Whatever the problems today, our past winters were always more severe.

Gerry Brooke takes a look back.

It’s been a trifle chilly of late, with extra blankets and even hot water bottles being bought out of storage to combat the freezing nights.

But it could be worse, as in 1962/63, when some of the lowest temperatures and heaviest snowfalls for 150 years were recorded.

In more recent times, in 1982 in fact, the thermometer at Filton fell to -15 degrees centigrade - and we havn’t seen those sort of temperatures yet.

The winter of 1963 had really started the previous year, one of the coldest on record.

November and December saw early snow on the Cotswolds - surely a harbinger of things to come.

The freezing weather actually set in on Christmas Day and on Boxing Day, 1962, a blizzard arrived.

By midnight four to six inches on snow lay on the ground and by New Year the West Country had become – for children and tobogganists anyway – something of a winter wonderland.

But more snow and cold was on the way with the Post’s headline at the year’s end reading, “Misery Monday”.

As half of the region’s rail services were cancelled, two trains were almost completely buried by snowdrifts near Yate.

Dundry, Priddy on the Mendips and Hawkesbury Upton in the Cotswolds were soon impassable with high drifts recorded.

The A46 between Stroud and Bath was closed and at Ston Easton, high on the Mendips, a coach party was stuck in the snow and cold for 24 hours.

On many minor roads, the snow levels were up to the hedge tops and in other places there were 20ft snowdrifts.

December to February saw 37 falls of snow which lay thickly on the ground for 51 days out of 90.

At night temperatures fell as low as -13°C.

An AA spokesman described the conditions as, “a witch’s brew of hard-packed, frozen snow, ice patches and fog”.

A snow plough sent to clear the Cheddar Valley railway line got stuck in a 15ft snowdrift.

In Chipping Sodbury, where the railway tunnel had to be closed, some snow lingered on for 14 weeks.

Troops were eventually brought in to help get the trains moving.

Cars, buses and lorries clanked around in snow chains – a feature noticeably absent from the roads this winter.

And truck drivers could be seen building fires beneath their fuel tanks – as they still do today in Canada – to liquify the diesel oil.

Stranded cars quickly attracted an army of helpers but flights out of Lulsgate (now Bristol International Airport) remained cancelled for days on end.

Construction work on the Severn Bridge, as on many other building projects, also came to a standstill, with many people thrown out of work.

And with 18-inch-thick ice floes on the river the Aust ferry managers suspended operations for seven days.

In Bristol, 1,100 men were given the job of clearing the roads, an operation which cost £4,000 per day.

The slush was loaded on to 170 lorries and then dumped into the river Avon alongside Coronation Road.

In January the Floating Harbour froze hard and a grain barge berthed in the Bathurst Basin had to be rescued from ice six inches thick.

Stockpile of salt used to treat the roads were soon exhausted, with many people putting out cold ashes from their coal fires onto the pavements to stop people slipping up.

Vegetables, such as potatoes, remained frozen hard in the ground leading to rationing.

Other foods, such as cabbages, were quickly eaten by hungry birds.

As the bad weather continued, emergency loads of coal – still used to heat the majority of homes in those days – were brought in by train.

By late January gas was being rationed and those people who relied on electric fires began to worry about the expense.

Paraffin stoves were more the norm, especially in the bathroom where they helped thaw out the frozen pipes.

Snow blown in under roof tiles would pile up in lofts, causing abject misery when it melted.

More than 2,000 burst water mains and 5,000 burst pipes just piled on the hardship.

Guttering and iron drainpipes on hundreds of homes proved unable to cope and came crashing down into the street.

Come February, a thaw set in and conditions slowly improved.

On many days, however, the temperature didn’t rise much above freezing and at night plunged far below zero.

It was an utterly miserable time for many with ten weeks of football matches cancelled.

Many readers, I expect, recall standing in the freezing cold and snow waiting for the school bus to arrive, if it ever did.

By way of consolation the ice was so thick on our local canal that we could skate along, pulling scores of kids behind us on sledges.

When spring eventually arrived, people could only look back and pray that future winters would be nothing like the last.

But older folk were already saying that it was nothing compared to the savage winter of 1947.

The weathermen, in their turn, were saying we would have to look back to the winters of 1740 and 1795 to make worthy comparisons.

1962/3 was, in fact, the third coldest winter since records began