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The Shipping Forecast – Celebrating 100 Years, MegClothier, BBC Books, 2024, Hardback, £16.99, 224 pp., ISBN 978‐1‐785‐94926‐5

Year: 2026
Type: book-review
Abstract: The shipping forecast is a BBC radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for 31 sea areas around the British Isles, the far south of Norway, southeast Iceland, Biscay, and Trafalgar, off Spain. There are also forecasts for up to 12 miles offshore for 19 areas around Britain and the Channel Islands. The forecasts are produced four times a day by the Met Office and broadcast on Radio 4, either on longwave or FM, or on both, depending on the time of the broadcast and on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. The forecast dates back over 150 years and was established by Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, captain of the HMS Beagle and founder of the Met Office. In response to the loss of hundreds of lives at sea, in particular in October 1859 when the steam clipper Royal Charter was wrecked in a storm off Anglesey, FitzRoy introduced a warning service for shipping in 1861, using telegraph communications. In 1911, the Met Office began issuing marine weather forecasts along with gale and storm warnings. The shipping forecast, then known as Weather Shipping, was first broadcast on the radio on 1 January 1924, and from October 1925, was broadcast by the BBC. As a former forecaster for the Met Office and writer of the shipping forecast, I was intrigued by what this book might offer, but soon found it underwhelming. If you are anticipating an insight into the shipping forecast's history and development, you are likely to be disappointed. The opening two chapters do give a taste of what you might have hoped for given its promising cover, but most of the content drifts away into cultural history, loosely interlaced with other sea-related items and anecdotes about the author's life and experiences of the sea. The shipping forecast is never the prime topic of the text. The author makes no attempt to explain the shipping forecast, the naming conventions other than FitzRoy, or indeed the forecast's actual use or how it is compiled and broadcast. Meg Clothier barely skims the surface of each largely irrelevant, or loosely related, topic before hastening on to the next. I also found her style of writing annoying, often flippant and unnecessarily geeky; for instance, capitalising the names of the sea areas if they are in any way related to the topic being discussed, and also her attempts to bring pivotal moments from maritime history to life by imagining what the forecast might have stated had it existed at the time. Her invented forecast for the Spanish Armada in 1588 is a prime example – ‘Humber, Thames, Dover, south or southwest 6 to 7, showers, moderate, occasionally very poor’. There are many references to maritime connections in literature, such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and J. G. Ballard's The Drowned World. I did, however, find the final chapter rather endearing. Here, the author writes of the literary, poetic and quite mystical aspects that many people associate with the shipping forecast. However, this book feels like an opportunity missed. Clothier has obviously done her research into all the subject matter she writes of, but I would have expected something more appropriate from a historical novelist, something more informative, something that the shipping forecast, a British institution, deserves in its broadcasting centenary year. There was not even a mention of Sailing By, the tune played nightly as the introduction to the 0048 broadcast!
Source: Weather
DOI: 10.1002/wea.70036
Language: English
Subfield: History
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W7128035288
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