Wonderful B&W reports from all around the country about the Big Freeze of 1962/1963. On BBC 4 last night so presumably on the iPlayer.
No HS&E back then. Ice was removed from 132Kv lines by suspending a rope from a helicopter with a gang of men on the ground hanging onto the other end.
Hadn't seen a Renault Dauphine on the TV for ages either until I watched this.
andrew
The b&w footage inserted into this edition of "Winterwatch" seems to have been a 1963 edition of "Tonight", the early evening studio magazine programme.
I watched it this afternoon. A brilliant series of reports, though clearly a retrospective even when broadcast, possibly made in the spring of 1963 just as the Big Freeze was clearing. Everything was in the past tense.
And it was very interesting to be reminded of just how good Kenneth Allsop was.
URL:
that wasn't a dauphine
what was it then ?.
I'm sure the back looked like this
sorry saw one of these on tv last night....thought that was what you were talking about
It was a rear-engined car with a round dumpy rear-end and a gear change like stirring a bucket of old nuts and washers
My Mk2 Zodiac was buried in snow for six weeks, but started first time after a battery charge. Yes it was a Renault Dauphine with wet liners. I had to change one for my dad, together with a piston after he dropped a
2BA brass nut in the plug hole.
Ah the Dauphine. While working in a petrol station as a sixth former in the 60's I just managed to stop a lady putting petrol into the rocker box.
The Big Freeze episode of Tonight
I don't remember it: I was tucked up nice and warm in my mum's tummy and born in mid-March. Mum has said that she was terrified of slipping on the ice and landing badly, which would not have done me much good.
The Big Freeze of 1963 is the setting for a thriller Paraffin Winter written and narrated (as a podcast) by Peter Chowney
???
That looks like the side!
Boom boom boom boom! Esso Blue!
In 62/63 the local teenage social hub was a coffee bar about six miles away. It was fun riding a high-performance 500cc motorcycle through the snow to get there. The snow was so bad that those who had cars couldn't get to it, so for a short while it became a bikers hangout, with less competition for the young ladies who could walk there from the nearby mid-wars estate of private houses. So, not all bad news. :-)
Did the need for paraffin die out with the increase in houses with central heating (of various fuels) and of electric/gas fires in living rooms? Was there any other significant uses of paraffin in homes?
NY expressed precisely :
Lighting, when there was no power or during a power loss.
And the worse two winters in living history are?
And cooking, on a Primus or two!
In 1947, my mother was quite jealous of the fact that I could sleep quite happily in my cot when there was ice on the inside of the windows.
Blowlamps, this being a DIY group. Much better at stripping paint than a heat gun.
I don't recall a heater in anything I rode in during the 1950s.
and many people
Deliveries? I used to be sent out with a one gallon can, to buy it at the ironmonger. Out of hours, I had to go to one further away, where there was a coin operated paraffin dispenser outside.
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