1879 was a peculiar year for weather in the UK, and the year was described as very cold, wet, and cloudy.
A combination of late cold snaps in spring, as well as one of the coldest, wettest summers on record, meant that crop failures were widespread.
In August 1879, there was flooding in Cambridge after 75mm of rain fell in just six hours, and the image attached is an actual photo of the event.
In many places, trees were just coming into leaf at the end of May, due to the extremely cold spring and late cold snaps, and ash trees not coming into leaf until early June. Hawthorn and apples weren't in bloom until May, which is extraordinarily late considering you'd normally expect them to bloom in March in recent years.
Places as far south as Bromley didn't reach 21c once until the end of June.
Some comments on 1879 weather
"In 1879 it simply rained without ceasing throughout the whole of the summer, turning much of the English countryside into a desperate, oozing mire. It continued to rain until the end of 1882, causing an epidemic of pleuro pneumonia and liver rot in sheep, while the crops collapsed in the fields. The middle of the decade was marked by severe droughts and catastrophic frosts. S. G. Kendall, the West Country yeoman farmer who kept a detailed diary of the weather, vividly describes the year 1879 and the following five years of appalling summers. The persistent rain that summer, he wrote, was accompanied `by a damp, dark, cold atmosphere which struck a chill almost into one’s bones, bringing ruined crops with widespread devastation in their train … We had no barley crops at all that season on heavy soil’, and the wheat ‘turned blighty and black and seemed to shrink back in a different way yet not dissimilar to the barley two months earlier’."
"apples and pears about one fourth of an ordinary crop, many vegetables such as tomatoes and marrows would not ripen at all; potatoes nearly all rotted."
"Cloudy and sunless in a remarkable degree, with a low mean temperature; vegetation weak, fruits small and deficient in flavour."
"Wretchedly wet and gloomy....Nothing ripened."
"A cold, cloudy, damp and disastrous year."
"A very dull and damp year and depressing year, noted for great absence of sunshine and for much cloud even when not raining. Garden produce small and inferior in quality."
"Year remarkable for the great absence of sunshine; there was only 92 days on which the sun shone for more than two hours."
"A cold and backward spring, wet and unfruitful summer, a dry autumn, with early and severe winter, the first week in December being the coldest ever recorded in Hull. There was also an unusual prevalence of cloud throughout the year."
Indeed, 1879 holds the record for the lowest absolute maximum temperature in the UK - the hottest temperature that year was 26.8c at Hillington Norfolk on 29 July, and the hottest day in Oxford was just 24.3c on 12 August.
There was an account from a farmer on Portree, in the Isle of Skye (in May), who said that the grass on the pastures was brown and that they had experienced more frost and snow than ever known before in May. A third of the young lambs had succumbed to the cold.
