I have had a look at the Met Office daily maxima for the UK in 5km grid squares which goes back to 1960 and did some painting in Excel

The charts for 19 and 24 Jan 1963 are shown below

Clearly 19 Jan 1963 cannot be a record breaker for lowest daytime max. The lowest max in the winter of 1962/3 was 24 Jan and was around -5C for much of the South East.

The curious thing is the 19th Jan synoptics show a small depression off the top of Cornwall and a strong SE wind covering much of Southern England and S Wales and conducive to blizzard conditions whereas the 24 Jan synoptics show a high pressure cell right overhead and calm conditions. Also the temperature profile for 19 Jan is unusual for winter showing the lowest temperatures in SW England and also S and Mid Wales and as low as -6C in one or two areas.I am wondering whether these reports from HH Lamb and Trevor Harley which are referencing SE England should be referring to SW England instead

As it was reported in Kent where I lived at the time, the problem was more that the low temps had produced particularly fine powdery snow which was sucked into the air intakes of the electric motors of the trains. As the SE network has third-rail electrification, the air intakes and motors are mounted low and so close to the ground in prime position to be affected.

Some places had exceptionally low minima both in that month and in January 1982. I think January 1982 had some very low maxima as well, and 13 Jan 1982 makes it onto the list of coldest days at Oxford (see my earlier post).

One other thought: I think the 2018 Beast might well have made it onto the list had it occurred six weeks earlier, in mid-January. As it was, the maxima were exceptionally low for the end of February and beginning of March.

Here's a photo of the first Sheppey bridge during that month. Looks like the sea froze over, and how!

https://ukwct.org.uk/weather/1895.jpg 

Yes, it was widely mis-reported in various ways - even then!

I remember it well. It was the automatic doors that caused the problem on my train. The powdery snow getting into the mechanism signalled the doors weren't closed and hence the train couldn't start. At each stop the guard had to get out and manually force each set if doors shut. My 20 minute journey to work  from Richmond to Waterloo at 07:20 gave up the ghost at Clapham Junction at 11:30

Which is mis-reported, the light fluffy snow getting into the electrics, Or the salt failing to do its job?

As for the first, this effect also affected Eurostar

https://web.archive.org/web/20110612232005/http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/transport/article6963830.ece 

but salt will melt ice down to the eutectic point of -21C - though in practice you wouldn't want to use that much salt (23%). 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutectic_system 

A 10% salt solution freezes at -6C which should have been achievable

https://www.lpi.usra.edu/education/explore/ice/background/allAboutWater/ 

I was surprised that the month didn't show up either in Lamb's list or in the coldest days at Reading or Oxford. When I have a moment I''ll have a look in Symons' Meteorological Magazine for March 1895 to see what I can dig out about Feb 1895: 

https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_11809e39-c3c9-43dd-9a75-f2a57d2f6fbb/ 

(The Met Office's digital archive is a godsend that deserves to be better known.)

Update: There was  a disappointing lack of relevant data. Most of the temperature data given is for minima , some of which were very low, or for daily mean temperatures. The small amount of maximum temp. data I could unearth isn't that startling. Garstang in Lancashire had a max of 22F (between -5 and -6C) on the 6th, and Loughborough in Leicestershire had maxima of 26F (between -3 and -4C) on both the 8th and 9th. That doesn't seem to fit in with the values that you've quoted. Where did you get them from, and are you sure that they were maxima rather than daily means?

Added later: I've found the Daily Weather Reports for Feb 1895 on the Met Office website:

https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/IO_6b0c337c-b082-4f3a-906c-db6e2b85f9aa/ 

Unfortunately most of the data is in manuscript and it's been photocopied, so it isn't as easily legible as one would like. But there's at awful lot of data there, not just for UK stations but for ones on the continent too. I didn't look beyond the 9th, and the lowest max that I spotted was for Aberdeen at 19F (-7C) - remarkable as the east wind had to cross the North Sea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_1894%E2%80%9395_in_the_United_Kingdom 

The only mention of daily maxima is this: "Coldest daily CET maximum: −4.5 °C or 23.9 °F 6 February". At least one of the three stations averaged to derive the CET figure must have had a lower value than that, but even so though very cold it doesn't seem to be truly exceptional.

The salt in my view despite Ian Currie's book quoting it in the book!

Shawbury was photographed in thick freezing fog on that day after fresh snow and sheltered from the scathing easterly that presaged the snow over the S UK on 13th. That night the same location broke the December minimum record, -25.2°C. Imagine that- less than 2 weeks out of November.

Those are certainly very impressively low maxima. I remembered that there had been some very low maxima in Jan 82, but had thought that Dec 81 was notable mainly for some very low minima. I did cover myself in my original post by saying that the data suggested that "the lowest possible maximum in SE England is close to -10C", though, and Newport and Shawbury are well outside that region. In Scotland at places like Braemar and Altnaharra ISTR that even lower maxima have occurred. 

These come from the Met Office MIDAS database of digitised station records

https://data.ceda.ac.uk/badc/ukmo-midas-open/data/uk-daily-temperature-obs/dataset-version-202407 

It seems that for this Station it is extremely difficult to get a daytime max below -6C as the lowest in the last 144 years has been -5.8C (twice)

As this Station is only about  8 miles outside central London I would expect other SE maxima (say in Hampshire or Oxfordshire) to be a few degrees lower that these but I suspect my pecking order is going to be correct for this date range

What a superb resource! I had no idea that there was a free archive of station data like that, even including ones such as the short-lived Sittingbourne station in the 1960s. Happily, that includes 1963, so at long last I can see what the last legendary winter looked like in my locality. (Sittingbourne is a few miles inland from here, but won't be greatly different - it's usually only a degree or two different to here).

And from a quick look, there were 11 ice days in January 63, 4 more in February and none in March. There was a run of 8 ice days in a row, and a 3-day period with lows in negative double digits, peaking at -13.9.

That means that the Feb 2018 "Beast" (which had a max of -1.2 here on the 2nd March, and a min of -14.8 on the morning of the 28th February) was not only the coldest late Feb/early March of my lifetime, but for decades before... truly remarkable.

The other thing that's of note in 63 was when the cold spell ended - at the end of February Sittingbourne reported a run of days a few degrees above freezing, but still -9 to -7 at night, followed in early March by days of +6 to +8, but still between -7 and -5 at night. It suggests the cold air took some shifting, but even back then the strength of the sun caused significant warming by day.

EDIT: And I can only dream of a summer like the one that followed. The absolute max was just 24.4, and temperatures didn't regularly reach 20 until late July. By mid-August they were below 20 generally. Only three days of the whole summer reached 23C!

Contrast that with last summer, regarded as mediocre on here. Temperatures were reliably above 20 by late June and stayed that way until mid-September. There were 20 days above 25C (let alone 23C). That's an incredible warming - I've certainly noticed it since the 80s, but the 60s look to make the 80s seem positively tropical!

Thanks. I suppose any NE wind has to cross central London to reach you and even a straight easterly has to cross the southern suburbs. Even allowing for the relative coldness of the 1890s, the number of entries from that decade (and not just from 1895) is striking. It makes me wonder if something changed some time around 1900, whether a switch from a Glaisher to a Stevenson screen, changes in the immediate neighbourhood of the screen, or the Kew area becoming more urbanised.

Don't know the history of that weather station so I couldn't say, but I know the period 1880-1900 was a very cold one and regarded as the end of the LIA. The area did become somewhat more urbanised in the early 1900's but the actual weather station is nowhere near any large buildings being right in the middle of the Botanical Gardens

If I have time I might look at another London/SE site on MIDAS with a long history like Kew and try and do a correlation exercise

Who would have predicted that neither 1947 or 1963 appear in this list?

I looked up 1987, of course, as that was the humdinger from my childhood. The lowest max was "only" -5.8, with -4.1 on the day before and the day after... a very impressive 3-day combination, but not as low as further inland (I suspect the snow would have had something to do with that too, as my gran used to say it warms up when it snows.)

The really interesting bit is the absolute low in 1987 was -14.1 - which means the Beast of 2018, at -14.2 there just pipped it. Imagine that - colder than 1987! The previous year had a lower absolute max, in the remarkable February of 1986 it reached -15.1 at Brogdale. The grass lows were better in the 80s spells too: -19 in 1986, a staggering -22 in 1987, compared with "just" -13.6 in 2018... yes, the grass min was higher than the air min in that particular spell! The difference, of course, is that there hadn't been days of snow on the ground beforehand, so some warmth from deeper down would have had an effect.

Greenwich might be a good one to look at. And Hampstead could be another if it's in the MIDAS dataset.

The summers of the 1960s were really cool by today's standards .  25C was regarded as a hot day in those days.   🙂 

These are minima, surely?

Also, synoptics for 12 Dec 1991 hardly look capable of producing a minimum of -13.3

https://www.theweatheroutlook.com/twodata/reanalysis.aspx