WE all know that southerners are softies who fly into a blind panic at the first hint of a bit of the white stuff.

But whatever happened to northern true grit? Not just the stuff that was supposed to keep our highways and byways open and our pavements free of ice, but the collar up against the wind, teeth gritted, stiff upper lipped determination we used to show at times like this.

If people think the recent freeze has been bad, they obviously weren’t around in 1963 or 1947. The latter was the year I was born so I can’t claim too much first-hand knowledge, but I heard my parents talk many times about the privations of that memorably harsh winter.

I was more aware of the problems in 1963. It was my final year at school and I recall donning wellies every day during more than two months of heavy snowfalls and freezing temperatures and plodging the two miles to school every morning and the two miles home again in the afternoon.

No thought was ever given to closing the school or to giving pupils days off because the playground got a bit slippery, the heating system wasn’t too clever, and just getting to school was a physical adventure. Why complain, they said. It gets you fit. One of my mates fell and cracked his collar bone. Nobody got sued.

In fact, with the rugby pitches under about three feet of snow, they sent us out cross-country running on games afternoons. We might have returned with hypothermia, but we dare not whinge about it. Thing is, in 1963 they hadn’t gone bonkers and stopped kids playing conkers or come up with a plethora of health and safety restrictions that left teachers cringing in fear of litigation and schools deciding to close their doors rather than have to carry out yet another risk assessment.

There are even dark mutterings that some schools chose to close down altogether rather than carry on with the kids that had made it through the snow because Ofsted doesn’t make allowances for the extreme weather affecting attendance figures.

It’s ironic, isn’t it. The children are sent home from school ostensibly for safety reasons. And what do they do? Go sledging and have snowball fights. Look, if I could walk four miles a day in 1963, why can’t teachers get out of their cars and walk to school? Or get some of those parents who drive those monster 4x4s to come and collect them.

But it’s not just the schools. Half the country seems to grind to a halt when there’s a bit of snow in the air. Public transport is crippled overnight and annoying television reporters pop up on our screens every morning at half past seven telling us tales of doom and gloom from some frosty field near Huddersfield.

It’s just winding everybody up even more. They invariably finish with a foreboding warning that we “must not travel unless it’s absolutely necessary”. Just exactly how many joyriders are there out there at 7-30am having a fun spin in the family saloon?

People are out there at that time because their journeys are necessary to open supermarkets so we can panic-buy food, to work in hospitals and police, ambulance and fire stations, and to keep the wheels of business turning. Funny isn’t it, most of them manage to get to work.

My eminent predecessor in this column, John Hurst, was an admirably old-fashioned reporter who went out with the Herald’s photographers to record the weather scene and sometimes be among the first to “liberate” out of the way places up on the East Fellside.

Back in that winter of 1963, when the snow lasted from Boxing Day until March, nowhere was it harsher than on Shap Fell where local police sergeant Bob Ivison spent long hours getting stranded lorry drivers to safety off the A6 — no motorway then.

John Hurst reckoned the tougher it got the more Bob Ivison relished the challenge. “I still have a mental picture of him near the fell summit, his great coat buttoned to the collar against the whipping snow. He was an indomitable figure,” was how Hurst evocatively drew a picture of a man facing the elements.

We’ve become a nation of wimps. There are still local heroes like Sergeant Ivison. But not enough of them. In fact it seems the only northerners who aren’t fazed by the weather are those meaty-thighed lasses in short skirts who bravely totter in high heels across the ice to reach the night spots in places like Newcastle’s Bigg Market.

Once Britain was prepared to meet an invasion. Now it can’t hold its nerve or get organised in the face of two inches of snow. Come back, Captain Mainwaring, all is forgiven.

A MAN OF STRAW

IF Cumbrian bobby Bill Barker had decided to stay in a warm office on the night of the November floods, his family would still have had a husband and a father.

Like every job, the police will have a few officers who opt for the easy way. PC Barker wasn’t one of them. He stood warning people to stay clear of a damaged bridge and lost his life when it was swept away.

Former Home Secretary Jack Straw should be made to apologise in person to Bill Barker’s family for his insulting comments about police officers who seek the refuge of warm offices when they should be on the beat.

Mr. Straw, who was little help to the police during his time in office, is one of the politicians who inflicted endless form-filling on bobbies who would undoubtedly prefer to be pounding their patch than poring over mountains of paperwork.

Apparently just attending a playground scuffle can prompt up to 50 items of paperwork. No wonder the cops are sometimes reluctant to get involved in such minor matters.

Instead of condemning all police officers with the same smearing brush, Mr. Straw and his cohorts should be making the job less bureaucratic so they can actually get out and do what they are supposed to do, which is catch criminals.

But then we’ve seen this week with the case of the thug who poured bleach over a woman in a restaurant that even when the police catch offenders, sentencing is pathetically inadequate and out of touch with public opinion.

PUBLICITY COUP

I DO not believe Anjem Choudary had any intention of carrying out his threatened protest march with 500 supporters through the streets of Wootton Bassett. He got what he wanted when the media went crazy amid calls for a government ban.

If the Islam4UK protest with black coffins had been allowed, we could have seen exactly who the dangerous fanatics are and it would have given the authorities some idea of how much support there really is for his extreme views.

However, I suspect Mr. Choudary’s claim that 500 would march with him was wildly optimistic. A handful of protesters, totally ignored by the fine people of this Wiltshire town, would have faced an embarrassing walk through empty streets. Instead a handful of extremists have pulled off a publicity coup, which was their intention all along.