Following on from our earlier posts on weather lore, David Howard has an interesting variation of the origins of 'Hughey' (Huie, Hughie, etc):
Regarding the origins of the saying ‘send it down Hughey’. Years ago (and there are getting to be too many of them at my age) I think I was told and didn’t read it somewhere that - a farmer in the Victorian mallee had lost a son in WW 1. In the hope that the son, named Hugh, had gone to heaven on his demise, dad was influenced to ask his son up there to send ‘it’ - rain, down from wherever up there the rain comes. How the saying escaped to the outside world is not part of the story.
