The school magazine and Andrew Marr. Mike Chew writes:
Readers may possibly remember that the first edition of our newsletter contained the editorial in the school magazine about the catastrophic winter of 1946/7. What is interesting about this editorial is how it tells of the hardships endured by members of the School.
On two occasions there were over 100 absentees from school. School meals were impossible for three days, “and those of us who could not get home in the dinner hour were compelled to have recourse to sandwiches.”
Let’s now put that in its historical context with a passage from Andrew Marr’s eminently readable History of Modern Britain. (pp 33-36):
“The winter of 1947 has gone down in history and personal memory as a time of almost unendurable bleakness… for three months Britain seemed more like one of the grimmer scenes in a medieval Flemish painting. It was not only the shortage of almost everything in the shops, and what was described as a virtual peasant diet, heavily based on potatoes and bread. – even though now the bread had been rationed.
It was not only the huge state bureaucracy, interfering in so much daily life, controlling how long you could turn your heater on, to what plays you could see and whether or not you could leave the country. It was not the 25,000 regulations and orders never seen in peacetime before….
No, the crisis of 1947 was set off by that most humdrum of British complaints – the weather. … the great piles of coal froze solid and could not be moved… the power stations started closing one by one ….men dug through snowdrifts to find food to carry back… factories had to stop work….electric fires were banned for three hours in the morning and two each afternoon…it was the coldest February for 300 years … and so it goes on.”