Considering topics for my next blog while the storms of August raged, I found myself wondering how early Taurangians got their weather reports.
Art Deco Wall Barometer
Image courtesy of Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 3115/84
Of course Māori systems and practices for assessing weather patterns from one Matariki to the next were already well in place in Tauranga Moana, and tenaciously remained in use[1]. It is more recent efforts that are the focus of this essay, which not only explores the mechanics of colonial arrangements but also offers a few reflections on how weather and weather commentary percolated through Tauranga’s day-to-day life in the later nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Thermometer, “Compliments of T.H.
Hall“
Image courtesy of Tauranga Heritage Collection, Ref. 0154/83
In the balmy Bay of Plenty, sheltered from the prevailing westerlies in a rain shadow kindly provided by the Kaimais, it is not too hard to read the day’s weather merely by looking at the sky and testing the wind direction (usually on a wet finger). But mariners and farmers depend on forecasts to plan their work – and even urban folk like to know their opportunities for digging their garden, mending the roads or planning their first outing after an illness[2].
Bay of Plenty Times, 7 August 1883
Editors of the Bay of Plenty Times consistently used the weather as news as well as background information in their reportage. When it came to forecasting, however, they were more erratic, although definitely biased towards storm warnings. Which makes sense. Calm seas and prosperous voyages are universally appreciated, but dull journalism. Appetites for disaster avoided can be well satisfied if the forecast is wrong; and disaster as predicted is always good copy.
Bay of Plenty Times, 24 April 1878
This was the first time the Bay of Plenty Times ran what might be called a weather report on its pages, although the new service’s set-up was noted in a timely editorial of 28 March 1874[3]. Possibly the logistics and expense of regular telegrams (and the fact that the Times was at that stage still a bi-weekly publication) made it all too hard to fit into the press schedule. Even ten years later, the long-distance relationship between our Editor, W B Langridge, and Captain R A (Robert Arbuthnot) Edwin RN, the first official appointed to the Weather Reporting Office, a branch of the Marine Department, was best characterized as friendly exasperation, at least on Langridge’s side.
Bay of Plenty Times, 26 July 1884 
Bay of Plenty Times, 30 December 1884
Captain Edwin’s attitudes are impossible to glean from the official records[4] but he seems to have been thick of skin and sharp of intellect and tolerant of people who moaned about the weather. And who failed to do so: Tauranga’s reports of wind, barometer and sea level movements were incomplete in 1879 and so the town was not included in Captain Edwin’s statistical table, “Return showing Percentage of Correct Forecast at the undermentioned Places during the Twelve Months ending 30th June 1879.”
Appendix to the Journals of the House of Representatives, 1879 Session II, H-10
Page 3
Captain Edwin was justifiably proud of his efforts to put together a national service to support the provision of forecasts, incuding hand-drawn isobaric weather maps. “About two dozen stations telegraphed daily (except Sunday) to Wellington,” notes the Encyclopaedia of New Zealand[5]. He attended the Inter-Colonial Meterological Conference in Melbourne in 1879, which enabled information to be exchanged daily by cable between here and Australia, then to be correlated with one of 24 “typical isobaric patterns commonly occurring over New Zealand”, thus supplying newspapers with a guide to printing a daily weather map. (I have been unable to find evidence of any such maps actually appearing in the NZ press. What follows is an example from 1953):
Portion of Australasian synoptic map
Dept of Lands and Survey, National
Library, Sourced from LINZ. Crown Copyright reserved
(NB. the map is a blank - isobaric pressure lines would be drawn in by hand)
The Captain became, in fact, a household name: weather reports were ascribed directly to him, without any allusion to the (evidently tiny) staff that made up his service. By degrees, he also became, apparently, responsible for the weather itself. “A correspondent writes:“ the Editor noted wryly on 1 December 1893 (which was of course an election year), “- Unless Captain Edwin manages the weather better than he has been doing lately we will have to go in for an elective meteorologist.”[6]
It does appear that Edwin was the phlegmatic victim of editorial judgment. His daily telegrams did not invariably make it to print. After the 1878 squall warning no further reports appeared in the Bay of Plenty Times until 1882, when 32 wires, all tidings of bad weather, were published. About the same number appeared in 1883; turning our attention to past Augusts, a notoriously difficult (those sou-westerlies!) time in the Bay, the numbers range from more than a few to none at all, from which we can infer that newborn lambs did occasionally get a settled spring in which to thrive. In other words, Captain Edwin’s conscientiousness and dedication to the fine naval tradition set by Vice-Admiral FitzRoy[7] were not always matched in the local press.
We might, however, forgive the editors. Not only did the Times eventually introduce a cheerful column inch or two, headlined, “Briefs”, with entries like: “WARMER. Weather on change. Borough Council tonight”[8] and “GALE miscarried. Weather still fine. New butcher’s business booming”[9] -- every household had, if not a barometer, at least a means by which to tell if there was to be a change in the weather: a strip of seaweed by the back door (if it softened, rain was on its way) or a rheumatic joint (if it ached more than usual, barometric pressure could be dropping). Telling people what they already know is not news.
All that changed when Captain Edwin’s 1909 successor, the Rev D C Bates, made arrangements to receive radioed weather reports from ships at sea. Sadly, this was interrupted by World War I but a sad truth of war is its opportunity for significant scientific advances. The quality, reliability and accessibility of modern weather reports offer a view of our planet, and our small place in it, that early weathermen would greatly appreciate. This is a small offer of appreciation to them.
[1] See, for instance, Hohepa, B. Bill Hohepa’s Fishing Book , Harlen 1977, essentially a collection of his weekly and widely published newspaper columns, often based on Māori practices and observation of the lunar cycle. A current example of his advice is at https://www.fishing.net.nz/fishing-advice/maori-fishing-calendar/
[4] See, for instance, Annual Reports of the Marine Department 1878 (Appendices to the Journals, H-12) and 1879 (Appendices to the Journals, H-10).
[5] A H McLintock (Ed.), An Encyclopaedia of New Zealand, Vol 2, Government Printing Office, Wellington 1966, p.549
[6] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT18931201.2.13
[7] Captain of HMS Beagle 1831-36, Governor of New Zealand 1843-45, pioneering meteorologist and author of The Weather Book: A Manual of Practical Meteorology (pub 1863).
[8] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT18950805.2.2.5
[9] https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/BOPT18950816.2.2.5
No comments:
Post a Comment