Century £14.99 pp307

“It is not that we enjoy our weather, but that we feel safe with it,” Tom Fort asserts in this enjoyable book. He is talking, of course, about the British, and the English in particular. “In many countries of the world, the weather is regarded — with good reason — as an indifferent or even hostile force, to be watched closely, appeased if possible and not to be trusted.” We make the weather a frequent topic of conversation, for the simple reason that it is constantly surprising us, catching us unawares. It isn’t predictable, like the endless winters in Scandinavia or the ferocious heat of Africa. We tend to be unprepared for the blizzards that occasionally hit the south of England in December or January, whereas New Yorkers are out with the sand and the snowploughs almost as soon as the first flakes begin to fall. “So foul and fair a day I have not seen,” says Macbeth in the most weather-beaten play ever written. And it is that state of foulness and fairness that we on this island have learnt to live with.

Under the Weather encompasses the findings of such great 17th-century scientists as Isaac Newton, Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle and the truly extraordinary Robert Hooke, each of whom sought explanations for the varied changes of climate that the superstitious and unenlightened attributed to the whim of God. These latter are still around, as witness the evangelical crackpots in America who declare that with every tsunami or earthquake the Almighty is ridding the planet of sinners. Fort traces the earliest meteorological writings in English back to William Merle, who became rector of St Michael’s church in the Lincolnshire village of Driby in 1330. Merle kept a daily record of the weather between January 1337 and January 1344. Fort has examined the journal, and remarks on the peculiar dullness that goes with this literary form. Writers who are obsessed with the weather cram their pages with temperature readings alone, unlike Gilbert White, whose The Natural History of Selborne (1788) shows how rain, hail, sleet, snow and sunlight affect birds, plants and animals and those of his human flock who were closest to nature.

There are many cranks and eccentrics here, but none more interesting than Dr George Merryweather (apt name), a general practitioner in Whitby, Yorkshire, the coastal town later honoured with a visit by Count Dracula. Merryweather had read a letter from the poet William Cowper to his cousin Lady Hesketh extolling the prophetic virtues of his pet leech: “I have a leech in a bottle that foretells all these prodigies and convulsions of Nature. No change in the weather surprises him . . . he is worth all the barometers in the world.”

Drawing inspiration from Cowper’s fond report, Merryweather confined leeches in bottles and kept a close watch on their movements. When the leeches were calm, the weather was mild, but when they were restless it was in anticipation of a storm at sea. Thus was born Merryweather’s Tempest Prognosticator, a device with 12 leeches in as many bottles on a specially constructed circular stand. Tubes and a bell struck by a dozen little hammers completed the design. Fort observes wryly that Merryweather was deeply attached to his bloodsuckers.

Our forefathers were more concerned with the vagaries of the national climate than we are today, with central heating in our homes and offices. They had to combat the elements, especially if they were farm workers or urban poor. Only trawlermen face those hazards now. Fort quotes John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, who preached thousands of sermons in the open air, and wrote in his journal about a downpour that halted his progress in Derbyshire: “The trees were torn up by the roots . . . Two women of loose character were swept away from their own door and drowned: one was found near the place, the other was carried seven or eight miles. Hayfield churchyard was all torn up and the dead bodies were swept out of their graves. When the flood was abated they were found in several places. Some were hanging in trees: others left in meadows . . . some partly eaten by dogs or wanting one or more of their members.”

Fort ends his book with a thought on global warming: it might make our cherished weather much like everyone else’s if governments continue to be cavalier about the problem, ignoring all the gloomy portents and predictions.

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