The Great Frost

Birds froze in mid-air and fell like stones to the ground. At Norwich a young countrywoman started to cross the road in her usual robust health and was seen by the onlookers to turn visibly to powder and be blown in a puff of dust over the roofs. . . . Corpses froze and could not be drawn from the sheets,. .. It was commonly supposed that the great increase of rocks in Derbyshire was due to . . . the solidification of unfortunate wayfarers. . . .

Thus Virginia Woolf, in Orlando, described Britain's legendary Great Frost in the reign of King James I. Last week, no birds froze in flight, no peasant girls were pulverized. But Britain and the Continent were gripped by their worst cold wave in decades. Before it finally eased off somewhat this week, it had seriously added to Europe's manifold miseries. Icy blasts from a high pressure area over Scandinavia struck through crumbling walls and patched clothes. Ice creaked in Venice's lagoons, and gondolas carried snowy canopies. Sicilian roads were blocked by snow. In Stockholm, 100,000 people had the flu, including Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf.

Crisis at the Crillon. In Britain, the Thames was frozen over at Windsor, and primroses just budding in Wales withered in the frost. Alarming reports came from Kent, where snowed-in pubs were running out of beer. But the cold wave brought far more serious hardships and economic dangers to Britain. Trains and trucks stood idle, schools and factories had to shut down as the coal shortage shut off heat and electric power. Office workers strained their eyes by candlelight. Water mains and pipes broke everywhere (since Britons stubbornly cling to the illusion that their winters are never very cold, water mains are not buried deep enough and many homes have rickety, poorly insulated "afterthought" plumbing, laid along outside walls). London's News Chronicle carried a cartoon depicting two Englishmen viewing an icicle-hung pipe above the caption: "If burst pipes were good enough for my dear father, they're good enough for me." Arab delegates conferring with Ernie Bevin on Palestine (see below) found it too cold even before the huge fireplaces of St. James's Palace and hastily moved to Ernie's less drafty official residence in Carlton Gardens.

In Paris, the poor huddled in the metro and the rich, wearing overcoats, huddled in the Crillon bar. The statuesque stone Zouave emerging from the Seine at the Pont de l'Alma wore a girdle of solid ice around his midriff. The soft silk draped around slender mannequins at Molyneux's, Lanvin's and Worth's felt as cold as the Zouave's ice. The Paris Models' Union announced that the wages for its members posing nude in unheated studios would be upped 30-c- an hour, effective "as soon as the model complains of chair de poule" (hen's flesh, i.e., goose pimples).

Burial in Berlin. In Vienna, the cold wave brought a bizarre crime wave. Robbers with Tommy guns held up trolley cars, stripped riders to their underwear, made off with their clothes. Raiding parties snatched hats (which were almost unobtainable by purchase) from men's heads in broad daylight. One Viennese, held up and stripped in front of his own door, asked for his key; the bandit fumbled through his victim's pants, found the key and the householder scurried indoors.

In Berlin, police arrested more than 200 coal thieves in one week, while citizens queued up for their meager fuel rations (see cut). In one instance, the cold brought a negative kind of relief: it halted (temporarily) the expulsion of Germans from Polish-held regions in the east. Perhaps the best example of what the cold wave meant to Europe's plain people was furnished by a refugee from that area, whose case was reported by TIME Correspondent Percy Knauth:

Frau Frieda Budde came to Berlin a year ago, went to live in a tenement at 33 Kolbergerstrasse. She never talked much to her neighbors. Her one friend was Old Man Faseler, who lived in the room next to hers. He spent most of his time in bed, fully clothed, with a cap on his head. Last week, he mumblingly related the climax of his neighbor's story: "She came home that evening frozen stiff. 'Frau Budde,' I said to her. 'You better warm your hands in hot water.' When I got her a pot of hot water, and she put her hands in, she all of a sudden fell over. 'Dear me,' I said, 'what's the matter, Frau Budde?' "

A few hours later, Frau Budde died on a red plush sofa, wrapped in a thin army blanket supplied by Faseler (she had none of her own). Dr. Elfriede Acker, who handles about 120 frostbite patients a day, reported death by freezing. For six days, Frau Budde lay on her plush sofa, while the wind whipped the brown paper that covered the windows. At last, overworked attendants removed her to an overcrowded cemetery. It was much too cold for Old Man Faseler to attend the funeral.

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