Stan Crib was the undertaker. On 5 December 1952, he and his uncle Tom led the funeral procession. Their hearse drove into London, followed by a long line of mourners. Accustomed to the London fog, Stan and Tom slowly made their way into the city. Suddenly, in broad daylight, it was night. “It was like being blind,” Stan later recalled. Now he couldn’t even see where the next bend was. Uncle Tom got out and walked in front of his car with a powerful torch in his hand. It illuminated nothing. In his sixty-year career, Stan stopped the funeral procession only twice: during the Second World War, when the Germans bombed the road he was driving on, and during the deadly fog of December 1952, when life in London came to a standstill for five days.
But the morning of 5 December gave no hint of what the day would bring. It was clear and icy. People immediately lit fires to warm their homes. That was the problem. In 1952, London’s houses were in an extremely poor state. Many were still damaged by German bombing, and insulation was almost non-existent. Usually a single fireplace or stove heated the whole house, and bedrooms were cold. In the evening, as much coal dust as possible was poured into the stove to keep the fire burning longer.
They ignored the fact that burning coal dust produces even more black smoke than burning bad coal thrown into the furnace. The defeated living conditions forced them to accept everything. Houses were overcrowded because those destroyed by German bombs had not yet been rebuilt or reconstructed, and slums were growing all over London. They had only started to be dismantled in 1956, and now people in the capital and other British cities were trying to survive the winter as best they knew how.
Sucking coal from domestic stoves
Scarcity was hitting them at every turn. England was still in the throes of bankruptcy, the result of the Second World War. Confectionery was scarce and horsemeat had become a staple food. The days when steam locomotives and trains were powered by the best domestic coal were over by 1939. Now, good domestic coal was being exported to get much-needed cash to get off the bottom, and they were using extremely low-quality coal themselves.
There were around 20,000 steam locomotives running around the country, and often many of them in the cities, especially London, at any one time. The soot created by burning bad coal went into the air. So did those from millions of domestic chimneys, but nobody cared about the impact of polluted air on people’s health, not then and not during the war.
Between September 1940 and May 1941, when the Germans bombed the British capital, Londoners were ordered by the authorities to place “smoke cans”, as the containers used to burn the dirty oil were called, every 50 or 100 metres in the streets. The black smoke that resulted should have covered the city like a blanket, reducing visibility and making the German pilots’ job more difficult. It was often really thick.
As the war wore on, the authorities realised that they were wasting precious coal reserves and stopped, but they were not interested in the impact of the smoke on people’s health. Instead, the then Ministry of Fuel and Energy set up an Energy Efficiency Department and advised factories on how to burn coal more efficiently, but again to avoid running out, as they could not import coal during the war.
By 1952, Londoners were well used to dark clouds over their heads, as well as toxic smells. When the Germans bombed the harbour, they would sometimes hit a chemical or other combustible material depot, and a heavy, foul-smelling black smoke would rise over the city.
During the war, households kept their air clean for the same reason as factories: to save coal. The authorities urged people to heat their homes as little as possible. In baths, they were told to mark a height of 15 centimetres. They could only fill the tub with hot water up to the mark and no more. One woman wrote to the Energy Efficiency Advisory Body asking what she should do if she bathed with her husband. Can she then put 30 centimetres of water in the bath?
The campaign did not have the desired effect, of course, but the authorities turned to women’s organisations. Now they have started telling women to heat their homes less.
During the war, smog was even more disturbing than after, if not more dangerous. The blackouts at night meant that nothing could be seen under the cloak of smog, but people would crawl home on all fours to detect a junction or a bend in time.
Lost in London
So they were not too disturbed when the morning of 5 December 1952 quickly turned into a day that could have been called night, so thick was the fog that covered them. Roy Parker was a third-year economics student at the time. He was not concerned about the greasy black smog he was breathing in, his life was complicated by an almost complete traffic jam.
The city was paralysed. River traffic on the Thames came to a standstill. Air flights were cancelled. Trains were more or less at a standstill. London’s iconic double-decker buses were moving on the metres. The sticky soot in the air made the windscreens so greasy and dirty that they could not be wiped clean.
To make the buses go, a conductor walked in front of the bus and lit the way with a lantern. The driver could only follow him if he leaned out of the side window, because he couldn’t see anything out of the front window.
One bus driver, making his way through the city alone, recalled standing at a traffic light. The light was red and refused to turn green. Finally, he just got off and took a few steps towards the traffic light. Only then did he see that he was standing in front of a pub and he ran. Behind him, of course, was a long queue of vehicles, because the drivers were sure that at least the bus driver, who knows the city like the back of his hand, knew where he was going.
Car drivers were getting lost one after the other. One boy earned a little money those days when drivers paid him to walk in front of them with a torch and show them the way. Many soon left their cars at home.
A Londoner lived 16 kilometres away from London, where he worked. He went to work in the morning by car because it was clear. On the way home, he and his colleague took turns walking in front of the car and telling each other where to turn. They “covered” the 16 kilometres in three hours.
The ambulances followed the same system: one paramedic walked in front of the ambulance, the other drove. In at least one case, the husband of a woman in labour who had suffered a seizure on 8 December 1952, when the fog was at its thickest, walked in front of the ambulance and had to be transported to the maternity ward.
George Lesley’s slightly older friend bought an old car that day. To get him from Clapham to Brixton, George sat on the bonnet of his car and told him where the bend was, because he couldn’t see it from the driver’s seat. They were driving through Clapham when a motorcyclist caught up with them. He asked George if he knew where the tube station was. “You’re driving on the pavement. If you go another 20 metres or so, you’ll go down the stairs,” George explained.
Pedestrians didn’t have it any easier. They were trying to avoid slipping on the slippery ground. But that was not the worst of it. Donald Acheson, a young doctor at the time, later recalled the really unpleasant feeling that came over him when he completely lost his bearings.
He had to run some errands, and he went from the hospital where he worked to Oxford Street. The distance was no more than 400 metres, but he got lost in the street he knew like the back of his hand. He had no idea where he was. To do what he had to do and find out where he was, he crawled along the pavement at the edge of the buildings until he came to the next junction and read the name of the street.
Another recalled how, aged 14, he used to return to his native Edgware with his parents from Camden. They were waiting for a bus and it was nowhere to be seen. They walked home. They saw almost nothing, but they huddled together to keep from getting lost and to make it less scary.
A London boy was returning home from school on the first day of the fog, and later stayed at home on the advice of the authorities. At the age of 8, he used to skate on the garden fences with his hand because it was the only way to know where the road ran. He was scared to death every time he had to cross it because he couldn’t see the other side.
I can’t see my feet
Animals were also affected by the fog. Birds crashed into buildings. Roy Parker remembered the problems the horses had. At that time, he said, many things were still being delivered by carts, and so his parents called someone to their home at the top of a steep hill to come and get something. As usual, he was paid a few pence for the job, but the man complained that it was too little because his horse had difficulty reaching the top of the steep road. He was really struggling to breathe.
Eleven cattle die at the Smithfield Show, one of England’s most popular agricultural events, the media report. The deaths were said to have been caused by smog, although 50 years later this was sincerely doubted, and no one disputed that the fog also caused the animals to have difficulty breathing and finding their way around.
For example, dog races had to be cancelled because the dogs didn’t know where to run, and participants in a traditional cross-country running competition organised by Oxford and Cambridge universities had to run in the right direction. When they arrived in a foggy area – in London, a greasy sooty fog covered 50 square metres – people hired by the organisers stood along their route, shouting relentlessly, “This way, this way, Oxford and Cambridge”.
People were unaware of the dangers of black fog, but apart from a full-blown heart attack, the most upsetting thing was the cancellation of almost all sporting events in the South East of England because the fog had decided to persist over the weekend.
Cinemas closed their doors because people couldn’t see the screen, as the fog penetrated into the buildings. An opera house decided to perform La Traviata but had to stop because the smog was suffocating everyone, audience and singers.
It was so dense that residents of the Isle of Dogs could not see their feet as they walked along the road. The same was reported by East End residents.
Mothers held their children tightly by the hand because if they lost them, they would never find them again. The authorities advised the townspeople to wear loose cotton masks, but since there were not enough of them, they pressed handkerchiefs over their mouths and noses. These, of course, did not keep out particulate matter or the sulphuric acid that permeated the air.
Richard Scorer did not have any breathing problems. Others argued that he had his genes to thank for this, but he thought that Pat Lawther, the author of articles on the health effects of pollution, had saved him from problems by advising him to breathe through his nose because it would clean the air before it got to his lungs.
Like everyone else on the street, he used to press a clean handkerchief to his face, and like everyone else, he was amazed at how dirty he was at the end of the day. He lived in Wimbledon and lectured in meteorology at Imperial College, University of London, South Kensington. Three years ago he decided to cycle to work because it was the cheapest way to do it and offered him the greatest independence. So he cycled about 11 kilometres each way every day.
Now he had to give up his bike because of fog, but he rode it from Wimbledon to the railway station in nearby Raynes Park. Where the fog was thickest, he couldn’t see a metre in front of him, so he stared at the edge of the pavement to see where he was going.
But it was not the almost non-existent visibility that stuck in his mind, but the fact that he arrived at the finish line as if he had fallen off his bike into the mud. His eyebrows were covered with what looked most like mud. His hair was dirty and his palms were full of something dark, although he did not touch the ground.
The dirt that stuck to them as they walked the streets has also remained in the memories of other Londoners. But it was not only people and animals that were at risk. As the sticky smog seeped into the rooms, the British Museum archivists watched in despair as it crawled across their bookshelves.
But at least books could not get sick, even if people at the time did not believe they could. The death of cattle at the Smithfield exhibition made them partly aware of the impact of pollution on animals, but not on themselves, even though the hospitals were full.
Too many dead, not enough baptisms
Donald Acheson was a doctor at the Middlesex Hospital in the London Borough of Westminster. He worked one week on, one week off. From 5 to 10 December 1952, at the very time when London was being plagued by sooty fog mixed with sulphuric acid, he was at his workplace. Among other things, he decided which patients would be admitted to hospital and which would not. Neither he nor they knew that the hospital was in an area of London where the fog was thickest.
Nevertheless, he did not later recall any smell of rotten eggs, as reported by others because of the sulphur, and only the ear-splitting silence from the road stuck in his memory. There was hardly any traffic and no visibility. He felt as if he were all alone.
He was not in hospital. Although it was not clear how, until long afterwards, enough ambulances found his hospital to fill all the beds with patients. They came with blue lips. Smoking and years of exposure to pollution had already weakened their lungs, and now they were full of smog.
After a day or two, he had to call the chief surgeon to cancel all the patients because they had no beds. Most of the acute patients were middle-aged and elderly men. They were gasping for air, but when he listened to their lungs with the stethoscope, he heard no chest wheezes, shortness of breath or signs of asthma.
Patients with really severe respiratory problems flooded the hospital two or three days later. There were so many that the hospital no longer cared which ward they belonged to – they put them wherever they had room. So they were in the surgical ward, and even the maternity ward was emptied. Because they were mostly men, they could not share rooms with women, but they were still in almost all the women’s wards.
The fight for men’s beds has been brutal. Patients with throats scorching and coughing fits from the sulphuric acid were simply too many. They did not know that the particulates and acid were causing inflammation in their lungs and that they would probably suffocate soon.
But death was not only for them, but also for those who had heart problems. On those days, doctors didn’t associate their symptoms with smog, but they knew there were many more heart patients than usual.
Oxygen reserves were rapidly depleting and the rooms were filling with fog. It seemed to Donald Acheson that it was more or less made of soot. The baths and sinks grew greyer and greyer until it was impossible to write on the dirty surface.
People were dying en masse. Officially, most lost their lives to chronic bronchitis or emphysema. The pathologists at Middlesex Hospital ran out of room in the mortuary and in the hospital chapel, so they took the bodies to the anatomical dissection department in the adjoining building, because it was a teaching hospital.
No longer did undertakers have coffins for the deceased, nor florists funeral bouquets for the mourners. In the East End, for example, the death rate increased ninefold.
There has never been an accurate analysis of how many people died at home that day because they couldn’t get to a doctor because of the weather, but the general estimate is that there were probably more than the dead in hospitals.
Roy Parker’s father was surprisingly lucky. He had experienced gas poisoning during the First World War, and was already suffering from symptoms similar to those experienced by miners who inhaled coal dust and sulphur. He was now a steam locomotive driver and often had difficulty breathing.
That December weekend, he was literally gasping for air, but he insisted on going to work, by bike of course, because cycling was the cheapest. It was already hard to get to work, and even harder to get home, but he survived despite the long cycling in the fog and the coughing fits.
After five days, the wind finally blew the fog away. Dark, tiny oil stains remained on trees and buildings, as if someone had sprayed the city with black paint. The rain washed it away and washed the greasy soot into the roadside canals.
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Londoners are quite calm
Six weeks after the fatal fog, a City of London health spokesman reports that 445 people have died as a result of the fog up to and including 8 December. Ten weeks later, a new official report put the death toll at 4000.
The deaths and illnesses that developed from smog were counted belatedly and not with much enthusiasm, but Londoners were not worried, even by the official 4000 casualties. Later, experts pondered why. Some because they were simply unaware of the impact of air pollution on health, and some because they were used to it.
Fog has been with London since the middle of the Middle Ages, and by the 15th century the skies over London were regularly black from coal smoke. The thick, hazy blackness became familiar to Londoners again during the Second World War. They had also experienced the ‘Great Fog’. It was not as thick in 1948 as in 1952, but it was just as long-lasting, and it is true that it did not claim as many lives.
People used to blame smog on industry, but it is because of industry that smog has been accepted as a necessary evil. If the country wanted to get out of bankruptcy, they needed it, so they gritted their teeth. On top of that, smog accumulated gradually. At first, it covered only the areas around the industrial buildings, then slowly it spread until they merged and the smog covered the whole city. It was so commonplace for its inhabitants by then that they accepted it as something you just couldn’t escape.
People were also calm because they did not see any dead bodies anywhere and the tragedy did not come to life in front of their eyes. The reports on the victims were mainly about the elderly, but somehow one is more touched by the loss of a child’s life. For example, when coal waste slipped into the village of Aberfan in South Wales on 21 October 1966, the English people were immediately upset and politicians had to act immediately. The waste had buried a school. The 144 victims included 116 children.
The media has also influenced the public’s reaction, and therefore the politicians’. In 1952, people got their news more or less from the newspapers, some of it from the radio. But the media were also not interested in health and mortality. They were mostly concerned with traffic jams and cancelled sporting events.
The more yellow media focused on the alleged increase in street crime. Scoundrels have reportedly managed to steal women’s handbags and literally disappear into the darkness, despite almost non-existent visibility. The unfortunate cattle from the Smithfield exhibition also received a lot of media attention.
One of the problems with the fog was that it was not visual. The densest simply could not be shown in the photographs because then nothing could be seen, and so the disaster was not visible at all.
The first serious reaction to the December events was not published until 1953, but there was no response to Dr Lessing’s serious analysis in the Times. Politicians remained silent, hoping that the matter would fade into oblivion and advising people to burn more efficiently. They were told that they did not know how to load their stoves properly, and that is why they emit smog instead of flames. That was partly true, but mostly the smog was the result of burning the only fuel they could get, extremely bad English coal.
There were some calls to investigate what was happening during the Great Fog, why it was happening and why it was causing so many casualties on this occasion, but these were stubbornly ignored by the Home Secretary, Sir Maurice Harold Macmillan, until May 1953.
The Ministry of the Environment has also been deaf to this, but it is true that it has a single official dealing with pollution. The Ministry of Fuel and Energy? There, too, they were silent. Politicians simply did not want to deal with the consequences of the haze.
Political games at the expense of clean air
“Does it not seem significant to the Minister that in the last month, literally more people have died in London alone from choking on air pollution than died on the roads across the country in 1952?” one MP asked Minister Macmillan.
On pollution, he replied to MEPs: “We are doing what we can, but honourable Members must of course be aware that we have a huge number of wider economic factors to take into account, which it would be foolish to simply ignore.”
Everyone knew they had to do something about London’s air, but they simply didn’t have the money. The Home Office was, at that very time, engaged in a planned build of 300,000 homes. They should have been built a long time ago to replace the ones that have been demolished, but they have not been built now.
They also refused to deal with air because of the elections. In 1951, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister for a second time, but the Tories wanted to replace him with Anthony Robert Eden at the next election. They did not want to upset the public’s acceptance of their new candidate, and neither did their opponents, so they collectively gave up on research into the impact of domestic coal burning on air pollution.
The Minister of the Interior was convinced that the problem could not be solved in this way and that the Clean Air Act would never be approved in Parliament, so it was better to leave the matter for a better time. There were not enough smokeless fuels, and there were 12 million homes in London that could not even be heated with smoke. In order for people to replace their heating systems, the state would have had to offer them a subsidy, and it did not have the money to do so.
At the same time, the government was planning to modernise Britain’s railways, a plan published in 1955. In the same year, the green light was given to nuclear power stations, which had been considered a few years earlier. So in 1952 they lived in the belief that they only had to hold out for a few more years and things would sort themselves out.
But the “wait and see” policy has not worked very well. The following year, the fog returned and in May 1953, Minister Macmillian finally agreed to set up a commission to investigate air quality. The Commission worked for 21 months under Sir Hugh Beaver and its report concluded that there was an undeniable link between air pollution and respiratory problems, but that the pollution problem could be tackled for the next 15 years.
On the basis of this report, the government proposed a Clean Air Act, which was passed on 5 July 1956. The law now sought to control household sources of pollution and create smoke-free zones. They had to burn fuels that did not emit black smoke, or in other words, the new law banned black smoke.
However, the law had exceptions. For example, some hospitals were not covered, but their chimneys still smoked black because they burned bitumen. This coal is the most abundant and is classified between anthracite coal, which is the hardest and has the most carbon, which is why it contains the most energy, and lignite, which is the softest and has the least carbon. Bitumen also contains a tar-like substance.
But at least formally, the authorities first started by cleaning up the so-called black zones, areas where black smoke had long been lingering over rooftops. They have been inventoried and a kind of map of black zones has been drawn up all over the country. They are now at the very top of the list of areas in need of urgent remediation. Then these ‘clean’ areas were expanded until they had control of the whole city or district.
People were told about the link between smog and sulphur dioxide, and that the smoke was actually covered in sulphur dioxide deposits. Once subsidies were introduced and people could really start burning less bad fuels, air quality in big cities like London, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield slowly improved, even though, despite the inspectors, they all broke the law in turn.
For example, the locomotives had a supply of briquettes, which were thrown into the furnace when the inspectors arrived, but otherwise they burned cheaper, low-grade coal. When an inspector wanted to fine a house owner, the owner immediately pointed to the chimneys, which were billowing black smoke, and told him to fine the owners first.
The authorities have also been volatile. It was more lenient with industry than with households, and made a number of exceptions, although industrial emissions, together with sulphur dioxide, were also extremely problematic. So the air was not cleaned overnight, of course, but the Great Fog of 1966 took 750 more lives, with a few minor ones in between.
But when they finally managed to sort out the heating problems in London’s homes, a new problem arose – cars started poisoning the city’s air, only this time they couldn’t change the fuel because they were already running at their best, so they restricted driving in the city centre. In 1952, this was not a problem. At that time there were only 5 million registered vehicles in the whole of the UK.
David Bates was a young doctor during World War II. He later recalled how, in 1952, no official could have imagined that more civilians could die in London from environmental causes than from any attack during the war.
The German bombing killed 30,000 Londoners and the deadly fog took 12,000 lives between December 1952 and March 1953. It caused a further 100,000 health problems. But scientists have only recently discovered what was really going on.
While fog was typical for London, it usually did not stay completely close to the ground and people could see at least a few metres ahead. In December 1952, there was high air pressure over the city, which caused a temperature inversion: the air above 300 metres was warmer than the air at ground level. As a result, the warm sooty smoke could not rise up through the heavier cold air and there was no wind to blow it away.
Well, that was clear to them from the start, but they didn’t understand where the sulphuric acid came from. After almost 60 years, they realised that it was caused by a reaction between nitrogen dioxide, which is in the atmosphere, and sulphur dioxide, which is one of the by-products of burning coal.
