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    Rain Later, Good: Painting the Shipping Forecast
    Rain Later, Good: Painting the Shipping Forecast
    Rain Later, Good: Painting the Shipping Forecast
    Ebook221 pages1 hour

    Rain Later, Good: Painting the Shipping Forecast

    By Peter Collyer

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    About this ebook

    Rain Later, Good is the award winning story of Peter Collyer's extraordinary journey around the Shipping Forecast areas and has been a bestseller since first publication.

    The artist's brilliant and detailed paintings reproduced actual size, offer a series of images which help conjure up the most mythical locations, whilst his delightful idiosyncratic text provides a wealth of fascinating insights. He introduces us to the people who live and work in these areas, and passes on snippets of tantalising information to give a powerful impression of the place and convey a real feeling of being there. The beautiful paintings which come from Peter Collyer's travels truly capture the spirit of these wild and isolated spots.

    This is a book to be treasured, and its reissue will be welcomed by Peter's many admirers.


    'A very remarkable painter. His work is simply stunning with an observed intensity which makes him very special indeed.' Chris Beetles in The Daily Telegraph

    'The most delightful and unexpected book I've encountered this year... a wonderful book.' John Naughton, The Times

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateSep 12, 2013
    ISBN9781408159002
    Rain Later, Good: Painting the Shipping Forecast
    Author

    Peter Collyer

    Peter Collyer studied fine art in Newport, Monmouthshire and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and a Brother of the Art Workers Guild. His other bestselling books include South by Southwest and Encompassing Britain.

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    Reviews for Rain Later, Good

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    • 5/5
      An inexplicable attachment to the shipping forecast - the four daily reports on weather at sea that go out on Radio 4 - is quintessentially British. It doesn’t matter that most of us live inland and that cheap flights have made going out in a boat a rarity; we like to know what’s going on at sea. Even changing the time of broadcast resulted in a deluge of complaints - there is no discussion of cancelling it, although most ships have access to up-to-the-minute information on-board from other sources.This coffee table book is delightful, channelling the national attachment and matching it with evocative watercolour paintings and affectionate travel notes that give you itchy feet to see places for yourself. I had no idea that there was an Open Air Rain Museum (tongue-in-cheek much?) in Bergen (or that it rains 290 days of the year there) and there are similarly entertaining notes for most ports of call. I rather regret that the author didn’t follow through on his whim to add food notes for breakfast and fish and chips forecasts for each area. However, there is a stunning painting of the sea or coast (complete with shipping forecast for the day) and a secondary painting or line drawing representing an aspect of local life for every current (and two past) shipping forecast regions and coastal weather stations. Given the Shipping Forecast covers the broader seas around Britain, this is a tiny view into the coastal life of Norway, Iceland, the Faeroes, the UK, Ireland, France, Holland, Spain and France - as well as our offshore islands - and amply illustrates the incredible variety and beauty of our coasts.I could wish that the images were bigger or that the book was landscape to match their format (rather than square, reducing their size). But the hazy views of light rippling on waves and suggestions on the horizon are enchanting. Don’t expect anything iconic to separate the sea areas - one patch of sea looks much like another - but for lovers of wind and wave, this is a treat. For the coastal paintings, this book reminded me that I do love watercolours after all (although I wouldn't choose to put them on my wall), and that there's a lot of variety in the type of painting you can produce with them. There's some beautiful work in here, and as it's often of my favourite subjects (cliffs, mountains, sea, clouds), I'm not biased at all.

    Book preview

    Rain Later, Good - Peter Collyer

    THE SHIPPING FORECAST ON THE RADIO

    In 1868 the first head of the Met Office, Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy, established a network of observatories around the British Isles for reporting on the weather. One of these was on Valentia Island off the south-west coast of Ireland. If you are one of the Shipping Forecast’s many insomniac listeners you will be familiar with weather reports from Valentia. Through the reports from these various stations it was eventually established that most stormy weather approaches from that direction and the first warnings always came from Valentia.

    A forecast specifically for shipping was first issued to the press in 1879.

    When broadcasts for shipping began in 1911 they were from the GPO in Morse code and took the form of gale warnings for the western approaches. In 1921 this became a twice daily weather message called Weather Shipping broadcast from the Air Ministry.

    The first sea area map appeared when the forecasts were extended in 1924 to cover the seas all round Britain. The seas were divided into three large areas; Eastern, Southern and Western, each of which was sub-divided into districts, which related more closely to some of the current sea areas. Tay covered what is now Cromarty and Forth, Severn was present-day Lundy and Fastnet. Malin and Irish Sea were Clyde and Mersey, and Portland, Plymouth and Sole were Channel.

    In October 1925 the BBC translated the Morse code broadcasts into spoken English and the first transmissions of something resembling the present day Shipping Forecast began to come out of our wireless sets at home.

    In 1932 a Northern area was added to the map consisting of three districts; Orkney, Shetland and Faeroes. At this time virtually the whole of the North Sea was just Forties and Dogger.

    Broadcasts were suspended for the duration of the Second World War.

    In 1949, when shipping had returned to normal, the map was given a new format, omitting the four large regional areas and extending further to the west in more detail. This map has survived to the present day with a few modifications, notably the addition of North and South Utsire in 1984 and the change of name from Finisterre to FitzRoy in 2002.

    When radio programmes were interrupted to bring the news of the death of King George VI in 1952, the announcement ended with ‘The BBC is now closing down for the rest of the day, except for the advertised news bulletins and summaries, shipping forecasts and gale warnings’.

    The forecast has always been broadcast on the BBC’s Long Wave frequency as that can be picked up at sea all round the British Isles. The BBC has used that frequency for The National Programme, The Light Programme (later Radio 2) and now Radio 4, but whichever channel it is the Shipping Forecast has always been there.

    The Butt of Lewis

    Those of us who listen to Radio 4 on FM or DAB no longer hear the 12.01 and 17.54 broadcasts as they are now consigned to the Long Wave frequency only. They are minus the weather reports from coastal stations, which used to be part of every broadcast and included yet more far-flung points with wonderfully evocative names; Ronaldsway, The Butt of Lewis, Malin Head, Galloper, Bell Rock, Sandettie Light Vessel... where mainly lighthouses, light vessels and Coastguard stations were to be found.

    As the latter began to be thinned out and Trinity House converted their lights to unmanned operation, other locations such as airfields by the coast or on islands had to be found to provide up-to-the-minute weather observations. This also provided the impetus for the Met Office to begin the development of an automatic weather station, which could be placed almost anywhere there were gaps in their observing station network.

    Each automatic station measures wind speed and direction, air pressure, humidity, visibility, air temperature and, at those placed on buoys and light vessels, sea temperature, wave height and period. Visibility is determined by measuring the scatter of light that returns from a light source, an indication of the density and type of atmospheric moisture.

    Wave information is measured by a heave sensor, a weight suspended on fine wires that sways with the motion of the sea. The rate of acceleration of the weight is converted into an indication of the swell. The wind speed and direction, because of constant fluctuations, is determined by taking a mean of the readings over a ten minute period.

    Every hour on the hour the data in digital form is transmitted 22,000 miles into space to Meteosat, a geostationary weather satellite belonging to Eumetsat, a conglomerate of European meteorological services. Meteosat sends the data to their headquarters in Darmstadt, from where it passes down the telephone lines to the Met Office in Exeter.

    It is here the Shipping Forecast is compiled.

    The prepared forecast, with a maximum of 370 words, is then sent by both fax and email from the Met Office to Broadcasting House, and is in the form of a script beginning with the words ‘And now the Shipping Forecast...’. The BBC’s continuity announcer has three minutes in which to read it out at dictation speed.

    If gale warnings have been issued for any sea areas these are named first. There follows the general synopsis, an overview of the weather between Iceland and Spain, stating where the main weather systems are and what they are doing, and then the forecasts for the individual sea areas and finally, in the late night and early morning broadcasts, the weather reports from the coastal stations and a forecast for inshore waters. Only the 48 minutes past midnight broadcast begins with the well-known tune Sailing By (which, by the way, was written by Ronald Binge).

    The introduction now states that it is ‘issued on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency’, which has always been the case, but this has only more recently been included. On 1st November 2006 the mention of fog was moved from the visibility section, where it had been the word describing visibility below 1,000 metres, to the expected weather section. Also on that day the Met Office added Sea State to the forecast (see Glossary), placing it after wind speed and before expected weather. The BBC leaves it out of their broadcasts, but does include it on their Shipping Forecast page of the weather website, along with a high seas forecast, which shows a map of the sea areas to the north and west of the ones we are familiar with from the radio.

    • • •

    Not broadcast where and when most people would hear it? Choosing to leave out some of the information? It seems to me the BBC no longer takes its role in disseminating the forecast seriously. Do they plan to drop it completely I wonder?

    In response to that question the presentation editor at Radio 4 says: "It was felt that, although we should continue to honour our obligation by broadcasting the forecast on a frequency that could be heard across the UK and for some distance out at sea, for some listeners it was a ‘roadblock’ between programmes. Hence the decision to move it to LW only at these times ... There are three minutes allowed for the forecast. To also do the coastal stations we would need a further two minutes, which ... we felt was time better allocated to programmes ... Radio 4 has a particularly tightly knit schedule and to release that extra time for the Sea States would be excessively disruptive for the general audience ... We continue to take our duty to broadcast the shipping forecasts extremely seriously ... We are aware that many sailors still rely on the broadcast. As long as it plays a vital role we expect it will remain in the schedule, and we will continue to consult with maritime safety organisations on the changing needs of

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