A very British eclipse

In 1927, Britain experienced its first total solar eclipse since 1724. Mike Frost looks at how, like 8 April 2024's US spectacle, eclipse fever swept the nation

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"At the back of us were great blue spaces in the clouds. But now the colour was going out. The clouds were turning pale; a reddish black colour. Down in the valley it was an extraordinary scrumble of red & black; there was the one light burning; all was cloud down there, & very beautiful, so delicately tinted. Nothing could be seen through the cloud. The 24 seconds were passing." Virginia Woolf, 'The Sun and the Fish', 1928

Early on the morning of 29 June 1927, the shadow of the Moon kissed the north of Wales and crossed the north of England. That day saw a total solar eclipse, the first in mainland Britain for over 200 years. The track of totality started at dawn to the southwest of Ireland, passed over the Lleyn Peninsula and Eryri (Snowdonia) in north Wales, before touching the English coast at Southport at 06:24 in the morning local time. Blackpool, Blackburn and Preston in Lancashire, Richmond and Middlesbrough in Yorkshire and Darlington in County Durham all saw total eclipses, as did parts of Liverpool and Durham. The track of totality left the English coast near Hartlepool and continued across the North Sea to Scandinavia and northern Russia. The whole of Britain saw at least a 90 per cent partial eclipse.

From the UK, it was a very short eclipse. Southport, on the centreline of totality, saw only 23 seconds of totality, Wales a second less, the east coast a second more. Yet, despite the short duration and the early time, a lot of people travelled to see it. Resorts such as Southport in Merseyside laid on "AllNight Festivities, including a special Open-Air Band Concert in the Municipal Gardens on June 29th at 3:30am". The newspapers estimated that a quarter of a million people were in the resort to see the eclipse.

British weather strikes