Robert FitzRoy had long been interested in meteorology and, in particular, convinced of the barometer's value. In 1829, during his first voyage in command, his ship had nearly capsized in a squall off Uruguay. There had been barometers on board and low pressure indicated, but anchors, topmasts, jib-boom and two men had been lost. He never again ignored the barometer's warnings. Indeed, he interpreted the instrument's readings so skilfully during his second surveying expedition that he weathered the severest gales without the loss of anyone on board or even damage to his ship. The voyage lasted almost five years (December 1831–October 1836) and proved a watershed in FitzRoy's life. It was a personal triumph which enhanced his reputation as a skilled and meticulous surveyor. He was thanked in Parliament, praised by the Hydrographer of the Navy and awarded the gold medal of the Royal Geographical Society. The ship was HMS Beagle, and the expedition was the famous circumnavigation of the globe with Charles Darwin on board.

FitzRoy was born on 5 July 1805 and educated first at Rottingdean School near Brighton and later Harrow School. He entered the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth in February 1818 and took only twenty months to complete the course of study, which normally took three years. He went to sea when he was 14, a volunteer aboard HMS Owen Glendower, and later served aboard HMS Superb and HMS Hind. He was promoted to the rank of Lieutenant on 7 September 1824 and subsequently served aboard HMS Thetis and HMS Ganges. He took command of HMS Beagle on 13 November 1828 and advanced to the rank of Captain on 3 December 1834.

With the resumption of a storm-warning service more or less as FitzRoy conceived it and the reintroduction of daily weather forecasts for the public, the fight over forecasts was won. Never again in peacetime would the Meteorological Office withdraw these services. The fight over forecasts was not, however, the only important development in the Office in the years after the Royal Society took charge. A threat to Kew Observatory had to be addressed, too.

Changes in the Role of Kew Observatory

For as long as the British Association had managed Kew Observatory (since 1842), the cost of sponsoring and maintaining the Observatory's work had proved a drain on the Association's finances. The Association's Council decided in 1869 that the time had come to discontinue the Observatory's financial support. Money would be provided for a further two years, and the connection between the Association and Kew would then cease.

By the early 1960s, the Meteorological Office had become respected around the world for its scientific and technological capabilities and the progress it had made towards realizing Richardson's dream of forecasting the weather by mathematical methodology. It had also long been a leading member of the international meteorological community. And yet, an international issue remained unresolved. The universal use of the metric system in meteorology had been opposed by the Office's Director at Leipzig in 1872, and the matter had continued to simmer. A partial introduction of the system in the Office had come just before the Great War, when there had been a change from inches to millimetres for measuring rainfall and inches to millibars for recording barometric pressure (see Chapter 8), but the Office and the British public had continued to use the Fahrenheit scale of temperature.

Fahrenheit or Celsius

A move to clear up the matter came in 1953, when the Executive Committee of WMO decided that degrees Celsius should be used for coding temperatures in all upper-air reports, and another move came in 1955, when the Second WMO Congress passed a resolution that the metric system be adopted for all international exchanges of meteorological information. The Third WMO Congress, in 1959, resolved that meteorological services which had still not adopted the metric system fully should do so, at least in coded messages for international exchanges, at some time in the period 1959 to 1963.

When control of the Meteorological Department passed to the Royal Society, the Meteorological Committee and officials of the Board of Trade may have thought that the storm of protest over the suspension of the storm-warning service would soon blow itself out. If so, they were much mistaken. The stream of complaints which began to flow as soon as the suspension was announced continued unabated, and a campaign to restore the service soon developed, with a formidable champion in the person of Colonel W H Sykes, FRS, MP.

The Campaign in Parliament to Restore Storm Warnings

Sykes's offensive began in the House of Commons on 15 February 1867, when he asked the President of the Board of Trade whether the Storm Signals as hitherto practised by the late Admiral FitzRoy were to be continued. If so, in what manner would they be continued, and by whom? If they were to be discontinued, would it not be prudent to invite the Chamber of Commerce of the United Kingdom to express an opinion on the subject? Furthermore, he wondered, was the Meteorological Report which had appeared in The Times and other papers to be continued, and, if so, could not observations from the Paris, Brussels and St Petersburg Observatories be added to it?

One afternoon in February 1854, an announcement was made in the House of Commons. A new government department was to be formed, to collect and digest meteorological observations made on board merchant and Royal Navy ships. Six months later, the Meteorological Office was born.

When the Office took its first tentative steps, it had a staff of four and a budget of a few thousand pounds per year. Since then, Britain’s national meteorological service has experienced several major changes in control and organization and is now an Executive Agency and Trading Fund responsible to the United Kingdom (UK) government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, with a staff of nearly two thousand and a turnover of nearly 200 hundred million pounds per year. It is a scientific and technological institution of national and international importance, serving not only the shipping industry but also many other groups of users, including the general public. It is also at the forefront of fundamental pure and applied research in meteorology and related sciences and, moreover, cooperates and interacts with the international meteorological community at administrative, operational and research levels. What were the origins of this institution? How did it come to be founded?

The speculation began before FitzRoy was cold in his grave. Who would succeed him? Some considered Glaisher a likely successor. Others supposed the post would again be filled by a naval officer. In fact, many months passed before anyone at all filled it on a permanent basis. FitzRoy's second in command, Thomas Babington, was in charge for nineteen months, but his appointment was never more than temporary, and he had to wait a long time for even that to be approved. He waited until 9 June 1866, by which time a government inquiry into the work of the Department had taken place.

A New Beginning

The first moves to set up an inquiry were made little more than a week after FitzRoy's death. Edward Sabine, the President of the Royal Society, reported at the meeting of the Society's Council on 18 May 1865 that he had been consulted by the President of the Board of Trade, Thomas Milner-Gibson, about “arrangements in consequence of the death of FitzRoy”. In his response, dated 10 May 1865, he had come straight to the point. “Should it not be desired to fill up the vacancy occasioned by Admiral FitzRoy's death immediately, time would be afforded for a reconsideration of the duties of the Office, which might be productive of advantage in many respects.” Babington was “competent to conduct and continue the system of storm warnings (with such assistance as he may require and with such moderate increase of his own salary as may be deemed suitable)”. Nevertheless, “the time may be viewed as suitable for obtaining and considering evidence and opinions as to the advantages, present and prospective, of continuing the practise of storm warnings”. And, he suggested, “it may be unnecessary to continue the publication of the daily forecasts”. The ocean statistics work could, he thought, be transferred to the Admiralty's Hydrographic Department.

Two exploits in 1919 made headlines around the world. In June, John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown won the prize of £10,000 offered by the Daily Mail for being the first to fly non-stop in an aeroplane from any point in North America to any point in Great Britain or Ireland in under seventy-two hours. The following month, there was another triumph of British aviation. His Majesty's Airship R.34 made the first round-trip crossing of the Atlantic by air.

The Meteorological Office was one of the organizations which provided technical support for these ventures. For the flight of Alcock and Brown, meteorologists and instruments were sent to Newfoundland, the Azores and Lisbon, along with equipment for observing the upper air. For the flights of the airship, two RAF meteorological officers equipped with kites were assigned to the battle cruisers Tiger and Renown stationed north and south of the usual tracks of Atlantic steamships, providing observations which proved useful not only for providing information about flying conditions at heights up to about 600 metres but also for the production of synoptic weather charts of the North Atlantic. Moreover, the airship carried a meteorologist, Guy Harris, who had, in the spring of 1919, investigated the upper air over the North Atlantic with kites he flew from the cargo steamer Montcalm on voyages between London and New Brunswick.