Just received Wessex Water’s autumn/winter magazine through the door. There’s an article reminding people that it’s forty years since the company had to impose a hosepipe ban.
That was the great drought of 1976 – when parts of the region went 45 days without rain.
We were invited to share a bath to save water. The drought came to an end on 27 August. The driest period some parts of the country had seen in a thousand years was followed by the wettest September since 1918 and the second wettest since 1727.
I thought that was the day l was hit by a low flying aircraft – but can’t find the cutting from the Bristol Evening Post to prove it – but l loved the photo in the Wessex magazine of me, Mike Hastie ( who was at Weston filming me when l was hit) and Graham Alford on sound (also down at the parched old airfield) doing an interview about the drought. Somewhere near a bonded warehouse on the Cumberland flyover into Bristol?
