When Weymouth was buried in snow during winter of 1963

That year Weymouth experienced one of the coldest Christmases in living memory.

While the weather may have provided a winter wonderland playground for the county's children, the cold and the snow proved challenging for everyone else, as depicted in this dramatic picture of a car in Weymouth by former Dorset Evening Echo photographer Harry Green.

Glasgow had its first white Christmas since 1938 when rain turned to snow as it moved south, and a belt of snow became almost stationary over southern England on Boxing Day.

The following day five centimetres of snow lay in the Channel Islands, with 30cm covering much of southern England. But what was to follow was far more dramatic. On December 29 and 30, a blizzard across south-west England and Wales left drifts six metres deep which blocked roads and rail routes, cut villages off and brought down power lines.

Owing to further falls and almost continual near-freezing temperatures, snow was still deep on the ground across much of the country three months later.

Throughout the winter, Lyn Hall of Westhaven kept cuttings of the Dorset Evening Echo in a scrapbook, which she shared with the Echo's Looking Back team in 2007.

When Weymouth was a winter wonderland Picture: Lyn Hall

Speaking to the Echo at the time, Lyn said: "I saved it all for my son because he was away at college during that winter," she said. "He was away at Foster's School in Sherborne, so I kept bits for him."

She continued: "My son had come down for Christmas and my sister and her husband came from Bristol and none of them could get home. We lived in the cemetery lodge at that time because my husband was the superintendent of the crematorium."

"It went on for several weeks. If you get snow now it's gone overnight. Then, you could not get from Weymouth to Dorchester. The villages were cut off and the bakers and the milkmen could not get through. All the people around my age will remember it," added 89-year-old Mrs Hall.

• Pictures: Extreme weather in Dorset - from heavy snow to heatwaves
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An Echo report on Monday, December 31, 1962, tells how worried dairy farmers in outlying parts of West Dorset faced the prospect of pouring hundreds of gallons of milk down the drains because their milk lorries could not get through.

Meanwhile in the villages, milkmen who had not received supplies rationed residents fearing a 'milk famine'.

On the same day, the paper reported how tragedy had struck on the snowbound Osmington Hill the previous Saturday night. A car was found entirely buried by snow and a middle-aged couple dead when rescuers came across the vehicle. Arthur and Daisy Barber were survived by their daughter, Sheila Reid, who was also in the car, as was her seven-year-old son Ian and Thomas Curtis of Dorchester. The cause of the tragedy was thought to be either suffocation or carbon monoxide poisoning, which would have complicated conditions caused by the extreme cold.

Arthur Coles, proprietor of the nearby White Horse Garage and a member of the rescue party, said at the time: "It is difficult to imagine why they were unable to get out of the car and walk the 200 yards to my garage."

Certainly other drivers abandoned their vehicles in the blizzard.

Another tragedy was averted on the Sunday, when the Army, the Navy, Dorset Police and Dorset Civil Defence rescued 70 people from the tiny Clay Pigeon Café, on the Dorchester-Yeovil road near Wardon Hill. The 'siege by snow' started on the Saturday night when 70 passengers of two Bournemouth-bound coaches floundered through snowdrifts and a driving blizzard to seek shelter in the café. Among those airlifted out by the three naval helicopters were the elderly, the infirm and a five-week-old baby.

By New Year's Day 1963 in Weymouth, fresh food supplies were dwindling; fruit and veg merchants had their lorries on standby for a dash out of the town the moment the road to Dorchester was open. In Portesham, bread was delivered on a tractor and a sledge and on Saturday, January 5, Portland naval helicopters dropped in food stocks to both Portesham and Abbotsbury.

A postal van was lost in heavy snow for three weeks because of unpassable roads

Indeed, the 'big shiver' showed no signs of a let-up and Echo readers were warned 'Dorset roads worse than ever' in a report detailing thick black ice. Throughout January, in the intervals when snow was not falling, the county simply appeared to freeze solid. Ice-covered Radipole Lake became a popular sports arena, despite warnings of the dubious safety of skating. Indeed, one headline screeches, 'YES! - even the harbour' with an accompanying photograph of the water between the Town and Westham Bridges as a solid sheet of ice, broken only by boats and buoys. Another image shows the tide frozen on the shore.

February was marked by more snow arriving. By the end of the month the weather over the country had reverted to 'normal', cold but clear and sunny days with severe night frosts and freezing fog.

A thaw then set in; the morning of March 6, 1963 was the first in the year that the entire country was frost-free, and the temperature soared to 17C in London. As temperatures recovered, monster snowmen and snowballs melted and their remnants were soon all that was left of what was probably the coldest winter since 1795.

Weymouth's coldest December on record was in 2010 with minimum temperatures at -0.3°C, 0.1°C.