The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1881-01-29 00:00:00

THE GREAT SNOWSTORM.

TEE snowstorm which has descended upon these
ie.lands may be regarded, in the suffering which
It has caused, and'in the loss which it has in
flieted, as nothing short of a national calamity.
Such a visitation does not hanpen oece in half ti
c-ntury. A traveller might have set out from
the Land's End and have gone all through
Englend and Scotland to the most extreme point
in the Shetland Islands; or to take another
direction he might have journeyed across Eng-
land from the Mersey tb the Wash, and every-
where his eye would have met the same scene.
•All over the land the face of nature was veiled
with snow. The silence of the fields had he
counterpart in the 'solitude of the permanent way
over which is accustomed to rush the mighty
locomotive, and in the quietude which settled
down upon the busiest towns. Those innocent
looking white flakes, so harmless and ‘almost
impalpable when whirling simply in the air,
became when settling down upon the country in
such mighty volume a most formidable obstruc-
tion to the movements of the most energetic.
The huge drifts baffled the power of the strong-
est locomotive to:pierce them; and in the most
populous towns business was for the time paral-
ysed, and man and beast were compelled to cease
from going to and fro. The experiences of such
terrible weather added another to the many
illustration. of man being utterly powerless be-
fore an extraordinary onslaught of the forces of
Nature.

Taking into consideration the almost unprece-
dented severity of the weather and the sudden-
ness of the storm, the Railway Companies
deserve credit for the expedition with which they
combated the difficulties with which they had to
contend, and have got their sj stems back into
moderately good working order. The sudden
blocking of the lines in various parts of the
kingdom simultaneously taxed the resources of
the companies to the utmost in finding an
adequate amount of labour almost at a moment's
notice to clear the permanent ways, and that
there should have been so little delay is highly
creditable to- the energy which was shown.
With our navigable rivers the task has not been
so easy, for they have been filled with masses of
floating ice, rendering inland navigation im-
practicable. These ice-floats, could they reach
the sea, would be absorbed and disappear, but
the threequarter ebb tide is met by the incoming
current, the vast piles of ice are driven back
I again, and as they are forced higher and higher
up where the stream becomes narrower there
i 3 no difficulty in their adhering ; and so it hag
come to pass that last Saturday a spectacle was
witnessed on the Thames which has not been
seen on the great metropolitan river for nearly
seventy years. The Thames was frozen over
in several places. and at Twickenham a sheep
was roasted whole on the ice opposite Eel-pie
Island. The last occasion of the kind was in
1814, when from the 27th December the Thames
was firmly frozen as far down as Qneenhithe in
Upper Thames-street. A sheep was then set to
a fire in a tent upon the ice and sold in shil-
ling slices under the appellation of Lapland
mutton. From London Bridge to Blackftiars
the ice bore not only passengers, but heavy carts
and waggons, and what was called Frost Fair
was held with merry-go-rounds and conjurors'
booths and other such entertainments. Further
back, in the winter of 1715-16, an ex was roasted
whole at about the spot where the Temple
Pier now stands. In the winter of 1684, the
frost continuing more and more severe, the
Thames was well planted with booths in form
of streets ; all sorts of trades and shops were
there, furnished and full of commodities, even
to a printing press, where the people took a
fancy to have their names printed, and the day
of the year set down and produced on the
Thames. The humour took so universally that
, it was estimated that the printer took .£5 a day
for printing a line only at sixpence a name,
besides what he got by ballads, tec. Coaches
plied from Westminster to the Temple on the
ice and altogether there seems to have been a
kind of Bacchanalian triumphal carnival on the
water.

Looking at the last of these occasions it is
observable that nearly seventy years have rolled
away since the incident of last Saturday formed
an experience upon the Thames. The gazing
crowds who were then the spectators of that
eingu!ar accessory of a severe winter, have
pod away. Two generations have come and
gone in the interval. Postab'y another
seventy years, or even a century may glide past
before another winter such as that of the
beginning of this year, may visit these Wands.
At all events it is sincerely to be hoped so. The
little gratification which a hard winter gives to
a comparatively few, is far counterbalanced,
even if it be not altogether obliterated, by the
enormous amount of suffering and misery
which it inflicts upon large numbers of the
industrial population whom it deprives of the
means of livelihood at the very time when
additional food and clothing are required to
conntf,ract the effects of the bitter and piercing
cold.