Bill Foggitt and me

At the beginning of my FT career I worked briefly on the diary with Malcolm Rutherford. Rutherford, who died a few years ago, was an odd man, not unpleasant, but rather eccentric. He had a sharp mind but smoked like a chimney and, I noticed, had a fondness for the bottle.

Like many who have developed a tolerance for alcohol, he rarely appeared drunk, but it was impossible to avoid the fumes, working alongside him in a small office. The FT was still produced at Bracken House in those days when drinking and smoking were part of the job.

He would sit in his chair, light a cigarette, take a deep lungful of smoke, puffing out his chest all the while like an amorous pigeon, then exhale in one prolonged movement. If he was smoking 40 a day I must have been smoking 20 in passive sufferance.

One day, after about six months, in a deftly executed pincer movement by David Walker, the news editor, and Geoffrey Owen, the editor, I was plucked from the office and shifted to the general reporting team. Walker had never liked the idea of my starting on the diary. Owen was diffident, but open to persuasion. Personally I was bemused. Working on the diary had been a doddle. The more eccentric my ideas, the more Rutherford had liked them.

“Let’s pick a team to win the FA Cup,” he said one day. “OK,” I said, “What about Middlesbrough?” choosing one of the least fancied teams in the competition. So that’s what we did and Middlesbrough had one of their best runs for years. I tried to come up with ever more fanciful ideas and each time he would take the bait.

“How about a piece on channel swimmers?” I said one morning. “Good idea,” he said. So channel swimming was in the diary. The diary had only just changed its name from “Men and Matters” perceived as somewhat dated and sexist for 1988, to Observer – not very original, but this was the FT.

Of all my ideas, however, the one that Rutherford liked the most was a piece on Bill Foggitt, a man I described as the “Thirsk weather sage.” Foggitt had been a favourite at theYorkshire Post, my previous employer, where readers enjoyed his oddball weather forecasts based on seaweed, frog spawn and other signs in nature.

Rutherford asked me to go back to him time again and never tired of the peculiar Foggitt wisdom. I even ended up writing a feature about old Bill who died in 2004, but not before the FT diary had secured him international recognition alongside Punxsutwaney Phil, the groundhog immortalised in the film, Groundhog Day.

You can read the feature here:

Polly the dog was ripping up a paper bag on the carpet. The ramshackle room was as cold as the grave and Bill Foggitt apologised for the mess. His record books were strewn across the table where a bowl of unfinished stewed apple and a half-eaten packet of crackers competed for space among the newspapers, old wrappers and other domestic detritus.

The room and its occupant were as dishevelled as might be expected in the home of an 81-year-old eccentric whose life revolves around his dog, his faith, his drinking chums at the local, and the ever-changing weather.

Foggitt is an anachronism of the 20th century, a weather sage who combines scientific observation with trusted weather lore, passed down for 150 years through his family in Thirsk, north Yorkshire.

There has been a Foggitt taking weather records in these parts for four generations. Since the 1820s, not a day has passed without one or other member of the family taking and noting climatic recordings in a book. Temperature, rainfall, barometric readings have all been noted religiously.

The habit started with his great grandfather, Thomas Jackson Foggitt, whose interest in the weather was prompted by a great deluge that swept away part of Yarm in 1771 after a cloudburst. Some 50 people were drowned. Driven by a desire to find a way of predicting such disasters, he began keeping records and diaries of the weather and other events in his life.

Thomas Foggitt, like many of his descendents, was an enthusiastic lay preacher. He was also a pharmacist. This curious mix of Methodism, pharmaceuticals and weather forecasting was typical of the family until Bill himself finally broke with tradition.

He abandoned his apprenticeship in a chemist's shop to study theology at Lampeter. He abandoned that too after obtaining his degree but failing to find a living in the church.

His full-time working life was never auspicious. He was a store man at ICI until badly injured when he was hit by a car in 1966. Foggitt retired to the family home, earning odd bits of income from occasional newspaper articles about the weather and making appearances on local television.

A striking characteristic is his complete lack of ambition or pursuit of affluence. This has led, however, to a slow deterioration in his environment. The once grand family house has seen better days and he sold off the fields beyond to developers.
There is a certain incongruity in a man whose life has been devoted to the observation of frog spawn, flowers, moles and birds, being surrounded by industrial units built on land he once owned. But it is the income from that sale that has allowed him to pursue his peculiar existence - early morning weather observations followed by trips to his local pub, The Three Tuns, and a daily intake of two pints of beer.

Foggitt has become part of the furniture of the village - where life tends to revolve around the pub and the church. He is condemned when it rains, feted when the sun shines. 'It is as if I were personally responsible for the weather,' he says.

His biggest forecasting coup was during a seemingly interminable frost in 1985. He predicted a thaw when the Meteorological Office maintained that the ice would stay for another week. He saw a bud opening on the winter jasmine and a mole burrowing up through the snow. 'This could only mean that nature was aware of the first signs of the thaw,' he said.

His mother knew all the weather lore, which he says he enjoys but is far from slavish about following. The weather, he says, was a hotly-debated subject in the family. 'When we saw some clouds, we would have a keen debate about what the consequences would be and there was big trouble if anyone got the forecast wrong,' he says.

Perhaps his greatest recognition came with the publication two years ago of an academic tome on remote sensing produced by the Association for Science Education. Professor John Gilbert of Reading University, who directed the project to produce the educational pack for the national curriculum, deemed him a 'living legend'. The eight-page section on Foggitt pays tribute to his observations based on the habits of plants and animals.

Much of this is centered on the garden pond he shares with his neighbour. Where the frogs lay their eggs in early spring is crucial for predicting the weather patterns of the following month or so. If the eggs are laid near the centre of the pond it means the frogs are fearful of a drought, so a fine, warm spring and early summer is guaranteed. 'When the eggs are at the edge of the pond you had better hold on to your umbrella,' says Foggitt.

His forecasts range from predicting the hurricane of 1987 - he noticed that the demented antics of his neighbour's cat tended to precede fierce gales - to more distant warnings of a new 'little ice age' recalling the days of Dickensian London when the Thames frequently froze over.

Much of his forecasting is based on watching the behaviour of wild flowers. The rock rose, for example, closes its petals and bends its stalk when the air becomes damp, foretelling rain. The scarlet pimpernel, which behaves similarly, is known as the poor man's weather-glass. Then there is John Go To Bed At Noon which does just that.

While prizing these hints from nature, Foggitt is perhaps most attached to the blend of historical event and associated weather conditions recorded in the family diaries.

One of his most treasured accounts recalls a day when his great grandfather was sitting in the chapel on December 29 1879, listening to a sermon. Suddenly the preacher stopped in mid-sentence and told his congregation that he could see a terrible accident happening somewhere at that very moment.

Foggitt said: 'He could not continue. It was only a day or so afterwards that people discovered that at that precise time, 7.30pm, a train had plunged into the river when the Tay Bridge collapsed.'

The recent death of Alf Wight, the Thirsk-based author, better know as James Herriot, has left Foggitt the town's only celebrity. It is unlikely to change him. 'Only the weather changes,' he says.

And what of the frog spawn this year? That was laid on March 4 and it was by the side of the pond. 'So hold on to your macs for a while but keep your sunglasses, too,' he says. 'The swallows have returned early and that bodes well for the summer.'

See also: Bill Foggitt 1988 , Bill Foggitt 1989 and Bill Foggitt 1990

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