"EVERYONE likes flattery,"said Benjamin Disraeli, "and when it comes to royalty your should lay it on with a trowel." Disraeli's contemporary, Alexander Buchan, may well have entertained some rather similar thoughts as he contemplated his reply to a letter which popped in through his letter box in May, 1879.
The letter was from Queen Victoria. "Her Majesty has information from someone in America," it read, "that from atmospheric and other meteorological observations it would appear that an interval of darkness to be succeeded by a period of intense heat is imminent. She wishes to get information from meteorological observers in this country if they have heard anything of this. Deja vu all over again, you may well think did Her Majesty have premonitions of the green house effect and global warming?
Be that as it may, it is a measure of Buchan's reputation during his lifetime that he should be so consulted on these matters. He is chiefly remembered by posterity, however, for his assertion that at certain regular times of the year the weather is consistently either warmer or colder than the calendar would suggest it ought to be.
His ideas were based on a statistical study earned out from 1857 to 1866 and published in a famous paper called Interruptions in the Regular, Rise and Fall of Temperature in the Course of the Year.
Buchan identified six cold periods and three unseasonably warm ones. The warm spells were July 12th-15th, August 12th-15th, and December 3rd-14th; the cold spells - were February 7th-14th, April 11th-14th, May 9th-14th, June 29th to July 4th, August 6th-11th, and November 6th-13th. The notion caught the popular imagination, and "Buchan Spells" were widely accepted for many years throughout these islands as an established feature of our weather.
Meteorologists nowadays treat Buchan Spells with scepticism, since more sophisticated statistical analysis over longer periods does not support their existence. Indeed in fairness to Buchan, he himself never claimed that his spells were an infallible guide to the weather and only suggested that they seemed to apply in his native part of Scotland. But even nowadays the relevant periods are eagerly awaited by those with an interest in these matters.
As it happens, Buchan's first "cold spell" of the year has just begun, so you can do a spot check on his thesis for yourself.