Citizens checking their barometers first thing in the morning found the needle sitting stolidly on 1030 millibars and the thermometer heading for the upper eighties. Living memory had never seen the like. “Three weeks and still no relief in sight!” the newspapers bewailed. Lunchtime saw the city’s green spaces populated with typists and shop assistants and legal secretaries and junior clerks rolling down stockings, removing jackets, loosening collars, eating sandwiches with hair oil dripping onto them. A warehouse fire in which the entire national stockpile of powdered ice cream mix was destroyed provoked citywide panic. The wireless reported scenes reminiscent of the Crash of 1929 as customers fought over tuppenny cones. An extreme Protestant sect prepared for the imminent end of the world by buying every last can of pork luncheon meat in the city. Fears of a wave of lawlessness as heat-crazed young hooligans ran amok never materialised, but that did not prevent the Evening Echo from reporting, with some glee, an outbreak of boot-polish-eating among sixteen-year-olds.
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