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[00:00:22] Hello, this is Garlic and Pearls with me Muriel Zagha and my friend Suzanne Raine. We are respectively French and British and this is a podcast where we examine all aspects of the Frenchness of the French and the Britishness of the British. And today Suzanne it's your turn to talk me through something distinctly British that I actually do not know very much about. What is it?
[00:00:49] Muriel, I am introducing you today to the Beaufort Scale or as you would call it in France, l'échelle de Beaufort. L'échelle de Beaufort. Does that ring any bells with you? Not really. But then, it's a scale for what? This Muriel is the next episode in our occasional series on weights and measures,
[00:01:18] because I know you enjoy them. I really enjoy them but find them impossible. And this is a sneaky one, really, because it's something that is British and Irish, although also in its deepest origins, French before the revolution in a way. Really? And it's something which is ingeniously avoided metrification and which is creative and artistic
[00:01:48] and useful and fun and poetic and elemental, just like Great Britain and Northern Ireland are. And it's a way of describing nature which cannot be tamed. Amazing. Amazing. What's not to love about that? Do you spend all your time, Suzanne, looking for ways of undermining the metric system? You do. I have a feeling. This is essentially what drives you.
[00:02:14] I'm not undermining. I'm observing that there are some things that cannot be reduced to the power of 10. Okay. Okay. And I'm willing to listen. The Beaufort scale is the manifestation. Yes, well, it's a slam dunk, frankly. The Beaufort scale is the international system for measuring wind, as you know. And it is, did you not know?
[00:02:43] I didn't know that. I mean, I shouldn't know it. But I think partly because I didn't grow up on the coast, I'm not as preoccupied with wind as if I were someone from Brittany or La Rochelle or somewhere like that, where presumably what the wind is going to do next is of paramount importance if you have a boat and so on. Whereas you're obviously British people are island people. We are. Although I do know, I acknowledge that France has a massive coastline and including a
[00:03:09] lot of the Atlantic. So this isn't a fight about who has the coast. This has a fight about who measures what happens at sea. So Muriel, I'm handing you now a printout of the Beaufort scale. What do you notice immediately about the numbers on the left-hand side? So the numbers 0 to 12. Yes. How much does that annoy you? 0 to 12. Yeah.
[00:03:37] Because it's not 0 to 10, you mean. And you think I would like it to be more regular. Well, there are 13 classes, aren't there? 13. We've categorised it into 13 because it's 0 and then 1 to 12. Oh, that's right. Of course, 13. Yes. But it doesn't say 13 because cleverly it uses the 0. Okay. Firstly, I think if that was in France, there would be, it would be 1 to 10.
[00:04:03] Yeah. I think our instinct would be, let's just collapse some categories together to make it nice and neat so that it's 1 to 10. I think you're right. I've become a bit more acclimatised to Britain now. So I'm not immediately shocked and appalled by the 13-ness of this list. And then what else? So this measures the force of the wind. Then the column next to that is knots.
[00:04:29] So that's the unit we're using. So knots is the speed unit. Yes. Which we're going to talk about a little bit more in a minute. Then next column, brief name of the category of wind, you know, expression, whatever. Then the next column is for use at sea and the final column is for use on land because obviously your needs are
[00:04:57] very different and the dangers presumably are different on land and at sea. Yes. What I noticed without reading it in detail is it looks to me quite like quite a literary document. The language is rather beautiful and poetic from what I can see. You know, for example, I'm just one thing, but force zero, knots under one knot, brief name calm. And then the description
[00:05:25] of it for use at sea is sea like a mirror. Isn't it beautiful? And that's immediately a poetic image. Yes. So it's not what I would call scientific, very abstract scientific prosaic language. It's poetic language that really describes nature. Is that right? And that's not a very French way of abroaching this kind of scale, I think. It has two columns for use at sea and then for use on land. And they are descriptions of the effect
[00:05:54] of the wind. And so there's a very lovely one at force five on land where it says, small trees in leaf start to sway, crested wavelets on inland waters. Yes. And that was somebody tried to make it shorter and they changed it to small leaved trees start to sway, which is of course a completely different meaning to small trees in leaf. Of course. It's not the same. It's not the same at all.
[00:06:23] It's not the same. So the poetic stuff actually has a point, which is my point to use. So the Beaufort scale, which is a measurement of wind and a way of articulating the strength of wind, particularly originally at sea, but now also on land, is not a precise metric measurement. And
[00:06:49] yet it is the one that we all use, including the French, pleasingly. That's amazing that you managed to turn the French. Yeah, I know. And I think through the back door there, I don't think it's demonstrated. You don't really know it that it's happened, but it's describing the wind as it relates to the effects on the canvas of the sails of a ship or on the sea itself or on the world around us.
[00:07:17] And it's still used because it is the most appropriate way for seafarers to describe you, telling you the wind is going X miles per hour is kind of useful, but actually what you need to know is what it's going to do. And there's some other reasons why it's still the most effective way of doing it. And one is because the wind isn't constant. The wind is constantly changing. It's an
[00:07:41] elemental thing. So to try and force it into this, the wind is going at this, is quite difficult. And actually what you want to be able to do is say, well, if you see the waves changing a little bit, so if you see these trees starting to move, then that means that it's moving from this to this. I think people have found it for now centuries, an incredibly useful way to communicate really
[00:08:05] clearly about what's happening. And so one of the things that happened from the very beginning was that it was all about the effect of the wind in the sails, the physical manifestation of the breath of the earth. That's what the Beaufort scale measures. And I'm going to explain it to you today. Was there a man called Beaufort?
[00:08:32] Yes, there was a man called Beaufort, obviously. And what do you notice about the name? It sounds French to me. Looks French or a French origin. Was he in fact French? Well, what a coup de théâtre. Wow. Really? He was a tiny, tiny bit French. So who was this Monsieur Beaufort? It would be Beaufort in French. Yeah. In fact, it's the name of a cheese as well. So, you know, I mean, it immediately becomes to me a totally different story.
[00:09:02] So I think this is what makes my brilliance in selecting this for the episode, particularly striking. He was descended from French Protestant Huguenots. And maybe you can explain them better than I can. That was under Louis XIV that they really suffered, wasn't it? Well, there were several terrible episodes, but it became really quite dangerous for French
[00:09:30] Protestants to remain in France. So there was a mass emigration, I think, when really they felt when not only under, you know, you felt that your life was under threat, but also society was closed down to you. So a lot of Huguenots came to England, I believe, and settled there. So was he one of those? Yeah, his ancestors were one of those. He wasn't, he was later, but his ancestors were French
[00:09:57] Protestant Huguenots who fled in the 16th century. So very early, actually, and they moved to London. And his parents were actually Irish. So his father, Daniel Augustus Beaufort, was a Protestant clergyman in Navanne, which is the county town and the largest town of County Meath, which is about 50
[00:10:22] kilometres northwest of Dublin. And his mother was the daughter and co-heirous of a man called William Waller, who'd built this amazing, beautiful Georgian house in a place called Allentown, also in County Meath. And the Reverend Daniel Beaufort was founding member of the Royal Irish Academy. And he was, he's a clergyman, but he was a scientist and a botanist. Yeah, I love those men.
[00:10:51] Yeah, he was, he was that. Quite early on, so Francis Beaufort was born in Navanne in County Meath on the 27th of May, 1774. So latter half of the 18th century. And he had an older brother and three sisters. And his father, so, you know, this is the, this is the world he's living in. His father created and published a new map of Ireland in 1792. So it's a creative endeavour household.
[00:11:19] So he is French, but he's kind of, oh, French from a time before the French started metrifying everything. Yes. He's from the France that you told me about where every little town had its own different set of weights. Exactly. Yes. That's the France that he would have recognised. None of that later stuff, frankly. No. But he did have French Protestant roots. So you can claim a little bit of him.
[00:11:47] So he grew up in Wales and Ireland until he was 14. But then he left school and he went to sea. So quite early on. So even though he became very scientific from a very scientific family. Yeah. So he, he went to sea at the age of 15 in 1789 on the British East India Company ship.
[00:12:15] It was known as an East India man called the Van Sittart. And then immediately was shipwrecked in the Far East. So already he's an adventurer and somebody who's interested in perhaps a bit more precision with maritime. Maritime star. Than the captain of the Van Sittart had demonstrated.
[00:12:41] Right. Where were they shipwrecked? In the East, you say? In the Far East. In the Far East. Gosh. Far away from home. Far away from home. And then from then on, the whole of the 1790s, he just did sailing in the Navy on various ships, which ended up, of course, after the beginning of the war with France, being quite a lot of battles with France in different places and ways. And he was promoted
[00:13:10] in 1796 on HMS Phyton. He was badly wounded in 1800 off Malaga. And then he was promoted to the rank of commander on the 13th of November, 1800. While he was wounded, he was recovering and he went off with his brother-in-law and constructed a semaphore line from Dublin to Galway. So he's an enterprising chap. Ah, yes. Yes.
[00:13:39] So now I'm going to go back. So we've got him lingering in the background. Enterprising chap, seafarer, war with France, lots of sea battles. How do you measure the wind and how do you communicate it? This is all significantly before the invention of the anemometer, which is a means by which you
[00:14:03] measure wind speed. And that was only really properly invented in 1845 by Reverend Dr. John Thomas Romney Robinson of our Marr Observatory, who was really starting to, and obviously they were then significantly enhanced and developed from that point onwards. But at the time that we're talking about, essentially
[00:14:27] fighting the French Napoleonic sea battles, there was no reliable means of measuring the wind like that. So you had to do it somewhat differently, which is this empirical scale, the Beaufort Windforce scale. And it was devised in 1805 by Francis Beaufort. I've often been tempted to do the shipping forecast
[00:14:52] on this, and I haven't done because it's too much of a cliche, the shipping forecast. The poetry of the shipping forecast that everybody so, you know, adores, obviously depends entirely on the poetry of the Beaufort scale. Did you notice that when you were looking at it? I do see that there's a line from one to the other. Because if you didn't have the Beaufort scale, you wouldn't have Hurricane Force 12,
[00:15:20] or Violent Storm Force 11, or any of those. So you wouldn't have the words. Do you see that? I do see that. You wouldn't have the words and you wouldn't have the cadence of the shipping forecast, which is so particular. It's worth is really looking and focusing at the words on the table. So if you look under brief name from Force 2 onwards, Force 2 to 6, what do they say?
[00:15:44] They say light breeze, gentle breeze, moderate breeze, fresh breeze and strong breeze. Lovely. And then from 7 to 9, what do they say? So brilliantly from 7 till 9, they say near gale, gale, dot, dot, dot, then strong gale. It's very evocative.
[00:16:11] It's beautiful, isn't it? And it really is beautiful. And so then the question is, what do they all mean? And particularly this word gale. Because what do you think of when you hear the word gale? I suppose it would turn your umbrella inside out. Isn't that the kind of wind force that you experience in a gale? But broadly, you're thinking of a really strong wind, aren't you? Yes.
[00:16:38] When you think of a gale. So it has a meaning to you, a force you're working against. Exactly. Or that's pushing you away. Exactly. So these are words that have become embedded with meaning about threat, really. And so I'm going to tell you about that. I'm going to tell you how this language, this poetic scale of words was developed after the break.
[00:17:06] Welcome back, Muriel. Weather suspense, wind suspense. So this scale that we're looking at, he didn't invent the words. No. And actually, he didn't invent the idea of trying to draw up and describe the effects of the weather.
[00:17:28] One of the things that's used as a marker earlier is something from Daniel Defoe, the English author, who wrote a book in 1704 called The Storm, which is the first detailed account of a hurricane in Britain. And it's seen as being the first substantial work of modern journalism, really,
[00:17:53] because there was on the beginning on the 24th of November and reaching its height on the 26th and 27th of November, 1703, or in the Gregorian calendar, the 7th and 8th of December, 1703, there was a week-long storm that hit London. And it was called by Daniel Defoe as the greatest, the longest in duration, the widest in extent of all the tempests and storms that history gives
[00:18:22] any account of since the beginning of time. Okay. So pretty big. Big glim. Big glim. And so he wrote an account of it. He put ads in newspapers asking readers to send in personal accounts, and then he selected 60 of those and edited them for the book. As he said, most of these accounts are reliable because most of our relators have not only given us their names and signed the
[00:18:48] accounts they've sent, but also given us leave to hand their names down to posterity. He constructed a table of degrees, which again went from brilliantly 0 to 11. So one fewer than old Beaufort, but still good. And his degrees were stark calm, zero.
[00:19:12] One is calm weather. Two, little wind. Three, a fine breeze. Four, a small gale. It's already the gale, only number four. Five, a fresh gale. Six, a top sail gale. Seven, blows fresh. Oh. Eight, a hard gale of wind. Oh dear.
[00:19:37] Nine, a fret of wind. Ten, a storm. And eleven, a tempest. Isn't that great? You can feel romanticism coming as well. I mean, you know, the relationship between nature and emotion, that you're looking at the wind and it's affecting you emotionally as well as physically. I totally agree. And he said, this is something, other stuff he wrote about the storm. He said,
[00:20:05] the tempest that destroyed woods and forests all over England. No pen could describe it, nor tongue express it, nor thought conceive it, unless by one in the extremity of it. And Portsmouth looked as if the enemy had sacked them and were most miserably torn to pieces. Can you imagine? Yeah, I know.
[00:20:29] You can imagine because it's completely terrifying. So there was, so already in 1704, clearly an attempt to classify winds according to a scale. And through the rest of the 18th century, they, other people did that as well. So in 1723, there was a man called James Duren, who was secretary of the Royal
[00:20:52] Society, and he had a smaller scale for weather observers. It got popularized, his got popularized on the continent by the Societas Meteorologica Palatina, which was founded in 1790 by Carl Theodore, the prince elector. Wow. And so you can really see in 1759, there was a British engineer called John Smeaton, who was like all of these
[00:21:21] people. He was preoccupied with the dangers of violent winds. Yes, of course. Because he'd been commissioned to design a replacement for the Eddistone lighthouse, which had been swept away in a terrible gale in 1703. And he designed again, an early anemometer. I'm sorry, I find that extraordinarily difficult to say. But those words are difficult. Anemone is also difficult. Anemometer, yeah, this is tricky.
[00:21:48] And he had, again, he had an eight point scale, which had descriptions in terms of movements and leaves and branches and trees, as well as the spread of a rotation of a windmill. So they were all doing this. But here's the thing, because everybody's doing all their definitions and stuff. You still have stiff breeze versus soft breeze. You know, who decides whether a stiff breeze and a soft breeze?
[00:22:17] Yeah, yes. So. Because you want it to have some measure of, if not objectivity, at least describing an experience that most people will agree is the same for them. Yes. I can see that's the French person in you saying, but hang on, this is all just poems. How can you possibly? Absolutely. There's these two fantastic academics called Dennis Wheeler and Clive Wilkinson from the University of Sunderland,
[00:22:47] who published an article in The Mariner's Mirror of 2004. And they observed that we have an embarrassment of riches of maritime records, or particularly mariners' records, because you had to keep your logbook when you were at sea, if you're a captain, and you were charting the world.
[00:23:09] And every day they were recording the sea state, the wind direction for posterity, also as a record in case anything bad happened, and, you know, they needed to explain their actions. And so we have thousands of mariners' logbooks and journals from the latter half of the 17th century onwards, written by officers in the Royal Navy, which have survived because they were important to assisting mapping of the world and navigation.
[00:23:37] And they've got incredible detailed observations and notes of the ship's position, the speed, direction, and the weather. So Clive and Dennis studied 52 logbooks from the period 1685 to 1700, and they analysed all these logbooks for their vocabulary about the wind. I wish I'd done that project. How much fun is that? It's really fascinating.
[00:24:07] Well, so they found, and this is where it gets a little bit like the Eskimos have lots of word for snow. So they found over 4,000 wind force records and 73 different wind force descriptors. So 73 different ways of describing the strength of the wind. Gosh. Don't panic, though, because... I'm panicking slightly. Yeah. Yeah. Where have all these words gone, you might ask?
[00:24:37] We don't have 70 different... Yeah, where are the words? Well, it turns out that 85% of all the words fell into just 11 categories because they were compilations of different bits of the words. So, for example, in those, you know, chart-topping words, number one, fresh gales, the most frequently used words. And I'm going to give you the top 10 or the top however many.
[00:25:06] Little wind. Yeah, yeah, yeah, please. Little wind. Moderate gales, hard gale, small gale, blows hard, variable, fine gales, blows fresh, calm, and strong gales. Okay. So gales feature highly. Yes. But you might observe, as you have done when I asked you to explain what a gale was, it's a bit imprecise still.
[00:25:35] And when you say, where does the word gale come from? The OED says, we don't really know. But it's possibly Old Scandinavian. So it's probably a very old seafaring term, actually. A kind of Viking word, almost. Kind of Viking word. But it wasn't until kind of now, really, and probably because of Beaufort, that we now tie it absolutely to severe weather.
[00:26:02] And in the old days, it probably more just meant a bit windy. Another one, so when you were reading, remember when you read between two and six, it was the word breeze. Breeze, yes. Yeah. And the word breeze actually had a very precise definition in the 17th century.
[00:26:24] So, for example, there's a man called Sir Henry Mannering who wrote a book called Nomanclator Navalis, the Seaman's Dictionary, which was published in 1644, where he's very precise. This is what a breeze is.
[00:26:40] A breeze is a wind which blows out of the sea and doth daily in all seasonable fair weather keep his course, beginning likely about nine in the morning and lasting till it be within little of night. We do not commonly call all winds that blow off the sea upon any coast breezes unless it be there where this course is certain. So that's very specific.
[00:27:07] And the thinking is that the word breeze might come from the Castilian word birsa and might have been brought to the UK by Elizabethan adventurers. That's the landscape that Commander Beaufort enters. Because by then he is master and commander. Exactly. So on the 13th of January 1806, he was commander of His Majesty's Sloop Woolwich.
[00:27:36] And he wrote in his logbook a 0 to 13 point scale. And he gave it descriptive names, which followed the custom of the sea at the times. But it was the fact that he was numbering it and making it so precise that changed it from being just a regular descriptor. And indeed, he used, you know, kind of moderate breeze.
[00:28:02] So he was being evolutionary, not revolutionary. Yeah. But it stuck. He said his idea on creating the scale was to remove uncertainties in wind descriptions. And commented, he said,
[00:28:28] So he added these columns, which included the wind force number and a symbol for the weather. And that all mattered because, as I said earlier, the anemometer was not invented. So you had to do this through estimation of the speed of the vessel and the quantity and form of the sail that the vessel can carry. And he designed it to work for the sloop, for a sailing yacht.
[00:28:57] So there's a period now between 1806 and the 1830s where we don't really know what happened to it. So he'd written it down. He'd invented it. It wasn't universally accepted. But by 1838, it absolutely was because it was then in 1838 adopted by an admiralty memorandum, which used the both. So that's it.
[00:29:27] And it happened through the help of a man called Captain Fitzroy of HMS Beagle. Captain Fitzroy went to Beaufort and said, I'm trying to circumnavigate the world in the Beagle. And Beaufort said, you'll be wanting to use my wind scale. And Fitzroy said, My handy wind scale. That probably would be useful because no one's invented the amnomerator yet. Yeah, no, no. Of course, imagine how wonderful.
[00:29:52] So I think that the idea of it was Beaufort's, the sort of adoption that really made a difference was Captain Fitzroy on the Beagle. And Beaufort refined the scale. And in 1831, he submitted it for official approval, which was then accepted by their lordships of the admiralty in 1838 as the definitive scale to be used by all ships of the Royal Navy.
[00:30:20] And at that point, so the one that I've given you is a later refinement, which has got the on-land stuff as well. At that point, it was designed to be used by a ship of the Royal Navy.
[00:30:35] So in the section on, so for example, the descriptive bit, it will say by number five, fresh breeze, or that in which a well-conditioned man of war could just carry in chase, full and by.
[00:30:54] And then according to the level of wind, single reef top sails and top gallant sails, double reef top sails, jib, treble reefed, close reefed. So he's telling you what you have to do with the sails at each strength of wind. And conversely, if you're seeing the sails doing this certain thing, that means that it's a force nine. It's a strong gale.
[00:31:19] And what's wonderful about his 1831 table is again, the poetry of it. I'm going to just read you from 10 to 12, which are always the exciting bits on the shipping forecast. Do you listen to the shipping forecast? No, I have heard it. I've heard it. So I know, I know its texture, you know, but I don't, I don't listen to it. You should do an episode about it.
[00:31:43] In a way, this is an episode about it because this is explaining the language that's in it. And when I know it's terrible for people at sea, but when there are very strong storms around the coast of Britain, it's quite powerful to listen to the shipping forecast because of the language around 10, 11 and 12.
[00:32:07] And when they break it down, it, you know, you can sort of really, it brings it to life in this extraordinarily emotional way. So the original 1831 one, 10, whole gale or that in which she could barely close reefed main topsail and reefed foresail. So that's basically, reefed means it's all rolled up. So you're really limiting your sails.
[00:32:36] 11, storm or that which would reduce her to storm stay sails. So you're sailing on whatever they are, small sails. And then 12, hurricane or that which no canvas could withstand. Oh goodness. Isn't it? So basically you have no sails left because they've flown away. You're just clinging to the mast. You're just clinging. Clipping for the best. Oh dear.
[00:33:04] So that's Beaufort's scale of 1831, which was designed for describing the sails of a man of war and what they could withstand. Nowadays, the version that you've got is still used and slightly adapted and adopted depending on what kind of boat you're in.
[00:33:27] But it is still used by mariners of all shapes and sizes on all sorts of boats for the modern yachts. One of the points that you might observe is that, of course, nowadays, not everybody is sailing when they're at sea. Sometimes they're powered by engines.
[00:33:50] So it was adapted in 1916 to recognize the fact that you can't just do it by what the sails look like. You're actually describing the sea state, which you'll see in your description as well. So you'll have descriptions of the waves here as well. If you go back to your chart. Yes.
[00:34:10] You see how under the for use at sea descriptions, a lot of it's about the size of the waves, isn't it? Yes. And how they're behaving. Could you read 10 and 12? 10, which is storm. Storm, exciting. Very high waves with long overhanging crests.
[00:34:34] The resulting foam in great patches is blown in dense white streaks along the direction of the wind. On the whole, the surface of the sea takes on a white appearance. The tumbling, in quotation marks, of the sea becomes heavy and shock-like. Dot, dot, dot. Visibility affected. Yeah. So that's 10. And then 12, which is hurricane.
[00:35:03] So that's where, you know, every man for himself, basically. The air is filled with foam and spray. Sea completely white with driving spray. Visibility very seriously affected. You can really see it. It's very, very evocative. I'm not a sailor, but I have been on boats. And I remember the experience for the first time of seeing the sea completely white. You know, I mean, these are things you don't forget.
[00:35:32] Also, though, you've been on a boat across the channel. Many times. I mean, sometimes you can cruise across and it's glassy smooth. And other times... White horses and everything else. Yeah. White horses. White horses. Exactly. So on that frothy note, we're going to have a little break and we're going to come back. And I'm just going to bring it up today. So I'm going to tell you something quite racy about Francis Beaufort's private life. Oh, hooray.
[00:36:02] Hello, Muriel. We're back. Hello. So now we're going to talk about this poor man's private life. I think so. Is it quite French, what you're going to tell me? It's so French. It's genuinely... But that's obviously, that's the Frenchman in him. Can take the man out of France. Can't take France out of the man. Totally. He becomes the hydrographer of the Navy. Right.
[00:36:29] And that's the kind of leading studier of the seas for the Royal Navy. There can be no greater honour. In 1829, he was appointed the hydrographer. And he was 55 already. So he was already at retirement age. And he served in that post for 26 years. And it was known as the high noon of admiralty surveying. So he just went everywhere surveying things.
[00:36:59] And massively increased the scope in what they say home waters and overseas. And they produced so many new charts. From 1830, there were 19 charts. And by 1855, 1,230. So surveying everywhere. He himself surveyed the coast quite early on, actually. After he'd commanded HMS Woolwich, a plucky little sloop.
[00:37:30] He went off and surveyed the coast of southern Anatolia. And he wrote a book about it. And he called it Karamania, that part of southern Anatolia. Really? So he published in 1817, so quite early. A book called Karamania, or a brief description of the south coast of Asia Minor and the remains of antiquity. So he was an adventurer and an explorer. Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
[00:37:58] Much interested in scientific affairs across the whole raft of scientific exploration. He also produced admiralty tide tables, which again, I mean, all of this really matters. If you're going to really develop the Royal Navy, you've got to be good at this. So he was crucial. He retired in 1846 from the Royal Navy with the rank of rear admiral. And he was 72.
[00:38:27] And he became then rather late on, actually, in his life, Knight Commander of the Baths. So KCB in 1848, aged 74. That's his very, very prestigious naval career. In his family life. I'm bracing myself slightly. Well, we all need to look.
[00:38:56] The thing is, this is tantalizing. I think in Sir Francis Beaufort, there are some models for some fictional characters. Possibly there was a TV series called Taboo, which had a sort of charismatic central character. I know you haven't watched it, so I'm not going to say anything more about it. But his personal life was not dissimilar to Sir Francis Beaufort's.
[00:39:23] So he married twice. And his first wife was called Alicia Magdalena Wilson, whose dad had been in the Navy as well. And in fact, the first ship that he'd been on, her father was his commander. But she died in 1834. But they had three daughters and three sons. And then he married again in 1838.
[00:39:49] So he had four years between the death of the first wife and marrying his second wife. And complicatedly, his second wife was the daughter of his brother-in-law. Oh. Which is complicated, but not ridiculously complicated. And I can't explain the whole family because we'll be here all day. So there was a sort of marrying the daughter of your brother-in-law. Hmm. Hmm.
[00:40:15] In between the death of Alicia and marrying Honora Edgeworth, he had for four years an incestuous relationship with his sister Harriet, who was a botanist. Oh, gosh. And we know about this because he kept a journal in, and it was in ciphered, with what's become known as the Beaufort Cipher, which is still in use as a sort of,
[00:40:44] I mean, it still is a famous cipher. But he collected more than 200 letters and journals, and he was apparently tortured by guilt. Yes. Over his incestuous relationship with his sister Harriet, also sometimes known as Henrietta. Gosh. And I know, well, you're saying, gosh, you're not shocked. He's a Frenchman. This is normal. Well, I don't know that it's not.
[00:41:16] It's not normal. Actually, what this makes me think of is more of a kind of AS Byer novel sort of thing. Yeah. It's that kind of set up. And Byron, you know, I think in terms of incestuous behavior, I associate it with slightly tormented, romantic, with a capital R, British types. I'm sure that the French also, you know, French people, scientists and their sisters possibly engaged in the same sort of thing. But actually, it's not exactly a French trope.
[00:41:45] Not in the way that you would imagine. Oh, okay. That's a bit flabbergasting. I like the way. So this cipher, to be clear, this cipher, do you think it was devised by him as a, I mean, directly to sort of be able to talk about the incestuous affair? And then it was later on put to other uses. But that was the motivation for coming up with the cipher. We don't know. I don't know. But it sounds like it.
[00:42:12] But it did need to be decoded. So the code was cracked in the mid-70s by a man called Alfred Friendly, who was an American journalist and a biographer of Francis Beaufort. So that's completely aspired, that kind of scenario. I know. I know. And so it immediately makes you want to go and read all the diaries. I mean, probably awful. So probably shouldn't just in case.
[00:42:37] But the other thing, when you talk about incestuous relationships, you kind of have in mind young people. But at the time, he wasn't. That's right. No. So he was a widower in his early 60s, and she was a spinster in her late 50s. Oh, yeah, that is unusual or more unusual. So one of the people who's been writing about it observed that maybe this was completely
[00:43:05] understandable because it was Britain and it was cold and there wasn't really any eating. I don't know. I don't know. They were really bored. So what do you do to entertain yourself? Yeah. It's fascinating. There's a tremendous story here, obviously. Also, because she was a woman in her own right. So she never, she was a woman in her own right. She was an interesting person in her own right. She never married.
[00:43:34] But they wrote books. She and her sister wrote books anonymously in the hope of supporting their family after their father gave up his clerical position. And she particularly wrote these botanical books. So she wrote Dialogues on Botany for the Use of Young Persons, which was published in 1819, trying to teach plant biology to young people.
[00:43:59] And she took a position on illustrations, which is possibly unusual. She said no to pictures in books for young people. She said, really, that's radical. She said, I believe it is important for people to study nature by experiencing it in real life rather than viewing it in representations. And she taught her young readers to learn by dissection and inspection using microscopes.
[00:44:27] And obviously her contemporaries criticized her because they said, is it actually helpful to have a diagram? No, I don't know. But I like her idea. She said, no. No. Go in the wild. Yes. And also it sort of fits with what her brother had done. It's a similar sort of approach you describe with words and you experience things rather than drawing pictures of, say, hurricanes. Yes. He didn't illustrate his chart, did he? No. His descriptions.
[00:44:56] He used beautiful words. Very good point. Lovely point. Yeah. So I think, I mean, it's obviously not quite right, but at the same time. So just to finish in the remaining time that we've got, in the Victorian era, or as you might call it, the 19th century, countries started to share meteorological data.
[00:45:25] And a conference was held in Cambridge in 1845 with representation from the leading British and European meteorologists. And that was the start of this pooling of data and information, not just to make your own Navy safe, but to increase the safety for everybody, including not just at sea, but actually increasing also all meteorological studies.
[00:45:52] So great scientific advances by coming together as European scientists. And then in 1853, and this must have been so galling for the French scientists, the Beaufort scale was adopted universally at the first International Maritime Meteorological Conference in Brussels, which was initiated actually by a man called Matthew Fontanmari of the US Navy.
[00:46:20] And it took place in Belgium, in Brussels, in the residence of Monsieur Pierre Coe, the Minister of the Interior. And we were represented, Britain, by Frederick William Beachy, Captain of the Royal Navy, a member of the Naval Department or the Border Trade, and Henry James, Captain of the Royal Engineers. I imagine, I mean, I'm sure it was galling, but I think there was no rival French model.
[00:46:47] I think that's what this means, that actually this was excellent. It worked. It was tried and tested and it worked very well. And the French had nothing to oppose it with. They didn't have another model of their own, which was all metric or whatever. Yeah. So, yeah. And there you are. And still hasn't. And actually, I meant to say, you were represented, France was represented at this conference by
[00:47:13] Monsieur de la Marche, who was a hydrographic engineer for the Imperial Navy. Yes. Wow. So he obviously approved. He was obviously a man of poetic sensitivities who said yes to... This is both beautiful and true and we must adopt it. This is beautiful and true. I love the way that he talks about sea heaps up and white foam from breaking waves begins to be blown in streaks along the direction of the wind. It's lovely.
[00:47:43] It's just lovely. I like the bit. It's very terse. It's to describe force eight gale. And the description for use on land is twigs break from trees. Difficult to walk. You could really imagine the cracking sound of the... Seeing everything sort of disappearing around you, you know, fragmenting itself.
[00:48:11] The landscape just gradually becomes, you know, disconstructed that you can't actually move forward except by an enormous effort of will. Do you remember when we talked about hedgerows and I mentioned Andy Goldsworthy, the landscape artist? There's a film of him where he walks inside a hedgerow and I imagine it's a bit like that with the wind where you're really having to push. It's beautiful.
[00:48:36] The point is, when this was adopted, it was a long time after the French Revolution. So we were not quite in that mindset, in that very uncompromising tabula rasa. We're going to rearrange entirely the way we look at nature, sort of mindset in France. And possibly the French were a little bit more supple in their thoughts and habits of mind and more open.
[00:49:01] And maybe I think, I really do mean this, that people whose lives are at sea know that you survive by reading the sea. You do. You can't rely on your measurements or you can't rely on your instruments all the time because your instrument will tell you what's happening now, not what's about to happen.
[00:49:25] And the way you pick up what's about to happen is by scanning the horizon, by the way the clouds are moving. You know, there's an element of it which you cannot capture on instruments. So if you're only going to be doing it on instruments, you will always be too late somehow. You will capsize and die, you know, eventually. You have to be able to read the sea and read the clouds and the wind in order to be able
[00:49:53] to take the right decisions about which sails to have up and everything. I should say, just to finish off brilliantly, that in 1946, the Beaufort scale was extended. Oh. So although we still use this 0-12 one, particularly for our shipping forecast here, particularly
[00:50:17] in the Far East, they also have Beaufort's extended scales number 13 to 17. Oh, exciting. So again, this takes us to what? 17. The end of the world. I know. Nothing can withstand. The sky curls up like a scroll and that's how you know. No? What does it cover?
[00:50:43] It was extended to apply to tropical cyclones and it's used in Taiwan and mainland China and Vietnam, which also have typhoons. And I'm sorry, I don't really know the difference between a cyclone and typhoon. It has specific kind of points. And again, we didn't discuss knots. I'm quite glad I didn't have to explain knots to you. But the modern Beaufort scale gives three speed readings and they're knots, which is nautical
[00:51:13] miles an hour. And this again, Muriel, this is the sort of thing that you guys hate. A vessel traveling at one knot along a meridian travels approximately one minute of geographic latitude in one hour. So it's a very complicated measurement if you want to do it in kilometers an hour. It's 1.852 kilometers an hour. And it's quite complicated in miles an hour as well. Not 1.151.
[00:51:42] So it's a completely another metric. And then they also measure it wind speed in miles an hour and kilometers an hour. So Beaufort force 17 is greater than 108 knots or greater than 125 miles an hour or 200 kilometers an hour. So that's quite fast. That's quite a lot. That's terrifyingly fast, actually. That's violence and destruction. It is. Going to end there.
[00:52:13] Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I have just been to see The Odyssey, the Christopher Nolan movie. Oh, yeah. And they talk about wind quite a lot, as you can imagine. And of course, in The Odyssey, in the poem, and a little bit in the film, the idea is that it's Poseidon who's powering, you know, the wind or turning it up and down, as it were. He has the control. And if you're trying to get home on a ship and you don't quite know where you are and so on, it's really, really important to be able to read the sea.
[00:52:40] And so when you were talking and also looking at the chart, I can immediately see Odysseus and his friends. And it's really very affecting poetically and wonderfully at the same time, a super practical thing that must have saved so many lives. It's brilliant. I had no idea. I had no idea because I'm not a sailor. I'd never looked into it.
[00:53:05] I now know that the Héchelle de Beaufort is something that we use in France as well. So I thank you, my people, and I thank you for this gift. The thank you for pointing out that Beaufort is a French name and that actually the man who is the originator of all this came from France in the Ancien Régime. French stock. French stock. Yeah. French stock. As we all are, of course. Indeed. Indeed.
[00:53:34] Thanks so much, Suzanne. That was absolutely fascinating and totally new to me. And I think to a lot of other people who have listened to us. Do subscribe, join us. And if you like this episode and you want to tell your friends about it and recommend the podcast, then that's brilliant. We thrive on recommendations and word of mouth. Do leave us a rating or a comment. We love to hear from you on social media. And we look forward to seeing you next time for more Garlic and Pearls and something
[00:54:03] completely different. See you soon, Suzanne. Au revoir, Muriel. Au revoir.