“The extraordinary and almost unprecedented rainfall of the past three days . . . has led to extensive flooding,” The Times announced. This was not recently, though, but a report from June 16, 1903. Heavy, relentless rains swamped large areas of southern England, and London was hit particularly hard. “At Hammersmith Broadway station the water rose all yesterday,” The Times continued. “The Great Eastern Railway between Bruce Grove and Seven Sisters stations, Tottenham, was flooded to a depth of several feet.”

The summer of 1903 was the wettest on record in London. In mid-June it rained without interruption for more than 58 hours. In the countryside, crops were flooded, hay and fruit rotted and cattle and sheep drowned. Farm workers suffered outbreaks of farmer’s lung from mouldy hay. Railway lines were washed away and roads became impassable.

It was also so cold that snow was reported in Newmarket and parts of Cambridgeshire. There was bitter irony in the popular music hall song of the time, In the Good Old Summer Time.

The rain came from a stalled depression over England. And after one of the worst summers of the 20th century, that October was the wettest month on record in the UK. The rains of 1903 are a reminder of the natural extremes in Britain’s climate, well before anybody had heard of global warming.