How the Shipping Forecast inspired poetry and wonder for over 100 years

Fascination with the weather and love of the sea combine in the Shipping Forecast. As Rob Stepney explains, it is also a honey pot for poets who have both parodied and eulogised it.

It is 100 years since BBC national radio first broadcast a weather forecast specifically designed for sailors in our coastal waters. Those whose safety depends directly on this service are relatively few. But there is a legion of landlubbers who cherish the Forecast for its hypnotic rhythm and inexplicably evocative sea areas. 

For Carol Ann Duffy, the Forecast is “the radio’s prayer – Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre”. For WJ Webster, the sea areas are the “ring of odd and yet familiar names/ recited in its stately settled round”. Michael Howe feels that they chart “the seas/ between what we hear and/ what we understand”. And, perhaps most famously, Seamus Heaney writes of the sea areas as being “conjured by that strong gale warning voice”.

Poets capture well the feeling of the Forecast because – as Elisabeth Mahoney wrote in The Guardian – they too use language that is both practical and “magically figurative, beyond the drudge of chatter”. ‘The Ships’ (as it’s known by those who read the Forecast) attracts people almost despite itself – since it is read with the measured consistency of a metronome and consciously stripped of emotion. But it is for these reasons that the Forecast has the qualities of mantra, lullaby or incantation; enigmatic but soothing. 

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There is undoubtedly a frisson of vicarious danger when rough weather brings real peril to those at sea while we are safe at home. But the Forecast also has romance, in the broad sense of being mysterious and set apart from everyday life. Areas such as Fair Isle, Viking and Biscay are the magic stuff of imagination. They relate to what the poet laureate Simon Armitage calls “Yonderland”, the title of his celebratory BBC-commissioned work premiered in Belfast in August. 

Some poets are also attracted, paradoxically, by the Forecast’s linguistic limitations and disciplined structure. Those who play with words relish the challenge of riffing off its highly constrained vocabulary: there are barely 100 possible words, but these can be creatively manipulated. 

So we have references to Finis Tear and Malign Head, while German Bight has been called “not as bad as German bark”. There is endless invention applied to the Forecast’s lists: Stephen Fry writes of “Shetland, Jersey, Fair Isle, Turtle-Neck, Tank Top”, and Les Barker of “Lundy, Fundy, Sundy, Mundy”. 

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For many years, Kathy Clugston, co-compiler of the new anthology, Good, Occasionally Rhyming, read The Ships. It is, she recalls, “one of the most thrilling and, when you first start, terrifying duties of the Radio 4 announcer”. 

When bringing life to a script is second nature, it is counter-intuitive that the Forecast should not be imbued with emotion. As Kathy points out, “good” at the end of a sentence is not a cause for joy; “it is merely a statement about visibility”.

That said, listeners are not slow to enrich sea areas with emotional meaning. My own favourite is Faeroes, because I think of my goddaughter as Fair Rose. But everyone’s associations are different. That is the delight of it. 

Several poets have used weather and the sea as metaphors for the ebb and flow, sunshine and squalls, pleasures and pain of human relationships. One of the book’s treasures is a previously unpublished poem by Zaffar Kunial in which he describes his mother’s last moments: “Face in sea mist. Mum, is that you? Here we go again/ becoming variable. Veering slowly. Losing identity.”

I was once asked which sea area was the most popular. Based on number of mentions among our poems, the answer is – in equal first place – Dogger and Finisterre/FitzRoy (16 mentions each). In two cases, Dogger was a reference to dogging, which gave it a leg up. Then come Rockall and Malin (15 each); and in 31st place is Trafalgar (just four mentions). 

Being on the radio, the Forecast is easily accessible and delivered on a device largely free from high-tech tantrums. Though the Met Office supercomputer uses billions of observations to underpin its predictions, each bulletin is compiled by a living, breathing meteorologist. And if ever I was in maritime mortal danger, I would appreciate the news being delivered by a human voice.

At the end of the day, and whatever the weather, the Forecast’s subject is the sea. Its radio waves link us with those on the water. And, as was said by the pioneering environmentalist Rachel Carson, “No one could write truthfully about the sea and ignore its poetry.” 

Good, Occasionally Rhyming: A Celebration of the Shipping Forecast in Poetry and Prose by Rob Stepney and Kathy Clugston is out on 28 August (August Books, £12.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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