Date with the rain

I hope you are all well. We are all living in strange times indeed.

One might have thought with this life lockdown I would have time for more blog posting. And yes I have been thinking I should, although retirement should in theory have also enabled that and look what's happened - or not happened! - here in recent months.

About a week ago I did kick myself up the proverbial and determined to get more active here.. but then I found a new addiction. Last week I saw a brief BBC news item that pointed me here , and so for a few days now I have been punching the keys digitising pre 1960 UK rainfall records! And I am by no means alone in this pursuit, as I write more than 14,000 other volunteers are doing the same and between us we have swiftly moved back in time through the 1950s, 40s, 30s and 20s and are now well into the 1910s. The 19^th century records are probably in reach by later next week. The people responsible for this project have been overwhelmed by the response. The power of crowdsourcing! Also, if this particular project doesn't sound like fun (but really it is) then you have other options – you could count penguins in time lapsed photographs of the Antarctic for example.

I have found the task surprisingly enjoyable, and interesting in a number of ways. Each sheet has a decade of handwritten monthly readings recorded for a particular rainfall gauge station. You have to either copy type a certain year's readings or transcribe location information. It is the location information, the recorder's name, and the various other random notes on the sheets that are so interesting.

The gauges were/are located in all sorts of places, quite a few Water Works, pumping stations, sewage works which are not so interesting but then I have also come across lighthouses, country piles, cottages, lunatic asylums, Kensington Palace Gardens, and yesterday morning Wolf Hall Manor. Many have caused me to run off down a Google rabbit hole as I pinpoint the locations and try to find out more about the history. Quite a few of the places I come across are of course no longer there: country piles demolished or now turned into flats; pumping stations now turned into houses. My UK geography has improved no end. It is interesting to note that before 1960 Somerset and Dorset were both referred to as 'shires.

The recorder names offer more opportunity for research. All the men, and they are mostly men, were Esq rather than Mr, many have C.E (Civil, or Chartered? Engineer) after their name, but then there are also Sirs, Earls, Majors, Lt. Cols, Headmasters. One of the most interesting to me was a Sir who lived in a country pile in Norfolk. I looked him up to find that his first wife was the daughter of a baronet and I share their surname, which is not a common one. Now that has me thinking I must trace my family tree!

There are lots of notes, some barely decipherable, on many of the sheets. The notes typically describe the site of the gauge and its immediate surroundings – hedges, trees, walls, outbuildings. You can sometimes build up a wonderful picture of a person's garden, right down to the height of herbaceous borders, raspberry canes, apple trees and the like.

On most of the sheets the location's nearest railway station and church are also specified, only sometimes a grid reference. This presumably for the benefit of inspectors who needed to travel to these gauges to check them periodically. Rail was probably the favoured mode of travel then, and also these would be landmarks easily found on an OS map.

As I have looked at the sheets I have built up an understanding of how the data was collected. It seems recorders would usually take daily readings. These would be aggregated to monthly values and then sent in (or telephoned in?) periodically to the Air Ministry Met. Office. This information would then be transcribed (sometimes years later it would seem) onto the official sheets that we are now digitising. For example while I was entering 1926 readings from a sheet I found this note: “Back years 1920-1928 copied from diary 6/1/53”. That comment blows me away. Just think, the recorder was making notes of the rainfall readings in their diary (nearly 100 years ago now). Then 25 years later their diary somehow finally made it to the Met Office (maybe the person died and the diary was found in their effects and was passed on?) where the readings were eventually officially collated. Now another 67 years have passed and I am transferring this data into a spreadsheet. Could the original recorder have possibly imagined his diligence would now still be relevant and causing so much feverish work? Certainly not in this way. (Incidentally, as I type this Al Green is on the radio singing Ain't It Funny How Time Slips Away!).

The whole exercise is a window into the past. And as I start recording 1919 data I'm thinking that with the current state of the world we all of a sudden have a lot more in common again in some respects with people's day to day life as it would have been 100 or so years ago – we are once again on Shank's pony, not straying too far from home, and closer to our family.

As I have been performing my task I have randomly noted down some things that have caught my eye, here are a few of them:

From a sheet for a Guildford gauge: “recorder Mr X, died 1942, then read by Mr Y until end of 1946, then read by Miss X 1947”. Readings stopped at the end of 1947. A note says house owner died at the end of 1947 and Miss X leaving. This paints a stark picture of lives changing. Miss X was presumably the daughter of Mr X, but who was Mr Y? A relative? A lover? In any event you feel for Miss X. But the rain will have kept falling on another gauge nearby.

From a sheet for West Ayton, North Riding: readings stopped Sept 1949 with the note “Too old to bother now”. It's interesting to see that more conservational, and less formal, notes like this tend to be much less frequent as I step back through the decades, or maybe I'm just not lucky enough to come across them.

From a station in Argyll Ardnadam Hafton House 1942 insp: Miss Allan says must give up reports as the gardener does not seem able to grasp how to do it.

At a girls county school in Glamorgan: 1945 unreliable , no amendments made to record. Observations probably taken by inexperienced pupils. No readings were recorded after 1945.

From Parkham, North Devonshire 1937: Letter from Parry saying that when Harding moved he took this gauge with him. No knowledge of where Harding now lives. Gauge missing in action!

Many people are recording their favourite observtions in chat threads related to the project. This was one that I wish I had seen: the few months' hiatus in 1948 when the Abbot of the Benedictine monks at Belmont Abbey in Hereford had to wait for the bullet hole in the gauge to be repaired before he could continue recording.

Oh, and as for the rain, I have noticed that 1921 was very dry in the UK.

Give it a go, you might be surprised how much you enjoy it.

A song title to perfectly match this topic immediately sprang to mind – Eddie Kendricks' Date With The Rain. Unfortunately I don't have that one in the collection as it is a bit pricey. So Youtube to the rescue:

Another phrase that came to mind was “observations in time” which is the title of any early Ohio Players album, and of a related Feel It post dating back to 2006. I have re-uped a track from  the album, which you can find here.

I will also leave you with another track. I have found jazz to be the perfect accompaniment when rescuing these rainfall records and I have been rooting through quite a few of the albums in my collection and giving them a proper listen for the first time in ages. One of those albums has been Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers' Ugestu. Here is side 1 track 1 from that album.

Art Blakey's Jazz Messengers – One By One 1963

PS: The picture shows a Snowdon Rainfall Gauge, the gauge of choice judging by the rainfall sheets I've seen. The picture was found here