In Barry Hines’s A Kestrel for a Knave, when a teacher calls out the name “Fisher”, the hero Billy replies: “German Bight.” Has the forecast changed over time? Seamus Heaney opened a sonnet with the line “Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea.” Blur referenced the forecast in a song, as did Radiohead and The Prodigy. Much of the Shipping Forecast’s charm comes from these names, which have captured the imagination of poets and artists. The waters around the British Isles are divided into 31 sea areas, starting at the top of the North Sea (“Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire”), moving round clockwise, travelling down to western Spain (“Trafalgar”) and back up, eventually ending with Southeast Iceland.Ĭontentiously, in 2002 Finisterre (an area off northwest Spain deriving its name from the belief that it was finis terre, the end of the earth) was dropped at the request of the UN Meteorological Organisation, and renamed FitzRoy, after the forecast’s founding father. The bulletin follows a strict format, beginning with gale warnings, followed by a general synopsis, and then the area-by-area forecasts. What does the forecast actually mean, though?
It is the world’s oldest radio programme. The following year, the fledgling BBC began to broadcast it, and aside from a break during both World Wars (when it was suspended for fear it could help the enemy), the BBC has continued to do so ever since. From 1924, the “Weather Shipping” was broadcast from London. In 1921, the Shipping Forecast emerged in something like its current form: Britain’s first radio forecast was broadcast twice a day from Poldhu wireless station in Cornwall. It is the longest continuous weather forecast in history, which can trace its roots back to 1861, to the work of Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, who founded what would become the Meteorological Office. How long has the Shipping Forecast existed? This long-lived and much-loved British institution may be reaching the end of the road.
But the loss of the long-wave signal, which can be received far from the British mainland, will mean that sailors and fishermen will no longer be able to tune into its crackly radio weather updates at sea. The forecast won’t die out altogether: the early morning and late-night broadcasts will remain on Radio 4’s FM, DAB and online services. Radio 4 long wave broadcasts the Shipping Forecast four times per day (at 00:48, 05:20, 12:01, and 17:54). 150 years of the Shipping Forecast: Five memorable moments.
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