Pictures from the freezing cold winter of 1962 and 1963 in Dorset

As we find ourselves right in the thick of the 60th anniversary of the winter of 1962 and 1963, here are some more pictures from Weymouth and west Dorset of that horrendous spell of weather.

Thanks, as ever, to Geoff Pritchard for helping us to share them.

Here is a summary of what happened during that winter and some of the problems it caused in the area.

The first edition of the Bridport News in 1963 reported drifts of up to 15feet deep.

Dorchester couple Mr and Mrs Arthur Barber died in a snowdrift in Weymouth and supplies of food were dropped by helicopter.

Milk was rationed in Chideock by the milkman Les Fussell but enterprising farmers clogged Beaminster Square as more than 200 tractors and trailers delivered supplies to the Beaminster Milk Factory – some getting through by bypassing the roads to drive over fields.

Pat Bishop of Brighthay Farm in Chideock said they were forced to store their milk in the bath – the churns being full and no one able to collect it.

Residents had to walk through seven foot drifts to the Beaminster factory to get milk and one eyewitness said looking down into the valley they looked like war refugees.

In Lyme a blizzard of snow didn’t stop electrician Stan Williams who piled his tools on a sledge and walked to his jobs.

And the pupils of at Lyme Regis Grammar School helped replenish supplies of fruit and vegetables after the headmaster Major TB Pearn told them to bring their sledges to school.

He joined the boys in a ‘fetch it yourself’ campaign where the boys spent most of their morning hauling five tons of fuel from the railway station to the school and delivering vegetables to the boarding house.

In Burton, Mr Lenthall and his two daughters aided by their ponies rescued their sheep from drifts.

The deputy coroner had to go by sea in a cabin cruiser to Lyme to conduct an inquest. Beaminster’s weather man Albert Dawe, who predicted the big freeze six months earlier, was featured on television.

The road from Bridport to Dorchester was cleared at 20ft an hour by bulldozers and excavators and even flames, although they proved spectacularly ineffective after a crew worked all day and only shifted 35 yards.

Pneumatic drills were used to clear Beaminster Square of ice.

Askers Roadhouse was cut off for two weeks, coal ran short and industries like Duncan Tuckers and Woolaways suffered – Woolaways standing down 85 workers, saying as water pipes were frozen they couldn’t mix cement.

Gundries reported 100 staff not being able to get to work, although they got unemployment pay thanks to co-operation by the Ministry of Labour. The bill for getting roads passable was estimated to be around £150,000 to clear 1,000 miles of county road using 63 snow ploughs and 161 diggers.

There was heavy criticism of how the crisis was handled and counter allegations that motorists paid no attention to road blocked signs.

A Southern National bus got stranded in Morcombelake and had to be extricated with a snow plough using a milk lorry as an anchor, a operation which took two hours.

Still is wasn’t just ’63 that was a bad year. One report said it was 81 years before that winter of ’63 since the west country had seen such appalling conditions.

The Bridport News could prove it too – reporters then had seen a card dated January 1881 with a picture of one Samuel Bishop who lost both his legs and several fingers to frostbite.

After an unsuccessful search for work the shoemaker walked from Bristol to Yeovil where the workhouse refused him shelter as he had no money. Nor would police help him with a ticket home.

He walked on through heavy snow to Misterton where he waited in a shed till morning before going on to Bridport.

By the time he got there his legs and fingers could not be saved and his legs were amputated.

The town rallied round and paid for artificial legs partly by selling the cards for sixpence each with his picture and story.