The Shipping Forecast - A Prayer For Now

 Maybe it’s the time of year or maybe it’s the time of my life, but BBC Radio 4’s The Shipping Forecast has come to offer solace as 2021 winds its way to a bleak end.

I was introduced to The Shipping Forecast (TSF) by a character in Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club (2020), who, as she ponders old, unsolved murders, writes in her diary:

All those murderers remained unpunished, all still out there, listening to the BBC Shipping Forecast somewhere.  (p. 23)

TSF, a weather forecast for British marine waters, casts its spell on the righteous and the sinful alike.

Over its many decades of broadcast, TSF has elicited many responses.  It has been mocked and parodied, and its words and cadences incorporated into poetry and fiction.  All this is testament to its staying power and its centrality to some form of identity for the people of the British Isles.  Mark Damazer, a previous controller of BBC Radio 4 (which currently broadcasts TSF), once said,

It scans poetically.  It’s got a rhythm of its own.  It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English.

(As quoted in Poetics of the Shipping Forecast by Sanna Nyqvist, in Spaces of Longing and Belonging  Territoriality, Ideology and Creative Identity in Literature and Film, 2019.)

BBC Radio 4 broadcasts TSF four times a day; currently at:  00:48 Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), 05:33, 12:01, and 17:54, providing the weather forecast for 31 sea areas surrounding the British Isles.  Each area bears a distinct, evocative name.  These areas go far afield, touching the coastlines of Southeast Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Germany, Belgium, France, and Spain.  They are shown in the map below (along with coastal weather stations marked in red, whose weather is not part of the TSF).  Trafalgar is covered only in the midnight (00:48 UTC) broadcast.

(This map is available from Wikimedia Commons.  It was posted by Emoscopes and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)

TSF is prepared by the Meteorological Office (Met Office) and each broadcast begins in the same way:

And now the Shipping Forecast issued by the Met Office, on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency . . . .

The broadcast is brief, typically read in a soothing, even-keeled tone, devoid of drama.  The first two broadcasts of the day are followed immediately by separate reports drawn from the coastal stations (see map above).

Given the ever-changing nature of weather, TSF’s content differs from broadcast to broadcast, but its structure remains fixed.  Each broadcast first provides a brief warning of where gales might be expected, and then a succinct synopsis of the overall weather pattern.  This is followed by a description of the next 24 hours for each of the general forecast areas in terms of wind direction and speed, weather, and visibility.  The forecast covers those areas in a clockwise fashion, beginning in the Northeast with Viking and ending with Southeast Iceland.

Each iteration of TSF has a specific upper word limit of 350 words, with a small bump at midnight (00:48) to 380 words when Trafalgar is included in the forecast.  As result of this limit, the forecast, in holding to a specific order in what it describes for each area, often drops nouns and verbs (for example, the first words and numbers provided for an area apply to the direction of the wind and its speed), and, in a further word-saving step, merges the forecast for contiguous areas when conditions are the same across them (e.g., "Forties, Cromarty, Forth.  Cyclonic 2 to 4 . . . . .").  This makes TSF sound, at first blush, like code (well, it is code) and perhaps a peculiar English dialect.

Here is the recording of a snippet from the December 23, 2021, midnight broadcast.  (This is my first attempt to insert an audio file in a post and it hasn't gone smoothly.  The embedded audio file may take a moment to begin to play after clicking on the arrowhead pointing to the right in the icon below.  If it doesn't play, refreshing the page might help.  Alternatively, the file can be made available by clicking on the arrow in the box that will appear in the upper right corner of the icon below automatically or when the cursor is moved to that area.)

One need not understand much of what TSF conveys to succumb to its magic, in fact, it probably helps not to translate it as it goes.  But even deciphering a bit of the forecast seems not to lessen its charm.  In the snippet I provided above, the opening forecast for Viking reads as follows:

Cyclonic 3 to 5, becoming northerly or northeasterly 4 to 6, increasing 7 later in north, perhaps gale 8 later in northeast.  Rain or showers.  Good, occasionally poor.

Translation:

Cyclonic = during the forecast period, a depression in the area will provide considerable change in wind direction

3 to 5 = measurements on the Beaufort Wind Scale – 3 is 8 to 12 miles per hour, described as a “gentle breeze”; while 5 is 19 to 24 miles per hour, a “fresh breeze”

becoming northerly or northeasterly = wind direction will shift to come out of the north or northeast

4 to 6 = 13 to 18 miles per hour winds (“moderate breeze”), and up to 25 to 31 mph (“strong breeze”)

increasing 7 later in north = wind in the north of Viking will increase to 32 to 38 mph (“near gale”)

perhaps gale 8 later in northeast = 39 to 46 mph winds (“gale”) possible later in the northeast of Viking

Rain or showers = the overall weather for the 24 hour period of the forecast for Viking

Good, occasionally poor = visibility will be more than 5 nautical miles (“good”) but sometimes between 1,000 meters and 2 nautical miles (“poor”)

Even with such a translation, I hear the words but miss the meaning.

I have come to TSF only recently, so I have no deep ties to it, no memories of listening to it under the covers as a child, no direct connection to the places it covers.  Still, it appeals strongly to me.  Just the names of the forecast areas are engaging, melodic, hypnotic as they are read in the forecast..  I know little about the actual locations - their physical makeup or their histories - but names such as Forties, Forth, Fair Isle, Dogger, or Rockall are wonderful to hear and to say.  These names create images for me, grounded in reality or not.

Further, I gain a curious sense of comfort and safety from the forecast.  That it begins by highlighting gales in the areas covered says plainly, there is danger out there,  Though the forecast spreads the out there across my imagination, that actually emphasizes that I am here, at home, sheltered from the storm.  What a powerful duality that is.  Peter Jefferson, a long-time voice of TSF, asserts that the midnight broadcast in particular has attracted a dedicated audience of listeners who consider it “something of a ‘must hear’ before the cloak of sleep envelops” them.  (And Now The Shipping Forecast:  A Tide of History Around Our Shores, 2011, p. 16.)  Snuggled warm in bed, the soothing tones of TSF gently caress the ears (no matter how turbulent the weather).

And, perhaps, a key element of its appeal to me is its predictability, its unchanging structure.  These days, the idea of a constant, never-failing beacon of light is irresistible.

From its inception, the forecast was, above all, a necessary service for the vessels braving the seas around the British Isles.  Its roots go back to 1861 when Captain Robert FitzRoy (later elevated to Vice-Admiral), head of what became the Met Office, started a storm warning system for British marine waters.  In the 1920s regular weather reports began on the BBC and have continued ever since (interrupted only by WWII between 1939 and 1945).  But TSF no longer provides a critical service for vessel plying these waters whose sailors have other options for securing weather forecasts.  As a consequence, Sanna Nyqvist describes shipping forecasts (she is writing about TSF and similar broadcasts in Finland and Sweden) as “relics.”  But relics that serve myriad other social and cultural purposes.

There are many essays, articles, and books about TSF and other shipping forecasts.  Peter Jefferson’s volume cited earlier is a conversational, congenial exploration of the history, structure, content, and cultural role of TSF.  The Met Office has produced a very useful introduction to the forecast – Shipping:  Fact Sheet 8 – The Shipping Forecast (2015).

Among the best articles is Sanna Nyqvist’s, which I cited earlier.  In it, she explores the  fictional, poetic, and non-fictional literature evoked by three nations’ shipping forecasts, paying close attention to the universality of responses to such broadcasts.  Of the countries she covers – Great Britain, Finland, and Sweden, each considers its shipping forecast unique, something not to be found elsewhere.  According to Nyqvist, the forecasts, sent out over the airways in cryptic language, speak to listeners of the past, of the settings in which they heard the forecasts in their childhoods, and offer a meditative and restorative balm.  It may not all be benign since some listeners may hear the shipping forecast speaking to their national and cultural identities against the threat of others.  Yet, she suggests, shipping forecasts may also engender an appreciation of the interconnectedness of places and people (consider the broad sweep of the areas covered by TSF).

Nyqvist captures an essential quality of TSF and other shipping forecasts where she writes

Through its ritualistic presentation on the national radio, the shipping forecast has become a part of the collective experience to the extent that it has become a secular prayer, a familiar chant sheltering its listeners from storms and perils.  (p. 53)

Would Captain Robert FitzRoy recognize any aspect of TSF, the present product of his vision for the Met Office and a system to warn ships at sea of impending weather?  He most likely would not ascribe any prayerful quality to the forecast given his hardened conservative Christian beliefs.  Prior to assuming leadership of the Met Office, his greatest accomplishments were the surveying voyages he commanded between 1828 to 1836 in the HMS Beagle.  Yes, that Beagle on which a young Charles Darwin sailed between 1831 and 1836.  FitzRoy and Darwin, despite an apparently productive relationship while at sea, fell out once back in England.  The difficult and troubled FitzRoy was critical of his treatment in Darwin’s account of the voyage of the Beagle, and opposed Darwin’s theory of evolution.  Four years after instituting that first storm warning system, FitzRoy committed suicide.

The closing couplet of Carol Ann Duffy’s sonnet titled Prayer may be a fitting conclusion to this post.  The sonnet offers a somber vision of unbidden memories of loss and regret penetrating lives, with comfort coming, perhaps, from the constancy of a quotidian litany.

Darkness outside.  Inside, the radio’s prayer – 
Rockall.  Malin.  Dogger.  Finisterre.

Finisterre is the weather area now known as FitzRoy.