Where do the shipping forecast regions get their names?
Where do the shipping forecast regions get their names?
And other notes on a British institution.
So when, you are aching to know, will this year’s Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything’s Black Friday offer be unveiled? I am delighted to tell you that, at very long last, the waiting is over:
Support independent nerdery! Buy now, while stocks last! Offer must end Friday!
Right, that’s quite enough of that, here’s some content followed by a dog picture.
1. The Shipping Forecast was first issued on 24 August 1867. This was of course a generation or so before anyone had got around to inventing radio, so for its first few decades it was issued by telegram.
2. It was the creation of one of those people whose careers are so impressive they make the rest of us feel inadequate. Robert Fitzroy was a naval officer who, on his rise to the rank of vice admiral, captained the HMS Beagle on the voyage during which Charles Darwin would formulate his theory of natural selection. Along the way he also served two years as governor of New Zealand, during which he tried his best to protect the indigenous Māori from the behaviour of British settlers. Top man.
3. The reason he is relevant to our purposes, though, is that he also essentially invented the science of weather forecasting. In 1854 he was appointed Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, heading the department that would grow into the Met Office. When the Royal Charter sank in a storm off the Welsh Coast in 1859, at the cost of 450 lives, Fitzroy began to wonder if it might be possible to use data on what weather was doing today to predict what it might do tomorrow. From 1861, he established weather stations around the UK which transmitted weather reports back to London for collation and publication in the Times. He even coined the word “forecasting” as the new term for the process.1 The first shipping forecast arrived six years later.
4. The shipping forecast has been broadcast by radio, in various forms, since around 1911. There have, however, been a few gaps: one between 1914 and 1921 (so the Met Office was not helping the enemy), and another from 1939 to 1945 (same). Oh, and early in the morning of Friday 30 May 2014, it wasn’t broadcast because someone forgot to flick a switch: listeners to Radio 4 instead heard the World Service.
5. At the moment there are four broadcasts on BBC Radio every day: 00:48hrs, 05:20hrs, 12:01hrs and 17:54hrs (although the latter two are on longwave only). Three of these are read by the continuity announcer on duty; the early morning one is read by a weather forecaster.
6. Each broadcast sticks to very strict rules. There’s a maximum word count (350, except for the 00:48hrs broadcast which covers 31 areas instead of 30 and so gets another 30 words). There’s also a standard format:
Gale warnings in force (if any);
General synopsis.
Area forecasts: wind direction/speed, weather, visibility, ship icing if any; areas can be combined if experiencing similar weather conditions;
Coastal weather stations (00:48hrs and 05:20hrs only): wind direction/speed, precipitation if any, visibility, pressure;
Inshore waters (00:48hrs and 05:20hrs only): wind direction/speed, weather, visibility.
7. The house style is designed to limit confusion: times are spelt out (“two-three-double-O”), and barometric pressures pronounced as whole numbers (“a thousand and five”), to ensure (I’m assuming) they can’t possibly be mixed up by any skipper who only hears half a broadcast. Wind speeds are given on the Beaufort Scale, with those up to force 7 using numbers and those above adding names for emphasis (Gale 8, Severe Gale 9, Storm 10, Violent Storm 11). “Hurricane force 12” adds the word “force” to provide even more emphasis.
8. The forecast’s ostensibly strange vocabulary actually conveys highly specific meanings. “Imminent” means within six hours, “soon” is six to 12, “later” 12 to 24. In the visibility section, “good”, “moderate”, “poor” and “fog” all mean you can see up to defined distances (more than 5 nautical miles/9.3km at one end, less than 1,000m at the other). Wind direction can be “veering” (changing in a clockwise direction) or “backing” (the reverse).
9. But now, the information you’ve really all been waiting for: where do the 31 areas in the forecast get their names?
Five (Forth, Tyne, Humber, Thames, Shannon, and Cromarty, an arm of the Moray Firth) are named for estuaries. Five more are for banks, areas of raised sea floor (Viking, Dogger, Fisher, Sole, and Bailey, after the charmingly named Bill Bailey’s Bank). Two are ports (Dover and Plymouth)
Three are named for headlands: Trafalgar (after Cape Trafalgar, Andalusia; only included in the 00:48hrs broadcast unless there are gales); Malin (Malin Head, the northernmost point of mainland Ireland); and Portland (the Isle of Portland, a “tied island” protruding from southern Dorset).
Eight are named for islands (North Utsire and South Utsire, both after a Norwegian island named, well, Utsire; plus Wight, Lundy, Rockall, Fair Isle, Iceland and Fastnet, after Fastnet Rock, a rather bleak chunk of slate in the Atlantic which counts as the southernmost point of Ireland). Another two (Hebrides and Faroes) are named for archipelagos.
10. That, if you’ve been counting or even if you haven’t, leaves five unaccounted for. Four of these are named for areas of open water. Irish Sea should be self-explanatory; Biscay, named for the bay of that name, hardly less so. A “bight” is a curve in a coastline: German Bight is thus the area of the North Sea bounded by the German and Danish coasts. (The entire North Sea was, once upon a time, referred to as the “German Ocean”.)
11. Then there’s my favourite, Forties, which is named for the Long Forties: a region where the sea is consistently roughly 40 fathoms (73 metres) deep, quite shallow for the North Sea, which is generally around 95 metres deep. (There’s also a Broad Fourteens: that, alas, doesn’t get its own shipping forecast area, but is split between Humber, Thames and German Bight.)
12. Last but not least there’s a single shipping forecast area named after a person. For decades, his region was known as Finisterre, after a peninsula on the west coast of Galicia, Spain. But in 2002 the Met Office decided to rename it, to prevent confusion with an area of that name in the French/Spanish shipping forecast: today it’s Fitzroy.
13. Here’s a map of those regions further to the south by the way. Please note the presence of fantastic names including Irving, Faraday, Romeo, Josephine and Meteor.
14. Back in Blighty, the shipping forecast also uses 17 different divisions for “inshore waters”, which I’m not going to spell out as I’ve been banging on long enough but here they are:
15. The Shipping Forecast – and Sailing By, the light orchestral music piece by the fantastically named Roland Binge, which precedes it – has such a place in British culture that it has on occasion been read by celebrities, including Stephen Fry, Alan Bennett and former deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. Since it’s meant to be read in a calm, gentle steady voice that places equal emphasis on every piece of information, just in case it matters to someone out there on the waves, I’m a bit surprised by the latter, but, cool.
16. The forecast has also been used in music by acts including Blur, Radiohead and the Prodigy.
17. On 18 December 1993, the forecast was broadcast on TV: to be specific, on BBC Two, for Arena Radio Night. It was such a hit they never did it again.
Anyway, that’s enough of that. When the forecast turned 150 in 2017, the BBC produced this lovely animation explaining it, all set to the strains of Sailing By. Also if you want to test your knowledge here’s a quiz.
The Gratuitous Dog Picture & Sales Pitch Bit
The article above is an extract from the archive of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything, a weekly newsletter which goes out every Wednesday at 4pm. Become a paying subscriber, and each week you’ll get a bit on politics, some diverting links, an article on history/geography/language/something, and the map of the week. But that’s not all! You’ll also get a warm glow of satisfaction that you’re helping me to write nerdy and interesting things, and not boring corporate ones. And all for just £4 a month or £40£20 a year! While stocks last!
But: we’re all broke right now. If you can’t currently justify paying for some nerd’s substack, just hit reply and ask nicely and I’ll give you a complimentary subscription, no questions asked. I am, quite literally, giving it away.
Alternatively, why not do one of the following:
a) Subscribe to Paper Cuts, the daily paper and news review podcast on which I can frequently be heard sounding off;
b) Read my latest New Statesman column, about how the entire country is now suffering from Long Cameron; or
c) Pre-order my new book, out next April? If you like my newsletter, you might like that, too.
Fitzroy was, however, honest about the limitations of his work: “Prophecies and predictions they are not,” he once wrote. “The term forecast is strictly applicable to such an opinion as is the result of scientific combination and calculation.”