NO-ONE remembered anything like it – not even the oldest inhabitant. We had gone to bed on the evening of January 27 happy to hear the rain beating against the windows with thought that the thaw which had set in the preious day would continue.

We awoke on Sunday morning in a strange new world – a world encased in ice – and unable to see through windows because of the new experience of a coating of ice on out outside.

Had we slipped back onto the ice age? Or was it the beginning of Hitler’s threatened freeze-up of Britain, the idea of which we had laughed the night before.

Ice an inch thick covered the roads and refused to be dislodged. Ice an inch thick covered all trees and vegetation. Houses and buildings were encrusted and wires sagged deeply with the weight of ice upon them.

And it was still raining. All day long it rained and the thick coating of transparent ice grew visibly thicker.

Pedestrians adopted all sorts of expedients to secure a foothold on the roads. Long discarded hosiery was brought back to light to cover shoes and afford some grip on the glassy thoroughfares, hessian and sacking were adopted for the same purpose.

Motorists found their way impeded by fallen limbs of trees. Trees were shunned by pedestrians for under the growing weight of ice drooping branches snapped suddenly and fell without warning. The rain froze as it fell and twigs and wires became encrusted sometimes to the thickness of a man’s arm.

Aerial wires grew a coating of evenly spaced pendant icicles which gave them the appearance of gigantic fretsaws. Few telegraph or telephone wires carried a coating of less than 12 ounces to the foot. This means that in its 66 yard span between posts each individual wire bore ice to the weight of one hundredweight and a quarter. Not infrequently wires carried three pounds per foot of their length, a quarter of a ton of ice on each wire in a 66 yard span. On this basis a cluster of 40 wires as shown in our photograph would carry not less than ten tons of ice. No wonder the wires sagged!

The rain changed to snow during the night an inch thick layer making road travel much more tolerable on Monday morning.

And the cause of it all? Two layers of air – a cold wind at or near freezing point near the ground, a more rainy layer above. The rain did not freeze into hail as it came down because it had too short a way to fall. But when it struck the ground or plants or telegraph wires, it froze on them at once.

February 10, 1940