Ancient weather lore tells us that the weather in November is a sure pointer to the character of the coming winter. There are several old country sayings which provide plenty of advice, and probably the best known of this goes like this:

If November ice will bear a duck, There’ll be nothing after but sludge and muck.

This suggests that a cold November, or at least one with a spell of severe weather, will be followed by a mild and rainy winter. The complementary proposition is supported by this rather less memorable couplet:

Flowers in bloom late in the autumn Indicate a bad winter to come

Although you may still hear these venerable old saws quoted by some people, they are sadly not borne out by the facts. In the last half century or so, there have been seven notably cold Novembers, two of which were followed by mild winters, three by average winters, and two by cold winters. Looking at it the other way round, the five warmest winters of the last century were preceded by one cold, three average and one warm November.

Britain’s warmest November in over 340 years of records occurred as recently as 1994. There was no frost at all during the month, and fuchsias, dahlias an geraniums were in bloom for most of the time in central and southern parts of the country, while it was still possible to pick runner beans and outdoor tomatoes right up to December 1. If the old sayings were good indicators, the winter of 1994-95 should have been a real stinker. In the event it was a very mild one with frequent rain and strong winds. There was a two-day cold snap over the New Year holiday which brought a few snow showers, and the only other significant snowfall of the season happened in early-March.

The previous November – that of 1993 – was of the coldest of the twentieth century with a mean temperature almost 3 degC below the long-term average. The winter that followed was pretty average, and there were three or four spells of very cold weather with snow in most parts of the UK. February in particular was decidedly wintry.

© Philip Eden