How do you know it's really cold in London? Big Ben freezes.
"Snow fell in London up to 3am," wrote the Liverpool Echo on 14 January 1955. "It had been falling continually for 12 hours."
On the Tube network, passenger-less 'ghost' services had run through the night, to ensure the rails didn't freeze. But while the Tube was kept moving, another London icon was struggling. "Hundreds of people walking to work across Westminster Bridge earlier to-day stared in surprise at the grey unlit clock face and the pointers which stood motionless," wrote the Echo.
Drifts of snow had swept across Big Ben's east clock face to the extent that the snow eventually jammed up the hands altogether. At 3.25am, Big Ben stopped dead. And there it stayed, literally frozen in time for four and a half hours. Then, at 7.50am, something happened:
...the minute hand suddenly leapt forward to 3.30 and then slowly to 4 o'clock. As Greenwich time reached 8am Big Ben solemnly chimed four times.
So the clock was up and running again, but significantly late. It wasn't until later that morning that three mechanics, employed by the company who'd made the clock, put Big Ben right again.
This wasn't the only time Big Ben has been stopped in its tracks by arctic weather. Back on 26 January 1945, its striking hammers froze up, meaning the familiar bongs were temporarily silenced. "Between the hammers and the bells are rubber buffers which prevent the bells from being struck too hard," explained then-resident engineer at the House of Commons, A.W. Nattersley. "Severe frost can freeze the buffer solid and destroy the margin of 'give' in them which allows the bells to be struck."
In the 1960s, London saw a number of especially chilly encounters, one which paralysed a clock face on Big Ben, on New Year's Eve of all days.
Something similar happened during tumultuous blizzards on 11 December 1981, when the mechanism appeared to freeze all four clock faces. Quipped the Newcastle Journal "At least Mrs. Thatcher was in a jovial mood, throwing snowballs at photographers near Shrewsbury."
