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Today the much-loved Shipping Forecast is 150 years old.

It's daily information is a life-saving asset to mariners in coastal waters around the UK, but the soothing tones of the announcer reading out the enigmatically named shipping areas has a hypnotic quality that makes it popular with many a listener sitting snugly in their homes imaging the perils of the seas.

But we would not have this particular national treasure had it not been for one disastrous wreck off the coast of North Wales.

The Shipping Forecast as we know it was born after the Royal Charter, which was returning from Melbourne to Liverpool laden with gold, sank after being dashed on rocks off Moelfre, Anglesey, during a Force-12 storm.

The wreck, in October 1859, cost the lives of around 450 sailors, and was the worst ever shipwreck in waters around Wales.

Following the disaster, Vice-Admiral Robert FitzRoy - who had captained the HMS Beagle expedition which took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos Islands to hatch his theory of evolution - proposed that a proper forecast of weather should be made available for sailors to avoid a repeat of the disaster, which was costly not only in terms of human losses but also because of the amount of gold that went down with the vessel.

Following the Royal Charter disaster, Fitzroy developed charts that allowed predictions of the weather to be made. From these, the modern term 'weather forecasting' was termed.

When the BBC was formed in the 1920s, it used Fitzroy's innovations as the basis of its Shipping Forecast, which continues to this day.