The one thing that makes this week’s heatwave unprecedented – David Behrens

This week it was simultaneously too hot and too wet. As some parts of the country wilted in the sun, others were literally washed away. Dozens had to be rescued after a motorway was submerged in a thunderstorm and a landslide engulfed a caravan park. Yet as the week ended, the temperature was barely 20 degrees.

It was, said one newspaper – not this one – an “unprecedented” occurrence that had seen the temperature reach 34C on six straight days for first time since 1961. Really? What was 1961 then, if not a precedent.

And where did that freak heatwave occur 59 years ago? Not here, by the look of it. The official record shows August as having been “rather dull with slightly below average temperatures and near normal rainfall”. I bet they moaned about that.

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Perhaps they were confusing the UK with Egypt, whose capital was said to be less hot than London on Wednesday. At least it was a dry heat. They didn’t have to contend with submerged roads in downtown Cairo.

Inevitably, comparisons will be drawn with the summer of 1976, which really was unprecedented. Not just because it was hot but because it didn’t rain all season long.

It was not the norm then to “dress down” for the heat, as we do today. Men seldom wore shorts in public, unless they were going to the beach. When they got there, older gentlemen still pulled knotted handkerchiefs over their heads – though whether this was to protect themselves from the sun or from passing seagulls was never clear.

Nor did anyone carry bottles of water around with them, or obsess about the need to keep hydrated. Our idea of adjusting to the climate was diving into the pub for a shandy that was served warm because they’d run out of ice.

It is not really surprising that we behaved differently then. Those who were of the age I am now had grown up during the First World War, not the swinging Sixties, and had seen hardship on a scale unimaginable to those of us who found this week’s weather hard to bear. When they got hot, they just rolled up their shirt sleeves. A telling piece of footage from the archives of Pathé Gazette in 1949 shows a London bus driver in his jacket and peaked cap surviving a brief heatwave by rolling his trousers up above the knee. That this was thought worthy of national attention speaks volumes about a straight-laced society that would not be fully unbuttoned for another 25 years.

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The more worrying echoes of heatwaves past are the water shortages that this week has brought. In the east of England, tankers were moving 200,000 litres of the stuff each day to meet the demand. The last time I recall this happening was 1995, when the M62 became a conveyor belt for tankers taking water across the Pennines to prevent Halifax from running dry. But that summer was the driest since 1766; the present one has followed one of the wettest winters on record.

All the same, there have been warnings of dire consequences if we fail to save water. So much for staying hydrated. After months of doing little else but following orders, an edict from the privatised water industry might just be the drinking straw that breaks the camel’s back – as they say in Egypt.

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If you had asked me a year ago, I’d have said that directives like those issued in 1976, when the Drought Minister, Denis Howell, urged everyone to share a bath, as he did with his wife, would have been simply ignored by the self-obsessed Britain of today. It has been a revelation to see how readily we have fallen into line since March and accepted the need to do as we are told, irrespective of the consequences.

There is though one genuinely unprecedented facet of this summer’s weather, which is that fewer of us are being made to experience it if we don’t want to. With so many people still working from home, suffocating daily journeys in trains and buses with no air conditioning seem as out of fashion as a 1976 cheesecloth shirt.

But we need to vent our frustrations. It can only be a matter of time before the final indignity of Michael Gove pitching up on TV to tell us who he’s sharing his bath with this summer – so in the meantime, we might as well take it out on the weather.

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