Southern England. 50,000 trees were destroyed at Hurn Forest in Dorset. Crops were badly hit, with £500 million worth of crops failing. Food prices subsequently increased by 12%.^[5]

In the last week of August, days after Denis Howell was appointed ‘Minister for Drought’, severe thunderstorms brought rain to some places for the first time in weeks. September and October 1976 were both very wet months, bringing to an end the great drought of 1975–1976.

Health impact[edit]

The 1976 heatwave is understood to have been the cause of 20% ‘excess deaths’ and there were significantly more hospital emergency admissions from 24 June to 8 July 1976 than for the same period in 1975 or 1974.^[6] This compares to 59% excess deaths for the 2003 heatwave.^[7]

Ecological impact[edit]

The extensive fires paradoxically helped preserve many areas of heathland that had been becoming scrub-land through natural succession because of reduced grazing pressure; the only long-term effect of the fires on Dorset heathlands was a change in the composition of scrub.^[8] The impacts of the extended drought on mature trees, especially beech, were still evident in UK woodlands in 2013.^[9]

Government response[edit]

The effect on domestic water supplies led to the passing of a Drought Act by parliament and Minister for Drought, Denis Howell, was appointed.^[10] There was widespread water rationing and public standpipes in some affected areas. Reservoirs were at an extremely low level, as were some rivers. The rivers Don, Sheaf, Shire Brook and Meers Brook (all in Sheffield) all ran completely dry, without a drop of water in any of them, as well as Frecheville Pond and Carterhall Pond (Carterhall Pond was permanently dry until 2007, when floods hit, and has not dried since^{[citation needed]}).

Longer term, the UK Department of the Environment realised it needed more information about the storage capacity and other properties of British aquifers, as sources of groundwater.

Comparisons[edit]

In the Central England Temperature series 1976 has the hottest summer for more than 350 years and probably for much longer. The average temperature over the whole summer (June, July, August) was 17.77 °C, compared to the average for the unusually warm years between 2001–2008 of 16.30 °C.^[11] There have in other years been hotter specific summer months, though.

The summer was so hot that it is embedded in the national psyche, with subsequent heatwaves in 1995,^[12] 1997,^[13] 2001,^[14] 2003 and 2006^[15] all using 1976 as a benchmark.

See also[edit]

• Drought in the United Kingdom
• United Kingdom Drought of 1955
• 2003 United Kingdom heat wave
• 2006 United Kingdom heat wave

I WILL BE ADDING A LOT MORE ON THE 1976 SUMMER THIS EVENING INCLUDING VIDEOS.