The Summer of ‘76

Few will now remember the Labour politician Denis Howell, later Lord Howell of Aston Manor, who in the famously long hot summer of 1976 was appointed Minister for Drought. His appointment to this post occurred in August of that year, as part of Parliament’s passing of the Drought Act which introduced water rationing. Mere days after Howell’s taking office huge thunderstorms broke out over the country, and the following two months saw heavy rainfall, bringing the drought to an end. He accordingly came to be dubbed ‘Minister for Rain’ in the popular press. Few politicians can be said to have had such a magic effect for good on circumstances; most tend to have the same in the opposite direction. No doubt there was nothing personal in Howell’s effect on the weather, but who knows? After all, he said that his earliest memory was sitting on his father’s knee during a General Strike meeting in 1926, as if among the elders in the Temple.

A song by Badly Drawn Boy on his 2006 album ‘Born in the UK’ has the lyric ‘Where were you in 76, the long hot summer? You want to be a rebel, then turn your hosepipes on’.

1976 has been a touchstone for hot summers in the UK ever since, though given that its highest recorded temperature was 35.9^oC on one day in one location – Cheltenham, then the graceful and favoured retirement spa for the genteel – it has been surpassed in this respect by later summers, not least the current one, which threatened for a while to set new and horribly uncomfortable records, and still might.

Whether the summer of ’76 was a delight or horribly uncomfortable depended on who you were and what you were doing. I was at Oxford, living in Summertown, my first two children were infants who, until the hosepipe ban, ran screaming with pleasure through the spray on the lawn. My own childhood on the borders of the Congo in Africa had somewhat inured me to heat and harsh sun, so I too enjoyed the unbroken days of both. Alas, the accumulation of annos domini render one less tolerant of temperature extremes. Before Coco Chanel made summering on the French Riviera fashionable in the 1920s, those who could afford it were wont to head for the Alps in the summer, reserving the Riviera for the winter where the temperatures are then mild and the weather equable. Such are my own druthers now in more modest style.

But: let’s go back to 1976, the benchmark long hot summer in the British imagination. The bare facts are that the peak days for heat lay in the two weeks straddling the turn from June to July, when every day somewhere in England temperatures exceeded 32^oC, and on five of the days exceeded 35^oC. The scorching of Cheltenham happened on Saturday 3 July. By August the effects of drought had become severe; in the south-west of England no rain had fallen for 45 consecutive days, fires broke out on heathlands and in forests (destroying 50,000 trees in Dorset’s Hurn Forest), and crops desiccated, causing agriculture a loss of half a billion pounds (in 1976 values, still real money then), raising food prices by 12%. Reservoirs and rivers ran dry – four Yorkshire rivers ceased running completely: the Don, the Sheaf, the Shire Brook and the Meers Brook. Flooded villages were exposed – Mardale Green in the Lake District emerged, as Haweswater shrank to a tenth of its normal size; in Derbyshire the Ladybower Reservoir dried out completely, exposing the hitherto drowned villages of Derwent and Ashopton. Vast swarms of ladybirds appeared, nearly 24 billion of them by the best estimates, in response to the equally vast swarms of aphids generated by the warmth of the preceding spring. As plant life collapsed in the summer heat the aphids died and the ladybirds flew away. Beech trees still showed the effects of the drought thirty years later. Human mortality indices registered a 20% increase in excess deaths directly attributable to the heat.

It is an ill wind that blows nothing any good: some benefits accrued. Heathlands which had been morphing into scrubland were restored by the fires, which burned off the succession growth that previous reductions in grazing pressure had allowed to flourish. The government was forced to think about water storage capacity and the state of Britain’s aquifers. (It is always post-disaster that political rationality raises its sluggish head: London’s sewer system was funded by Parliament only when the stench of the polluted Thames had backed up to Westminster in the ‘Great Stink’ of 1858).

Despite its hold on the memory, ’76 was not a peak, it was an augury. Heatwaves since then have been increasingly frequent, notably in 1995, 1997, 2003, 2006, 2014, 2022, 2023, 2026, most of them more severe: plot the graph. The 2003 heatwave was the hottest on record in Europe since 1540, and caused an excess death rate increase of 59%. The highest temperature ever recorded in England was 40.3^oC at Coningsby in Lincolnshire in 2022; so far this year the hottest day in the British Isles has been 37.2^oC, on the island of Jersey. Meteorologists say that temperatures like this and higher are to be the norm as the climate warms further and faster.

If short-termists, fanning themselves dejectedly in a futile patch of shade in their gardens, can take comfort from bad news, then it lies in the thought that the Gulf Stream – the North Atlantic Gyre, technically the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC, whose warming waters from the Gulf of Mexico bathe Europe’s shores – is in danger of collapse. If it does collapse it will plunge the British Isles and Europe into an ice age. Only consider: if you look at the globe of the world, you will see that moving Britain around it on the same latitude places it squarely in Canada’s Hudson’s Bay. Look up the weather in Hudson’s Bay. Which is worse: scorching heat and drought, or long freezing winters? Iceland has already begun preparations for an AMOC collapse, officially declaring it a National Security Threat.

The Scandinavians say that there is no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes. This I think applies chiefly to cold and wet weather, not hot weather. For the latter you need leisure, air conditioning and delivery services. All three are usually possessed at someone or something else’s expense. Leisure (unless enforced, as in unemployment) likely means that one has enough cash, which in our distortedly unequal society – created by deliberate public policy, ‘keeping down taxes’ so that there is not enough to be shared for others (many) to have minimally decent lives – means that one is profiting from the system. Air conditioning ditto, in addition making matters worse by damaging the climate: a very short-sighted fix. Delivery services? Think of the delivery guy on his bike in the heat…

People alive now who survive into the long future – no longer such a safe bet as once, courtesy of the way things are going – are unlikely to remember this summer of 2026 as people alive in 1976 remember that summer. This is because summers to come will almost certainly be worse, reaching emergency levels as a dreadful norm. It is too late to do anything about that – ‘too late’ are the most tragic words in the language; and remember that the first warnings about global warming were voiced in the 1890s: how shameful is the human species in matters like this! – but not too late to prepare and to mitigate. Iceland’s National Security Threat is the world’s Global Security Threat. The punishment for sinners, some tell us, is to burn in the fires of hell forever. Our sins against the planet, forked into excess by demons who serve the god Profit, are already stoking the flames.