The Chartists are coming & so is snow in London
Hurrah for old England and liberty sweet,
The land that we live in and plenty to eat;
We shall ever remember this wonderful day,
The Chartists are coming, get out of the way.
The Chartists are Coming, Ballad, 1848
According to the weather forecast there may be a chance of snow in London over the next couple of days. The forecasts are made by professional weather forecasters, often trade union members of the professional’s union Prospect, they both deserve to be taken seriously and are highly likely to be accurate.
That said you don’t need a weatherman to tell you that in recent times it has snowed infrequently in the Capital. A northern colleague said to me recently that despite it being the middle of winter if it does actually snow in London it will be headline news.
The inability of perhaps particularly London to cope with even modest amounts of snow is legendary.
The expectation of snow in London is one of the great things of London life nevertheless. People peer anxiously out of windows for signs of snow and search for reports of approaching snow (these days much easier to find with social media). In the mid-nineteenth century London, 170 years ago, when it snowed a lot more than now, it was the Chartists who got people looking out of windows, checking for any sign of impending trouble.
Suffice to say that in the revolutionary year of 1848 the Chartists did indeed come, on April 10th 1848, but actually they were rumoured to be coming far more often than they actually arrived.
Snow and the Chartists two of the great imponderables of London life. Actually quite a lot of Londoners liked and like both of them.
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