The coldest day

Winter is on its way with its cold temperatures.
Most of us have ways of dealing with the cold weather - but spare a thought for the residents of Eweburn, now Ranfuly, on July 17, 1903.
That morning many woke - early since it was a farming community - to a starting minus 25.6 degrees celsius.
A cold southerly brought heavy snow followed by clear skies, light winds and intense frosts. The top of the snow layer became much colder than the relatively warm earth, which no longer heated the air because of the insulating layer of snow.
The Hakataramea River froze solid and blocks of ice floating down the Waitaki River formed a temporary dam near Kurow.
A creek north of Kurow froze where it ran across the flat road surface. As more water flowed down over the ice, it too froze, until a barrier of ice a metre and a half high blocked the road. Potatoes, onions, oranges and apples froze as hard as stones, eggs burst and meat had to be cut with an axe, though it tended to splinter.
Communications went down as telegraph poles iced over, and remote communities got cut off.
In all, about a million sheep froze to death.
For a while the story was lost to local legend until Reverend Daniel Bates was appointed as a temporary clerk to help process the climatological records.
Daniel Cross Bates was born at Spalding, England on June 9, 1868 where he was educated before going to Australia where he became a minister of the Anglican Church. He was ordained at Newcastle in 1892 and came to New Zealand in 1898 where he was the vicar at All Saints’ Church in Invercargill.
He trained with David Kennedy at Meeanee who had started his own observatory there.
Bates served with the 9th New Zealand contingent in the Boer War, rising to Chaplain-Colonel.
After an injury meant he lost his voice, he left the church and joined the Colonial Museum as reliving director - taking on much of the climatological work. Weather forecasting was carried out by the Weather Reporting Office and Bates became assistant to its director. He was also the Director of Meteorology for the Army, specialising in military aviation.
Bates ended up being appointed consulting meteorologist to the government.
He played a considerable part in the discussions leading to the establishment of the Wellington Zoological Gardens at Newtown in 1905.
Bates died in Wellington on August 7, 1954 and in buried in Karori Cemetery,
Photo by Rosan Harmens.​