I'm going to give away my age by saying that I remember this snow. As others have mentioned, it started on Boxing Day with a heavy snowfall, and I think we had more during the following weeks, on and off. I remember climbing up on top of the piles of snow bulldozed off the road, which were higher than I was tall (though I was shorter then than I am now!) No problem keeping warm, as we had got a ton-and-a-half of coal in the coal shed in the autumn (as everybody did in those days) so no matter what happened you could keep the coal fire going - as depicted in the first video. I remember that the remains of the piles of snow cleared off the roads took weeks and weeks to melt. My memory says they lasted into May, but that is most probably faulty, as one doesn't have a clear sense of time at that young age.
Originally Posted by: AJ*
I remember it well too. In fact I'm of an age where I can remember that winter better than I can remember December 2010! I was living in Cranleigh, then as now. It all started a couple of days before Christmas with a cold easterly bringing frosty nights and sunny days with maxima just above freezing. It clouded over on Boxing Day and a band of snow moved down from the north. Very fine snow started about 4 pm, but it was so light that the last time I looked out at about 8 pm there was only about half an inch lying. So it was a surprise to wake up next morning to find a deep covering. The snow stopped about 9 am and I ventured out with a ruler to measure the depth, which came to about 7 inches. There was a another hour or so of snow between 11 and 12, but not enough to substantially add to the cover.
The rest of that day and the next two were heavily overcast, with temperatures just above freezing by day and just below by night, but there was no visible sign of the snow thawing, so the "wet bulb" temperature must have remained sub-zero. In the afternoon, my father pointed to scuds of dark cloud beneath the cover of stratus, and said that it indicated bad weather. How right he was! That night we had perhaps the worst blizzard that I've experienced here, thanks to a classic "Channel Low". The snow stopped not long after dawn and the sun came out, so I ventured into the garden with my trusty ruler. Getting a reliable estimate of the depth was difficult, because in was only a foot ruler and there had been a lot of drifting. But I did my best to take readings in several places, and my best estimate for the average depth was 14 inches. Allowing for some compaction of the previous fall suggests that this new fall was about 8 inches.
Then we had another fall of 3 inches late on New Year's Eve (this time measured on a previously cleared surface). After that, the rest of the winter was slightly anticlimactic here; often bitterly cold of course, but we only had one more major snow event. Then during the last few days of February, the wind veered from E to SE, the sun came out, and temperatures started to rise. The last morning we had a full snow cover was 1st March. There were still sharp night frosts for a few more days, but soon the snow was all gone apart from the remains of drifts, and even they didn't last that long. My best estimate for the winter is 65 days of snow cover here.