Looking at this wintry scene from the top of the upper High Street, we can all feel relieved that winter this year is well behind us.

Indeed, the residents of Andover in 1908 may have felt the same way but there was to be a sharp fall of snow on Saturday, April 25, that caught everyone by surprise. Cold spells in April are of course not unknown, and in 1908 it had been a cold week, with a heavy fall of hail very early in the morning of April 25, blown in by a north-west wind.

However, the wind then changed to a north-easterly and this was what brought the snow from 5am onwards, in a large swathe that stretched right across the south.

However, Andover was right in the centre of the storm and it was particularly severe in the local area.

The Daily Mail commented that the snow was eight feet deep on the platform at Andover Junction, although the Andover Advertiser disagreed, acidly reporting that they must have been ‘short feet’!

Certainly, the disruption to the Town Station was serious, as the depth of snow prevented the level crossing gates from opening automatically from the signal box and had to be pushed backwards and forwards by hand whenever a train arrived or departed. The trains could not run to their normal timetable and any pedestrian who tried to cross the wooden footbridge over the tracks was risking life and limb from the ice on the steps. They just had to wait for the gates to be opened by the railway staff.

The snow kept falling for most of the day and to make matters worse, a gale then blew up and scattered snow all around. By this time the snow was banked up everywhere and any horse-drawn delivery vehicle – as nearly all were in 1908 – was forced to take refuge; in a comment of the period, the Advertiser regretted that people in the villages ‘looked for the grocer and the butcher in vain…and it was Sunday morning before many of them received their joints’.

The snow eventually stopped falling about 4 o’clock and Charles Howard, about whom I wrote last week, went out and took various views of the snowfall around the town.

The postcard above is one of his, published by Frederick Harvey whose shop was almost opposite Howard’s studio.

After April 25, the following day dawned bright, melting most of the snow to slush and the following day of rain soon dispensed with any that remained. Apart from melting snow sliding off rooftops and bringing down guttering, it was almost all gone as quickly as it came. But for the business acumen of photographers like Howard, we would never know today how it looked.

The postcards must have sold well at the time because there are many of them, some of which are nothing much more than a sea of white, with a solitary figure (Howard’s unfortunate assistant), standing in the centre to add a point of interest to the scene.