A Year's weather: 1895 by John Megginson

1895 – the year when Oscar Wilde was sent to gaol, when Middlesbrough Football Club won the FA Amateur Cup, Alfred Dreyfus was sent to Devil's Island, the future George VI was born and, in Bavaria, Adolf Hitler had his sixth birthday.

The year had begun, according to the pages of the Whitby Gazette, with the usual entertainments and concerts held by churches, chapels and societies.  In the months that followed, golf clubs opened at Whitby, Robin Hood's Bay and Goathland.  Ships were wrecked, lives were lost at sea and in the local mines.  Two men died in a thunderstorm at the Royal Show at Darlington, a father and son in a lightning strike at Kirkbymoorside.  The people of Helmsley were horrified to discover that the attentive young father, on holiday with his wife and baby, had murdered them both with a large carving knife and buried them a few miles outside town. 

And the year's weather on the North York Moors was recorded by John Megginson in verse.  He was a 52 year old farmer, woodman and local preacher who lived at Fryup Head with his wife Ann Frank and their large family.  Snowdrifts, floods and storms – here they are in lively verse: 

Original Poetry on the Year of Our Lord, 1895

John Megginson, Great Fryup, Lealholm, Grosmont

As long as we are all alive

We shall remember January of '95;

When it came in it was so coarse, 

It snew and blew with mighty force!

So those that had to go to preach

They had a task the place to reach;

And when they had to travel back

They were beat sometimes to find a track;

For down below, and on the moor,

The wind it made the snow to stoor;

And people round about the place

Could not get to the means of grace.