THE SHIPPING FORECAST grew directly out of the terrible loss of life at sea during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For the want of an adequate weather forecast, ships were repeatedly driven on to rocks, capsized and sunk all around Britain’s shores – a fact confirmed by the mind-boggling number of wrecks that still litter our shores (including an estimated 6,000 off Cornwall alone). So serious was the problem that in 1853 a conference of leading maritime powers was convened in Brussels to discuss a coordinated approach to the burgeoning science of ocean meteorology. The result in Britain was the creation the following year of the precursor of the Met Office with Captain Robert FitzRoy at its helm.

FitzRoy took on the role with characteristic zeal. He issued ships’ captains with instruments to collect information on wind, temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure, and used the data to produce ‘wind stars’, the forerunners of isobars. Convinced (correctly) that atmospheric pressure held the key to predicting the weather, he devised a sturdy ‘Fishery Barometer’ and raised the money to have 100 made and fitted in fishing harbours and lifeboat stations around Britain. He even wrote rhyming couplets to help sailors interpret the data, such as ‘When rise begins after low, squalls expect and clear blow’.

But the turning point came in 1859, when a severe storm hit the Irish Sea, killing 800 people and leaving behind a trail of destruction at sea and on land. Some 200 ships were wrecked in this one storm, including the Royal Charter which sank off Anglesey with the loss of 450 lives. These catastrophic events galvanised FitzRoy into action. He set up 15 stations around Britain to collect information which he translated into synoptic charts from which he created a ‘weather forecast’ (a term he himself had coined in 1855). His predictions were published in The Times from 1861 onwards – the first attempt at a daily weather forecast. He also instituted a system of signals – e.g. a cone pointing up for a northerly gale, or down for a southerly gale – which were to be hoisted at relevant stations to warn sailors of bad weather.

The first effort to relay the weather forecast to ships at sea started in 1911, when the General Post Office was given the task of telegraphing gale warnings to ships approaching Britain in the North Atlantic. The outbreak of the First World War brought this service to an end, and when it was eventually resumed in 1921 it was much more similar to the Shipping Forecast we know (and love) today. Broadcast twice a day from Poldhu wireless station in Cornwall, Britain’s first radio forecast was made up of a general synopsis followed by meteorological readings from five weather stations around the British Isles: Dungeness, Scilly, Holyhead (Wales), Blacksod Point (Ireland) and Stornoway (Scotland).

The 1921 experiment was clearly a success, and in 1924 the Weather Shipping, as it was called, started to be broadcast nationally from a powerful transmitter at the Air Ministry in London. This bulletin split the country into regional areas (west, east, south and, from 1932, north) which were themselves divided into more localised areas – 13 in all. Many of the names that have since become iconic made their first appearance here (e.g. Forties, Dogger, Thames, Wight and Shannon) along with some that wouldn’t survive the test of time (Tay, Channel, Severn and Mersey). Ten coastal stations were used, of which only Wick, Scilly, Valentia, Malin Head and Stornoway survive today.

The BBC became involved in 1925 when the Met Office was looking for a way to make the Weather Shipping available to smaller vessels which didn’t have the expensive equipment needed to receive the Air Ministry signal. And so the forecast made its first appearance on long wave, broadcast twice a day from the BBC station at Daventry in Northamptonshire.

The service was again closed down for the duration of the Second World War, and by the time it re-emerged in 1949 the world was a very different place. The volume of shipping around Britain’s shores had increased, and the Shipping Forecast was expanded accordingly, all the way across to Norway, Iceland (which fed the nation’s fish ‘n’ chips habit), down to Biscay and even the north coast of Spain. The old regional divisions were ditched and the number of areas increased to 26. Some old friends were lost (Orkney and Shetland merged and were replaced by Fair Isle) while many new friends were introduced (including Rockall, Fastnet, Malin, Irish Sea, Bailey and Finisterre).

Creative juices at the Met Office must have been in full flow as the sea areas were redrafted into the distinctive Shipping Forecast map which has been used, with only minor alterations, ever since. The only dubious decision was to name one area Heligoland after an island off the north coast of Germany which even then, four years after the end of the war, was still being used for target practice by British pilots and had just been subjected to one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in history. Not surprisingly, a meeting of European meteorologists a few years later tactfully suggested the name be changed to German Bight, which it duly was.

The other big change after the Second World War was that the Shipping Forecast was given its own slot, twice a day, on the newly created Light Programme (later renamed Radio 2). Its slow insinuation into the national psyche had begun. The last Shipping Forecast on Radio 2 was read by Jimmy Kingsbury on 22 November 1978, after which it switched over to Radio 4, where it has remained ever since.

Over the years, the boundaries of the sea areas have been adjusted to better reflect weather patterns, and new areas have been added to improve regional accuracy. The giant Forties and Dogger areas, which once covered most of the North Sea, were reduced in size in 1956 to make room for Viking and Fisher. A few years later, in 1984, Viking, Forties and Fisher were in turn shrunk to make way for North Utsire and South Utsire, giving more and more detailed information for the rapidly expanding North Sea oil fleet.

Up until 2002, all the Shipping Forecast areas were named after geographical features, be they sandbanks (Forties, Viking, Dogger, Fisher, Sole and Bailey), rivers and estuaries (Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Humber, Thames and Shannon), towns (Dover and Portland), islands (North and South Utsire, Wight, Lundy, Fastnet, Rockall, Hebrides, Fair Isle, Faeroes and Southeast Iceland), seas (German Bight, Biscay and Irish Sea), or headlands (Finisterre, Trafalgar and Malin).

But in 2002 the Met Office caused a furore when it renamed the Finisterre area after its founder, Robert FitzRoy. It turned out that the Spanish Met Office used Finisterre in their shipping forecast for a different, much smaller area, and no less an authority than the United Nations World Meteorological Organisation had decided that this would cause confusion. The British Met Office agreed to change the area’s name and chose FitzRoy in a well-deserved tribute to the man who did so much to kick-start the British meteorological movement. There was uproar in the British press, which bemoaned the loss of such a distinctive name and objected to foreign organisations meddling in Britain’s national institutions. But FitzRoy has stuck and slowly but surely become part of the music of the Shipping Forecast.

Contrary to appearances, the Shipping Forecast doesn’t have dedicated readers but is read by the normal roster of BBC announcers as part of their general duties – so you’re just as likely to hear Zeb Soanes (say) reading the Shipping Forecast at 00:48 as the news headlines at 5pm (though possibly not on the same day!). To complicate things further, since 2006, the 05:20 bulletin has been read by a presenter from the Met Office.

Inevitably, some names do stand out. Brian Perkins, Peter Donaldson, Laurie Macmillan and Alice Arnold all soothed the nation’s ears in the 1980s and 1990s. Another familiar voice for many sailors was that of Peter Jefferson who read ‘the Ships’ for 40 years and became known as ‘the voice of the Shipping Forecast’. And no one who heard the comforting voice of Charlotte Green reading the Shipping Forecast is likely to forget it in a hurry. So popular was Green that she received Valentine’s cards from fishermen and became known as the Fishermen’s Friend, before she eventually moved on to Classic FM and Radio 5 Live in 2013. Several announcers are sailors themselves, and a few, such as Carolyn Brown and David Miles, have even passed their Yachtmaster Certificate, which no doubt gives their readings extra gravitas.

‘The Shipping Forecast was one of the subjects I received the most letters about, although not all of them were complimentary. One reader accused me of mispronouncing the word ‘shipping’ – putting ‘tt’ where ‘pp’ should have been. He even threatened to write to the controller of Radio 4 in disgust at my use of bad language.’

Charlotte Green, Radio 4 announcer 1986–2013

Worse things happen at sea. On at least three occasions in the past ten years the wrong forecast has been read, each time because the previous day’s forecast has been picked up by mistake. When it happened in November 2011, a keen-eared listener in the Scottish Highlands noticed that a storm being forecast in the 00:48 bulletin had already passed over. He deduced that the previous morning’s forecast was being read, and duly complained to the BBC. More recently, on 30 May 2014, the 05:20 bulletin failed to go out altogether due to ‘a technical error’. Instead, listeners were treated to the News Briefing from the BBC World Service, and had to wait until 06:40 to get their morning fix of the Shipping Forecast.

As the Shipping Forecast has evolved into a quirky but much-loved national institution, artists, writers, musicians, comedians and even politicians have lined up to satirise and pay tribute to its distinctive tones, including Blur, Radiohead, Tears for Fears, Stephen Fry, Frank Muir, Carol Ann Duffy, Seamus Heaney – the list goes on. And there have been a few celebrity readings, such as former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott who read the forecast in 2011 to raise awareness on Red Nose Day. When it came to his native Humber, he deliberately dropped the ‘H’ and said, ‘Umber – without the ‘‘H’’, as we say it up there’. Even the playwright Alan Bennett was persuaded to read the Shipping Forecast when the Today programme was guest edited by Michael Palin for one day in 2013 – albeit a repeat of a particularly dramatic forecast from a few weeks earlier. Everyone, it seems, loves the Shipping Forecast.

‘It gives a reassuring view that people are still doing the same thing, collating the weather and telling you all about it. Somehow, the electronic stuff doesn’t have the same meaning.’

Alan Gick, skipper of Thames sailing barge Alice

‘There are various bulletins throughout the day depending on which frequency you are listening on, but my favourite time for reading the “Ships”, as we called it, was immediately after the midnight news. At that time of the evening, the continuity studio had a womb-like quality to it, especially when I turned off the harsh overhead lights and had just one spotlight focused on the script. It felt intimate and private and I always aimed to read clearly and distinctly and at a measured pace to enable sailors on fishing boats, wallowing in deep angry seas, to write it down.

‘I allowed my imagination to roam free. If the gale warnings were severe, I had an image in my mind of small, relatively frail trawlers being tossed about on vast indifferent waves in the pitch-black, icy cold of a winter’s night. I would imagine fishermen, clothes and hair stiff with salt, hauling themselves up a steeply angled deck with the skin of their hands and faces flayed by a biting, unforgiving wind. It was an evocative image of “those in peril on the sea” and my affinity with the Shipping Forecast had much to do with my own love of the ocean.’

Charlotte Green, Radio 4 announcer 1986–2013

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