SHIPPING FORECAST
Join WILLIAM THOMSON on his journey each month exploring a Shipping Forecast region
Last month we learned how the shocking wreck of the steam clipper Royal Charter inspired Admiral Robert Fitzroy to begin work on what we now know as the Shipping Forecast. In addition to the loss of 450 lives aboard that one ship, a further 300 people died in the storm and 150 ships were sunk around the British Isles in the hurricane force winds.
Something had to be done and Fitzroy was the man to do it. Born into aristocracy - he was the fourth grandson of King Charles II - while his status definitely helped him in life, what made him stand out was an incredible intelligence, combined with a strong sense of responsibility to help others.
At the age of 12 Fitzroy joined the navy and he was the first person to achieve 100 per cent in his lieutenant exam. Stationed aboard HMS Beagle on its mission to survey Tierra del Fuego (near Cape Horn), he took command of the ship when the captain, Pringle Stokes, took his life from depression and the strain of the job in terrible conditions. Fitzroy performed his task so diligently after Stokes’ demise that after the voyage he was given another special mission to survey South America and make new charts.
Well aware of the loneliness - and his own battles with depression - Fitzroy asked his friend Charles Beaufort (famous for the Beaufort Scale) to find a young gentleman to be his guest for the voyage; someone he could converse with in the evenings, free from the rigid social hierarchy of naval discipline.
Beaufort chose a 23-year-old naturalist, Charles Darwin. The voyage took them five years and provided the inspiration for Darwin’s work, while also establishing Fitzroy as a brilliant meteorologist. Upon returning home, his skills were well recognised and he was appointed chief of a new department, the Meteorological Statist to the Board of Trade, later condensed to the Met Office.
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His task was to collect weather data at sea and he did this by arranging with ships’ captains to provide information of their surroundings using instruments on loan to them. Taking this information, he developed strategies to make weather data accessible to sailors and fishermen around the British Isles, bringing together the latest technologies of the time.
As we will explore in this series, he devised warning cones around the coast, installed barometers in fishing ports and published weather forecasts in the The Times newspaper. Sadly, he died before the first radio Shipping Forecast was broadcast in 1867.
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