Clodagh Finn: Why Storm Agnes leaves behind a silver lining

If the reaction from Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell — who inspired the name choice for the letter ‘J’ — is anything to go by, being included as one of the Irish scientists on this year’s list of storm names is a reason to celebrate.

“[I] hope that if a potential ‘Storm Jocelyn’ happens, it may be a useful stirring-up rather than a destructive event!”

Here’s hoping that interest in Agnes Mary Clerke has been stirred up by her most recent outing, if we can call it that.

I like to think of her at home in Skibbereen where, as a child, she and elder sister Ellen Mary were home-schooled. Their mother, Catherine Mary (née Deasy), described as an “intellectual lady with considerable musical talents playing piano and harp” and father John William Clerke, TCD scholar and manager of the Provincial Bank, made excellent teachers.

By the time Agnes Mary was 15, she was already writing a history of astronomy while examining the night sky through her father’s four-inch telescope.

The family moved to Dublin in 1861. As a young woman, Agnes Mary suffered bad health and was advised to go to a warmer climate. She and her sister moved to Florence, a city famous for its Renaissance art and architecture. The 10 years they spent in such rich cultural surroundings made a lasting impression on the Clerke sisters.

Both of them became excellent linguists. Ellen Mary became fluent in several languages. She wrote, in English and Italian, on travel, astronomy and travel. Agnes Mary developed an interest in the science of the Renaissance. Later, when she moved with her sister to London in 1877, she wrote several articles on astronomy.

Male-dominated field

There, she made a name for herself in a field that was largely male dominated. Her first book, A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century, was published in 1885 when she was 43.

It was an immediate success and established her reputation for making science accessible to the general reader.

She wrote with clarity about difficult subjects, while her love of astronomy shone through with such force that one American reviewer said her book “reads like a romance”.

Her biographer Mary Brück said her work was treasured by historians and by amateur lovers of astronomy alike.

“This remarkable woman, educated solely within her own family and through her own private studies, not only kept abreast of astronomical progress worldwide but also had a genuine understanding of the matters on which she reported and the gift of communicating them through her fluent and prolific writings,” she wrote.

Agnes Mary was also a gifted artist and contributed some 150 sketches of scientists to the original Dictionary of National Biography. She broke another glass ceiling when, shortly before her death in 1907, she was made an honorary member of the all-male Royal Astronomical Society.

Almost a century later, historian Dr Allan Chapman summed up her life’s work like this: “No other single figure has a better case when it comes to being considered as the founder of the history of astronomy as a serious, scholarly study. She also practised in that most intellectually dangerous and fluid branch of history: the history of her own time.”

Unlike many others, she was celebrated not only in her own time, but afterwards. A crater on the moon bears her name, in recognition of all she did to bring astronomy and astrophysics to public attention in Victorian England.

It strikes me that her gifted sister, Ellen Mary Clerke, journalist, poet, linguist fluent in several languages including Arabic, carer, guitarist, oarswoman and charity worker, also deserves to be better remembered and celebrated. There’s a plaque recalling both sisters in their birthplace, but maybe we should have, say, a journalism award in Ellen Mary’s name too?

That brings me back to the importance of remembrance through name. The naming of storms is not designed to commemorate people, but this year Met Éireann used the process to honour the lives and work of Irish scientists.

Naming storms saves lives

The Irish Meteorological Service and the UK Met Office have been naming storms since 2015 because, as they point out, it works. It saves lives by providing clarity and it warns people of the impact of incoming weather. They were joined in the endeavour by the Netherlands’ meteorological agency, KMNI, in 2019.

This year, Met Éireann contributed seven of the 21 names to the storms list: Agnes, Fergus, Jocelyn, Kathleen, Lilian, Nicholas, and Vincent.

It is interesting to see that the choice is weighted in favour of women. There are three men and five women. I know that adds up to eight, but under the letter ‘K’, we get two for the price of one; both Kathleen ‘Kay’ McNulty, ‘mother of computer programming’ and Kathleen Lonsdale, pioneering X-ray crystallographer and pacifist, are celebrated.

Here’s hoping we won’t have to endure a Storm Kathleen to hear more about those two women. Look them up if you have a moment, along with the other excellent choices on the list: Fergus O’Rourke, scientist who contributed to myrmecology (the study of ants); aforementioned astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell; Lilian Bland, journalist and early aviator; Nicholas Callan, physicist who invented the induction coil, and Vincent Barry, best known for leading the team which developed the anti-leprosy drug, clofazimine.

When the ‘Name a Storm’ competition comes around again next year, I’ll be making a pitch to include (with her permission) Maureen Sweeney, the Irish woman whose weather forecast saved D-Day.

In early June 1944, Ted and Maureen Sweeney were taking hourly weather readings at Blacksod lighthouse and coastguard station in Co Mayo, which were then secretly phoned to London.

At 1pm on 3 June, 1944, Maureen forecast a severe Atlantic storm. On the back of her report, the Allies delayed the timing of the D-Day landings, an operation that changed the course of the Second World War.

Maureen, who is now 100, was given a special US House of Representatives honour in 2021 for her vital weather forecast. As she said in a Nationwide interview on RTÉ some years ago: “They could arrange everything, but they couldn’t pre-arrange the weather.” 

Another lesson we continue to learn with the increased frequency of storms, named or otherwise.