How losing the Wragge christened storms

From time to time they have a "Cyclone Bertie" in Australia

From time to time they have a "Cyclone Bertie" in Australia. And on the same alphabetical list they use to name the storms down under, Cyclone "Nora" is usually followed shortly afterwards by "Owen".

There was a time when all this might not have been coincidence. Clement Wragge, the eccentric government meteorologist for the state of Queensland in the early 1900s, formed the self-satisfying habit of naming the most unpleasant weather disturbances in his region after persons against whom he had a grudge.

When in 1902 he gave a particularly vicious storm the name of "Conroy", by way of registering his hostility towards a prominent national politician, the episode attracted attention far beyond the limits of Australia. Wragge, not surprisingly perhaps, retired from active meteorology later on that year.

He had been born England in 1852, and after many adventures finally settled in Australia. There, his prolific activity as an amateur meteorologist attracted great attention, and as a consequence he was appointed Queensland's weather supremo in 1887.

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One of Wragge's more bizarre adventures in this capacity involved his fascination with the idea, common in Europe at the time, that the discharge of artillery pieces could be used to bring rain to drought-stricken areas. He set up a series of six such guns at Charleville in Queensland, with the object of breaking a persistent drought, and when he gauged the atmosphere to be ripe for making rain, the guns were ceremoniously fired at one-minute intervals.

The project, however, was an abject failure, and the resultant adverse publicity probably cost Wragge his chances of becoming the first director of the soon to be established Australian Federal Bureau of Meteorology.

Wragge was a lanky, gawky, red-haired man with large feet, always encased in highly polished Blucher boots; he was also uncompromising and unconventional, and not afraid of making enemies. One biographer describes him nicely: "A tactless attitude towards the government meteorologists of other states, together with his interstate forecasting activities, had not endeared Wragge in professional circles, and to this was added a private life not entirely in keeping with Victorian ideals."

Despite all this, Clement Wragge is remembered today as probably the first meteorologist in the world to have given names to severe storms. He started with letters from the Greek alphabet, and then progressed through Greek and Roman mythology to the use of feminine names, and thence, as we have seen, to an even more adventurous nomenclature.

Understandably, the practice ceased after the furore that it caused in 1902, but was revived officially in the US in the early 1950s, and has been with us ever since.