"There are four schools of thought about climatic change. One finds evidence that we are entering the next Ice Age; another is as confident that the earth is getting warmer; a third believes that there has been no significant change in historical times; and the fourth is agnostic in such matters. Similarly, there are some who believe in weather cycles, and others who do not; one of my pet ideas is that the best-marked 35-year cycle of them all is that of a belief in meteorological cycles."
These thoughts, typical of the wry and impish cynicism of the man, were penned some years ago by Fred E. Dixon, one of the great characters of Irish meteorology. Perhaps he would not have cared to hear himself described as such, for Fred was British to the core, and very proud of it. Yet in half a dozen different spheres of intellectual endeavour, he made an Irish institution of himself.
As far as we know, Fred's first serious thoughts on Ireland came to him as a young man of 26, then working as a meteorologist in Edinburgh. He saw an advertisement in the scientific journal Nature by which recruits were sought for the newly-established Irish Meteorological Service; Fred applied and was successful, and began his new career at Foynes, Co Limerick, in March, 1939.
He was to serve for nearly 40 years, in due course training a generation of Irish meteorologists, heading the Central Forecasting Office in Dublin, and finally ending his official career in charge of the Meteorological Service's climatological division.
But it was the way in which he married his meteorological vocation to his myriad of other interests that made Fred unique. He had a deep knowledge of the history of his adopted city, and the texts of his seminal lectures to the Old Dublin Society on The Weather in Old Dublin are still consulted as the standard work on the climate of our capital in historical times - and are much thumbed, it must be said, by Weather Eye. He was also an avid collector of almost anything at all collectable, and his writings on the weather as portrayed on postage stamps are typical of his idiosyncratic genre.
Non-meteorologists may remember Fred Dixon as a frequent and innocently provocative contributor to the letters page of this newspaper. But if in aught he was eccentric, he was also the epitome of the perfect gentleman.
In all my years in meteorology, I have yet to hear him spoken of except with great affection. And thus does Weather Eye remember Fred E. Dixon this morning, on the 10th anniversary of his death on September 4th, 1988.