English: A Story of Marmite, Queuing and Weather. Ben Fogle

      How can I sum up the forecast’s appeal to those who don’t technically need it? Mark Damazer, the Controller of BBC Radio 4, nails it: ‘It scans poetically. It’s got a rhythm of its own. It’s eccentric, it’s unique, it’s English. It’s slightly mysterious because nobody really knows where these places are. It takes you into a faraway place that you can’t really comprehend unless you’re one of these people bobbing up and down in the Channel.’

      Zeb Soanes, a regular Shipping Forecast reader, who once fulfilled a listener’s wish by delivering the forecast from the top of Orfordness lighthouse, touches on its emotional pull: ‘To the non-nautical, it is a nightly litany of the sea. It reinforces a sense of being islanders with a proud seafaring past. Whilst the listener is safely tucked up in their bed, they can imagine small fishing boats bobbing about at Plymouth or 170ft waves crashing against Rockall.’

      The purpose of the Shipping Forecast is to warn against the hazards of hostile weather. And as such it taps into an ancient impulse. Throughout history, the English have scanned the horizon along the country’s 2,748 miles of coastline on the lookout for perils. We can call upon Shakespeare to express in the most lyrical terms how geography – a sense of place and its attendant climate – makes a people who they are. John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard II beautifully crystallizes the English view of their ‘sceptre’d isle’:

      This fortress built by Nature for herself

      Against infection and the hand of war,

      This happy breed of men, this little world;

      This precious stone set in the silver sea,

      Which serves it in the office of a wall,

      Or as a moat defensive to a house.

      There hasn’t been a successful invasion of our shores since 1066 – for 950 years – but still we keep an eye out to guard against threats. These are much more likely to be incoming weather formations than armadas or invading fleets. Our island existence depends on keeping a watchful eye over our waters. The Shipping Forecast subliminally reassures us that someone is doing that.

      The English language is full of vocabulary, phrases and idioms that reveal its people come from maritime stock. For example: the Romans arrived in AD 53, and stayed not just as imperial administrators, but also as traders and tellers of stories of the Christian ‘cult’ of Jesus alongside their pagan deities. A few centuries later, when Christianity had become established, the main body of the churches built all over the country at the centre of communities became known as the nave, from the Latin for ship, navis. The name came as a natural transfer of associated ideas. Like ships that introduced the religion, naves contain a body of people.

      Until mass air travel became the norm in the late 1950s, and the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, marine transport was the only way for anyone to reach the English or for the English to reach the rest of Europe and the world. That’s why maritime trade and the Royal Navy have always had such great importance. We send boats and ships out on missions (naval, commercial, leisure) and receive incoming vessels only by invitation or by arrangement with the harbourmaster.

      And as a nation, we spend a lot of time out on the water. In fine weather there’s nothing the English like more than pootling around in a dinghy or on a raft, feeling the sea air on their face on a bracing coastal walk, or enjoying a bucket and spade holiday on a stretch of sand. To live in a cottage by the sea has long been a dream of those approaching retirement. The fashion for affordable package holidays by the seaside was consolidated when Billy Butlin established a chain of hotels at locations such as Bognor, Blackpool, Skegness, Barry Island, Ayr and Clacton. Our top-rated chefs prize seaweed as ‘sea herbs’ and fight to stop all our hand picking of our own supplies. As no one lives more than a hundred miles from the coastline and many rivers have tidal reaches, the screech of seagulls is as familiar as the siren call of the fair-weather ice cream van. The hinterland behind the coastline is dotted with woods, hollows and tunnels romantically suspected to have once served as hiding places for smugglers’ contraband. Nautical novels are noted bestsellers, from C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books to Patrick O’Brian’s twenty-volume Aubrey–Maturin series of novels, set in the early nineteenth century and following the lives and careers of Captain Jack Aubrey and his friend, naval physician Dr Stephen Maturin.

      So many quintessentially English passions are built on sea-based stories, from the rock music popularized by pirate radio in the 1960s – broadcast from offshore ships or disused sea forts, providing music for a generation not yet served by legal radio services – to the notion of an ocean cruise as the dream once-in-a-lifetime holiday. Personal challenges and stories revolve around the sea too: to swim the English Channel, to row across the Atlantic, to circumnavigate the British Isles. We are bound to the sea in a way that infuses our whole national mindset.

      Take the fast-food dish we gave to the world: fish and chips. Piping hot fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, doused in salt and vinegar, is what foreigners think we eat outside as a comfort on cold and wintry days. And even today, with the invasion of fast food from America and elsewhere, it is estimated there are still eight fish and chip shops for every McDonald’s.

      Finally, it is impossible to document our English maritime heritage without mention of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. As a child I can remember my pride in raising money for the iconic RNLI. I had one of their famous lifeboat donation tins, which I used to fill over the course of the year. It is almost impossible to visit any beach or coastal village in England without seeing the famous RNLI flag, although I’m sure few of us notice it, because it’s so familiar.

      The RNLI has saved more than 140,000 lives since 1824. Today it is staffed almost exclusively by 4,600 volunteers – who provide search and rescue at sea as well as lifeguard cover at over 150 English beaches. Their work is invaluable in sustaining our proud island nation status.

      Back at Broadcasting House, Chris explains why he thinks the Shipping Forecast is so popular. ‘Many of the names are unfamiliar to people apart from the context of the Shipping Forecast, so it turns our landscape into a slightly ethereal world, inhabited by communities we are connected to but know nothing about. It’s something that binds us together when so much divides us.’

      I’m struck by how true this is. The Shipping Forecast is many things to many people – essential information, a lullaby to send them to sleep, a poem, a song, a comfort in times of stress or danger at sea. Perhaps above all, though, it reminds us who we are: an island people in the Atlantic who naturally, instinctively, look to sea.

* UTC stands for Universal Co-ordinated Time – the new international term for GMT.

      CHAPTER THREE

       HEROIC FAILURES

      If you can keep your head when all about you

      Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

      If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

      But make allowance for their doubting too:

      If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

      Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

      Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

      And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise …

      Rudyard Kipling, ‘If’

      ‘Success is overrated. We all crave it despite daily evidence that our real genius lies in exactly the opposite direction. Incompetence is what we are good at.’

      Stephen Pile, The Book of Heroic Failures

      Heroes come in all