Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

THE FIRST snow of the winter always sets us wondering whether more is in store and whether this winter will be a stinker.

But what was the worst winter you remember - the Big Freeze of 1963, the agony of 1947 or the wartime white-out of 1940?

Certainly, '63 deserves its place in the annals of the atrocious.

But not so much for snow - though, goodness knows, there was enough of it. Rather it was the nigh-endless bitter cold which put that winter in the record books.

It was on December 22, in 1962, that the temperature plunged and East Lancashire came in for the highest number of freezing days and nights in any winter ever - no fewer than 66.

And between February 6 and 27 there was no let-up at all. That month's mean temperature was just 33.3 Fahrenheit - making it the coldest winter since 1878-79.

The average night temperature for the three months to February was a frozen 28F with 20.3 degrees of frost on the coldest night, January 24.

But what that prolonged bitter spell meant was that the snow that came down late on Christmas Day lay on the ground for months and it was added to by half a dozen more snowfalls - including a furious blizzard on January 20 - before Jack Frost finally gave up his grip at the first week of March.

For countless householders the Big Freeze brought the misery of burst water pipes. By the middle of January more than 1,000 council houses in Blackburn alone were affected. For many others, there was the agony of having no water at all because the mains had frozen. Standpipes were set up in the streets and water tankers sent to outlying areas.

Worse still was the danger of gas leaking from fractured pipes. Elsewhere in Lancashire, people died from the poisonous effect and in our region families were overcome or driven from their homes by it. The cold itself claimed the lives of several old people.

Sport was wiped out for weeks. As football fixtures piled up, the Pools Panel was born. But there was no respite for racing punters. In fact, bookmakers' clerks in East Lancashire were thrown on the dole.

But if that was grim, was it anything like the hell that East Lancashire suffered in 1947? Monster snowfalls came down again and again on a region already beset by severe food shortages, a desperate fuel crisis, power cuts and factory shutdowns.

In the middle of February, when winter had ravaged the region for weeks and still more agony was to come, a Darwen housewife summed up the ordeal for the Northern Daily Telegraph.

"What a life," she said. "No coal, no electricity, no potatoes, no cigarettes, one small loaf and four burst pipes."

By the end of January as thousands of East Lancashire workers were out of work because their factories had no coal and plunging temperatures bringing as much as 26 degrees of frost added to the misery of power cuts in their homes, a thaw in early February brought hopes of relief. But cruel winter swept in on the fourth day of the month with the worst blizzard the region had seen for several years. More than a dozen villages on the border with Yorkshire were cut off as drifts piled up 15ft high outside Nelson and Colne and snowploughs battled to reach isolated Tockholes and Waterside near Darwen.

Yet this was only the start. Another snowstorm the next night added to the emergency. Troops were called in - among them 100 Polish soldiers sent to dig a road through the drifts to the new open-cast coal mine at Long Causeway in Burnley in a bid to bring supplies to the fuel-starved mills.

Thousands of sheep were buried on the hills. Newchurch-in-Pendle was cut off for four days and villagers were running out of food. Parties of men dragged sacks of supplies across the fields from Barley - which itself was to be cut off five times before the ordeal of 1947 was over.

After the snow came the freeze. Vital coal supplies for Blackburn's power station were held up at Burnley Wharf as the canal froze between Whitebirk and Hapton. An ice-breaker barge sent to clear it was itself frozen in.

The government announced a total shutdown of electricity to industry and homes were hit by twice-daily power cuts lasting hours.

Still the cold continued - 12 degrees of frost was recorded at Darwen and the third snowfall of month meant that many of the rural roads that had taken days to unblock were closed again. The plunging temperature made the ice on Queen's Park Lane in Blackburn, where skating had already been possible for three weeks, four inches thick by February 22 .

Three days late an even worse blizzard than the ones before roared in - for 15 hours.

Trains, trapped in huge drifts, were blocking the lines to Burnley and Chorley. The vital movement of coal was at a standstill. Thousands of people found themselves marooned in their homes as snow piled 10ft high up against their doors.

So deep was it that, in Blackburn, trams were abandoned when their motors burned out. A snow plough sent out to clear the town's Haslingden Road was itself buried and its driver and mate "lost" for six hours as they struggled shoulder-deep two miles back to their depot.

Two railway engines from Chorley charged through the drifts at Brinscall but had to give up the battle to reach Blackburn at Feniscowles. Rail traffic was at a full stop from Accrington to Colne.

The day after the blizzard, three horses pulled a van filled with food over the snow from Darwen to Hoddlesden where it was greeted by hundreds of cheering villagers. It took a part of 50 men four days to dig through to Tockholes.

Funerals were cancelled as gravediggers were defeated by 15 inches of frost in the ground. Ten days after the blizzard, three main roads out of Rossendale were still impassible. At Church, a night watchman with a hut and brazier kept guard on a tram that was stuck to the track by frozen snow for nine days. At the end of the first week in March, snow again blotted out East Lancashire. Mills that had reopened in the hope of receiving coal were shut once more. In Accrington, the frozen rampart of old snow became six inches higher. Sheep in Bowland were dying by the hundred for lack of fodder. Blackburn's MP Barbara Castle spent 16 hours on a train travelling from London to her constituency. Yet, the next day there was still more snow. Half a million tons blanketed Blackburn and Tockholes and Barley were cut of for the fifth time. Five days later after a night of more snow and frost, rain turned the streets to slush and then frost turned them back to ice. Telegraph poles snapped like matchwood under the weight of ice-covered cables and, as the clocks went forward to Summer Time, Tockholes was still cut off as yet another snowstorm blew in on March 18.

As the end of that awful winter finally arrived, the government cheered up the families who had shivered around empty grates for weeks with an announcement that heating rooms with gas or electric fires would become an offence.

But if there was one consolation for householders that winter, it was that at least they had an idea what to expect from the weather forecasts. Not so in 1940, the first winter of the war - weather forecasts were banned from the radio and newspapers.

So it was that, after a month-long cold spell, on the afternoon of January 26 people were surprised by a snowfall that went on all day and night, all the next day and into the early morning of the following day.

At Belthorn, where the snow came up to the bedroom windows of houses, the occupants of two cottages were trapped inside for days without heat and communicated with each other by rapping on the dividing wall.

It took one motorist six and a half days to reach London from East Lancashire, but the road from Rawtenstall to Manchester was closed for longer than that. It was a week before the rail link between Blackburn and Manchester could be restored and six days before traffic from Todmorden could reach Burnley.

And 100 East Lancashire people who went to a pantomime in Leeds were stuck for days at Skipton while the villages of Ribchester and Mellor were cut off for four days.

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