Is Guy Fawkes’ Night going to turn into a damp squib this year? The forecasts don’t look good – our best hope is for a brief ridge to briefly quieten things down before the next frontal system trundles in from the Atlantic.

What was a very wet week last year led to the cancellation of the public display on Wanstead Flats – with 10.2mm of rain on the Saturday flooding the already sodden land. The forecast for this year doesn’t look much better with 16mm of rain due between Friday and dusk on Sunday.

But what about the actual 5th of November? Monday looks very wet for this region with yet another frontal system sweeping across the south. Up to an inch of rain could fall before dusk on Tuesday driven along by a stiff westerly wind. The only positive, if you can call it that, is it will be very mild. Temperatures will only fall to around 14C which is very warm for a night in early November.

It wasn’t always like this – ask most people of a certain age what the weather was like on Bonfire Night in their youth and most will answer ‘calm, cold and frosty’ – the bonfire providing a source of warmth as well as somewhere to roast the chestnuts and toast the marshmallows. But were frosty nights on Guy Fawkes in the 1980s that common? I decided to have a look back through the archives and find out.

Only 4 nights in the Eighties could really be described as approaching frosty – they were 1980, 1981, 1989 and 1988 which was the coldest Guy Fawkes’ of the past 30 odd years with the temperature falling to 0.4C. All the other years had minimums of between 5-10C. One thing that is noticeable is how dry November 5 was in the 1980s – just 2 years had any measurable amounts of rain; 1986 (0.5mm) and 1984 (3mm). Nineties Bonfire Nights were even warmer – nearly 1.5C warmer on average – the coldest years being 1991 and 1998 with 2C.

Noughties Bonfire Nights were a continuation on the Nineties – mild though over half were dry affairs. The overall average over the last 30 years is quite surprising – 12C during the day and only falling to just over 6C at night. Taking the average of the last five years the minimum rises to nearly 8.5C! The odds of it raining heavily on Bonfire Night, meanwhile, average out about 1 in 5. Raining lightly the odds increase to a 40% chance.

And as for that wished-for frosty night? Forget it. It seems memories of perfectly frosty Bonfire Nights are about as elusive as the Dickens-style winter snow images that are still so common on Christmas cards.