Sporting Bygones: Snow and freezing temperatures may have decimated sporting fixtures but the Sixties brought new meaning to ‘winter break’

Fifty years ago this month, Britain shivered in the coldest month of the 21st century and there were more postponements than you could shake a sledge at.

Snow began falling just before Christmas and barely let up until the end of February.

By the time the thaw arrived in early March, the football calendar was in disarray and there was a backlog of fixtures waiting to be completed.

One of those was the FA Cup third-round tie between Lincoln and Coventry.

Scheduled to have been played at Sincil Bank on January 5, it was called off due to ice and snow.

The game was rearranged for January 9, then January 16, January 21, January 26, January 30, February 4, February 6, February 11, February 13, February 18, February 20, February 25, February 27 and March 4, only to be postponed on each occasion due to more ice and snow.

Finally, at the 16th time of asking, it was played on March 6, prompting the Lincolnshire Echo to enthuse: “IT’S ON AT LAST!”

The paper was not so enthusiastic in the morning, however, a score of Lincoln 1 Coventry 5, prompting the lament: “Was it really worth the wait?”

But if the Lincoln-Coventry fixture was the tip of the iceberg, with the game only proceeding after a pneumatic drill was used to penetrate two feet of ice on the Sincil Bank pitch, a number of other ties had to be rescheduled more than 10 times.

As snow drifted to more than 20 feet in places, driven along by gale force winds, Bolton Wanderers did not play at all between December 8 and February 16 – a period of inactivity that brought a whole new meaning to the term “winter break”.

So bad was the weather that the FA Cup third round took a staggering 66 days to complete; there were a whopping 261 postponements during that period.

Clubs resorted to desperate measures in an attempt to clear the snow.

At Chelsea, a giant tar burner was repeatedly rolled across the Stamford Bridge pitch.

At Blackpool, flame throwers were employed on the Bloomfield Road surface.

At Halifax Town, they gave up altogether on trying to clear the snow and instead turned postpoments into profit, advertising The Shay ground as a public ice rink and charging admission.

The lack of fixtures played havoc with the football pools, so Vernons, Zetters and Littlewoods acted quickly to find a solution.

A predictions system was put in place and, on January 26, 1963, the Pools Panel sat for the first time.

The panel consisted of six men – the former England players Tom Finney, Tommy Lawton and Ted Drake, former Scotland full-back George Young, former World Cup referee Arthur Ellis and former Conservative MP and aviation pioneer John Theodore Cuthbert Moore-Brabazon.

The panel met behind closed doors at the Connaught Rooms in London and their deliberations were announced on television.

Inevitably, with Britain blanketed by the worst snow storms since 1881, it was impossible to complete all the fixtures on time and the season had to be extended by two weeks.

Everton won the First Division Championship and Manchester United the FA Cup, their first major trophy since the Munich Air Disaster of 1958.

Other sports were also affected.

There was no horse racing in England between December 23 and March 7, with 94 National Hunt meetings called off, while the rugby union and rugby league codes were decimated.

However, a pools panel would have been kept busy earlier than its inception in the 1962-63 football season.

For in 1946-47, a total of 140 Football League games were postponed and the season did not end until June 14, when Sheffield United beat Stoke City.

In 1981-82, no fewer than 182 matches fell foul of the weather.

The situation that season was so bad that the draw for the FA Cup fourth round was made despite a number of second-round games having yet to take place.

However, the single-worst day weather-wise in British football history was February 3, 1940, when 56 of the 57 games in England and Scotland were lost.

The only one that went ahead was between Plymouth Argyle and Bristol City.