When I were a lad – and I don't know why that has to be written in a generic northern accent – anyway, when I were a lad and we didn't have a TV the Shipping Forecast on BBC Radio 4 was a regular feature of our news gathering. Not that we needed this forecast – we weren't seafarers and adventurers; it was just there, always, immediately before the weather forecast and the Six o'clock News. It was poetic, rhythmic, soothing, soporific, reassuringly traditional. Tyne, Dogger, German Bight. Southwest gale 8 to storm 10 veering west. Moderate. Good. 'Well love, you might think it good, ensconced in your cosy little office but what about those poor sailors fighting to save their ship from nature's tantrums. I bet they don't see anything good in a storm-force sou'wester'. In those far-off pre-Wikipedia days you had to work things out for yourself, or else visit the library and hope that they had some literature on the subject. I did the former. An interest in geography helps with the names. They are all named after maritime features so it's not hard to follow the broadcaster as he or she takes a clockwise tour, starting with Viking, around the coastal waters of the UK and ending up in Southeast Iceland. Having learned the Beaufort Scale at school helped me decipher the numbers and a bit of common sense told me that 'good' had nothing to do with the severity of the gale and the suffering of old salts, but with visibility. 'Poor, becoming moderate later'. And I amused myself by trying to forecast the actual weather from the shipping data. Now, the Shipping Forecast and the Weather Forecast are different beasts, produced for different environments, for different audiences and for different purposes. Nevertheless one felt that if there were gales in sea area Lundy, it might be reasonable to assume that land areas North Devon and South Wales might also be having a blustery day. There had to be a correlation between the two even if they are not the same.
Now in 2020 and living in Dorset, once again without TV, we are relying on Radio 4 for our daily newscasts. And bless, the shipping forecast is still going exactly the same as I remember it. The same words in the same format, the same rhythms and poetry, the same sea areas, the same... whoa! Stop right there! FitzRoy! Where did that come from? Where or what is FitzRoy? What's happened to Finisterre? Has the land really finished? I am fully aware of two chunks of land by this name – the far western département of Brittany in France and Cape Finisterre in Spain. The official explanation is that Finisterre was therefore too vague, possibly confusing, so in 2002 it was renamed FitzRoy in honour of the Robert thus surnamed. My immediate objection to this is that it breaks the naming convention. Of the 31 areas six are named after sandbanks, six after estuaries, nine after islands, two after rocks, two after towns, a bight, a bay, a head, a sea, a cape (was two) and now some bloke! But then I investigated and was fascinated.
Robert FitzRoy (1805-1865) was born of aristocracy and most of his life was fairly predictable and unremarkable for that class of person. He joined the Royal Navy as a voluntary student, was the first to pass lieutenant exams with a 100% score and eventually rose to become Vice-Admiral. He dabbled in politics, spending some time as the Governor of New Zealand. That proved disastrous as he was too fair-minded. He had the nerve to believe that the native Maori probably had as much right to the land as the British settlers who, in their rage, sent exaggerated reports back to London and succeeded in having him dispatched back there too. Anyway, more relevant to this article, he retired from active service in 1850 and in 1854 was appointed to run a new department that became the forerunner of the Met Office. He was to collect weather data at sea from instruments loaned to ship's captains. He invented other equipment (e.g. barometers) as necessary. The numbers were to be crunched, interpreted, and made widely available for the safety of shipping and fishermen. He developed weather charts and invented a new word – 'forecast'! Fifteen land stations, all linked up by telegraph, started sending in daily weather reports and this lead to the first daily weather forecasts, being published in The Times in 1861. And this, dear reader, is why the Met Office were keen on breaking with tradition and named a sea area after a bloke. Not any bloke but the one who just happened to be their founding father.
His other claim to fame, and one that he became greatly ashamed of, was his captaincy of HMS Beagle. During the two voyages he established a worthy reputation for himself as a hydrographer and surveyor. But for his second trip, feeling that the captain's role was essentially a lonely one and so wanting equal companionship, he invited a certain Charles Darwin along. The resulting publication of On the Origin of Species was deeply distressing to this religiously devout man. In 1860, at a debate in Oxford, he was seen holding a Bible above his head and asking how it was possible to reject the word of God for the word of man? A fair point! He felt partially responsible for aiding and abetting Darwinism and that depressed him. General synopsis – low. Just as FitzRoy debunked Stephen Saxby's lunar forecasting method as pseudoscience, Darwinism has, today, been equally debunked as pseudoscience by scientists honest and true, who have realised that even so-called 'simple' life forms are anything but. The elegant design, staggering complexity and sheer brilliance of any living cell is such that many have accepted that the probability of anything like this assembling itself by chance, and in such a short time as 13bn years, is effectively zero - see this if you are so inclined. Design requires a designer. The things that Darwin didn't, and couldn't know have proved fatal to his theory. Yet in schools and universities and in the popular media macro-evolution is still taught as fact. How the masses have had their eyes blinded! Fog, poor.
And now, I appear to have veered well off course and find myself becalmed in the Doldrums with no way back to the Shipping Forecast. Calm 0 or 1, monotonous, not so good. In fact, very poor.
Back