The Editor,
The Journal of Glaciology
Sir,
If I may briefly reply to Mr. Hawke’s letter in the last issue of the Journal of Glaciology, I should like again to emphasize the need for caution in drawing generalizations on snowfall for the entire country from a limited number of stations. This particularly applies to comparisons with the past, for which, as Mr. Hawke himself admits, data gradually become more meagre and less reliable. The Survey after all has to work, so to speak, on a grid, in which must inevitably occur large meshes of unrepresented country very significant in a land of complex physical relief like Great Britain.
Take the very month which Mr. Hawke quotes, namely December 1890, which was so rigorous in the South, especially round Oxford. I am old enough to remember as a child that very severe season when a large meadow at the back of my home in a London suburb was continuously white from 27 November to 21 January 1890–91. From this personal experience taken in conjunction with all I heard at the time about the prevailing conditions and read about them in the ensuing years I cannot but feel that in this particular case the three stations quoted by Mr. Hawke as having had thirty-one days of snow cover in December 1890, namely, New Radnor (Wales), Walthamstow (Essex), and. Diss (Norfolk), were much more representative of Southern England as a whole than the five others quoted by him with considerably fewer days, namely Babbacombe (Devon), Ross (Hereford), Rotherby Hall (Leicester), Derby and Salisbury. Mr. Hawke quotes Babbacombe as having had only four days of snow cover but even if this figure is reliable and representative of any considerable stretch of this much indented coast I heard a very different account from a family of cousins living inland in Devonshire. They spoke of being continuously under snow for several weeks, thus supporting my own experience in Middlesex, with only a clear month in February before the onset of the famous blizzard of 9 March in that part of the country. Northward of Lancashire and Yorkshire the season was milder and there was little snow in Scotland, as Mr. Hawke observes, except at high levels.
24 April 1949.
