How the Great Smog choked London 60 years ago this week

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception


A dense, green-yellow fog choked the streets. Cars edged forwards with passengers sitting on the bonnets shouting instructions. From behind the wheel, drivers could not even see as far as their own headlights. Mothers took their children to school with handkerchiefs and scarves wrapped over their faces. With their hands tightly clasped, they shuffled along in ‘crocodiles’.
One pedestrian remembers bumping into a motorcyclist who asked: ‘Which way to the Tube station?’

The Great Smog - A police officer outside the Bank of England attempts to keep traffic moving through the Great Smog of London of 1952

Iconic landmark: A tugboat docked on the Thames near Tower Bridge during heavy smog in December 1952

The pedestrian could only reply: ‘Carry on 20 yards, and you’ll go straight down the steps — you’re on the pavement!’
Such were the scenes during the Great Smog of London, which began 60 years ago today.

 

A thick, greasy, grimy fog descended on the city and killed 12,000 people in four days. A blanket of soot hung over the streets so thickly that visibility was reduced to a couple of yards or less.
It was a pea-souper, a ‘London Particular’ — and it was the worst in history.
The city had been paralysed by swirling fogs since the Napoleonic era, 150 years earlier. By the time Dickens came to write about them, he imagined dinosaurs stalking out of the mists. Readers of Sherlock Holmes cannot imagine the great detective without seeing him striding up Baker Street shrouded in eerie tendrils of fog.

A poor sight: Visibility was reduced to a couple of yards with drivers not even being able to see as far as their own car headlights

Snug in the smog: Two-year-old Jill Hamlin, from Oxted, is seen at a mask fitting at Bourne And Hollingsworth store

Read all about it: This newspaper billboard can only just be made out through the fog that's making the headlines

The Great Smog was not romantic. It was murderous. People and animals suffocated in appalling numbers, making it 20th-century Britain’s worst peace-time catastrophe.
Londoners again had to summon the Blitz spirit which had sustained them through the war.
Professor Roy Parker, now a social historian, was living with his parents in Lewisham, South-East London in 1952. His father, a World War I veteran who had been gassed in the trenches, was intent on cycling to work even though the choking conditions caused severe pain in his damaged lungs. ‘He was 56 and in great distress, gasping for breath, struggling.’ But still he cycled on.
Trams and buses could not run. One driver who tried said ‘fat flakes of soot stuck to the greasy windscreen like paint’ and could not be wiped off. In order to see just a couple of yards ahead, to where his conductor was walking with a torch to light the way, he had to lean out of the window.

Deadly fog: A young couple pictured wearing their home-made smog masks on their way to work in London during the Great Smog

Feed the birds: Trafalgar Square, pictured on December 5, 1952, was still surrounded by pigeons as well as smog

In the East End, people could not see their own feet. Yet dock workers reported that, in crane cabins 50ft above the ground, the skies were quite clear. Below them, the smog lay like a dark sea.
It was a particularly cold December and the damp, freezing air soaked up the pollution and held it like a blanket over the city.

Lighting up the night: A police officer using flames at Marble Arch to direct the traffic in London

A band of high pressure then settled over London holding the pollution in place, almost like a layer of oil over water.
As homes stoked up their fires, the conditions only became worse. Domestic fireplaces were the biggest culprits.
Households mostly burned the cheapest coal, which was heavy with dust. In the days before central heating, a fire was the only way to heat the rooms, and was often used to boil water and even cook.
But the smog was also the result of a lethal climate cocktail produced by coal-fired factories, diesel fumes from lorries and buses, and clouds of pollution drifting across the Channel from continental industrial centres.
The scale of the pollution was incredible. Every day, 1,000 tonnes of smoke belched from London’s chimneys, emitting 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid and 14 tonnes of fluorine compounds.
Even more deadly, 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid was formed as sulphur dioxide coming from chimneys mixed with moisture in the air.
The acid burned the back of the throat, bringing on choking fits. It caused inflammation of the lungs, especially in children, the old and people with bronchial illness.
Thousands died, suffocating from within. As the death toll mounted, undertakers ran out of coffins.
More than 100,000 people suffered such health problems as bronchitis and pneumonia.
Some estimates suggest a further 8,000 may have died in the weeks and months after it.
Sir Donald Acheson, the government’s former chief medical officer, recalled as a young doctor feeling his way through deserted streets: ‘I had to creep along the walls of the buildings, to the next corner, to read the name of the street.
'I remember an eerie silence, as there was little or no traffic. Visibility was less than three metres, and it was bitterly cold.’
At the Middlesex Hospital, off Tottenham Court Road, where he was resident medical officer, Acheson saw an unstoppable tide of admissions.
‘Within a few days, patients with acute respiratory distress spilled over into all wards — they were in the surgical wards, and even in the obstetric wards, and as the majority were men, room had to be found in some of the women’s wards. The supply of oxygen was stretched to the limit.’

Carrying on: Commuters pictured wearing extra layers to work to protect them from the dust and dirt on their way to work as London entered its second day of dense fog in 1952

Deadly fog: Pedestrians carefully make their way through the smog, as one lady visiting the capital shows she is prepared, bringing her own mask

Dark as night: Morning traffic at Blackfriars, London, almost at a standstill because of the blanket smog

INSPIRATION FOR BEST-SELLER

The smog forms the background to recently-released C.J. Sansom spy thriller Dominion, which sees an alternative version of 1950s London.
In the book, Winston Churchill surrenders to the Nazis in 1940, leaving the British to live under strict authoritarian rules, with the Press restrained and Jews repressed.
Churchill leads a resistance organisation who use the cover of the great smog to evade capture from the Gestapo.

Nothing could keep the smog out and as it oozed indoors, it left a film of black over every surface.
It even closed cinemas — the black pall made it impossible to see the screens.
At Sadler’s Wells theatre, the opera La Traviata was halted because of the noise of choking as smog spread through the auditorium.
Dog racing at White City was abandoned because the greyhounds couldn’t see the hare.
Ambulances, of course, had to stay on the roads whatever the conditions. One crewman would drive the vehicle, while another walked ahead, warning people out of the way.
Some trains were kept in operation, but, in near-total darkness, ingenious measures were needed to avoid accidents.
Railway engineers put small packets of explosive on the lines, to be set off like pop-gun caps by the wheels as trains inched along the tracks — the noise warned workers that a train was approaching.
In the days that followed, the Mail reported: ‘The Great Smog Grows Worse: Thousands in Fog Queues. London Paralysed. No Buses, No Taxis, No Coaches, No Planes.’
Richard Scorer, a professor at Imperial College, recalled cycling home through the fog, following the kerb at a snail’s pace.

Completely covered: Thick fog blacked out large areas of London, including Brixton pictured above, and the Home Counties while bringing road and rail traffic to a crawl

Silent killer: The smog killed 12,000 in four days and an estimated further 8,000 died from ill health caused by the fog in the months after it

‘I became very dirty,’ he told an inquiry into the Great Smog, 50 years later. ‘My eyebrows were covered with what you might call mud; my hair was filthy; and my hands had collected a lot of muck. It was as if I’d fallen into a puddle of mud.’
And it wasn’t just men, women and children. At the annual Smithfield livestock show in Earl’s Court, cattle gasped for air and collapsed. More than a dozen had to be slaughtered to put them out of their suffering.
After five days, the weather changed. A breeze cleared the air, leaving an oily residue caked on every building and tree. It was as if the city had been sprayed black. Rain came and washed the grime into the gutters, producing an evil-smelling trickle of sooty gunge.

Dirty: Residents walking around London during the height of the smog, such as to a local market pictured above, reported being left filthy from simply walking through the streets

'A real pea souper': Bus conductors were forced to walk ahead of their buses, which were hardly visible from just a few feet away, to guide the drivers through the streets of London with flaming torches during the smog

Fog lights: Traffic moves slowly, with lights aglow, as smog descends over London during daytime hours

The government was keen to play down the scale of the disaster and the ministry of health released figures purporting to show the death toll was much lower than it really was.
In the Commons, the minister for housing, Harold Macmillan, future Tory prime minister, tried to blame the weather for the disaster, and emphasised that pollution was a necessary evil.
When the Opposition benches attacked the government for not doing more to cut down on pollution, he replied: ‘We do what we can, but of course, the honourable gentleman must realise the enormous number of broad economic considerations which have to be taken into account and which it would be foolish altogether to disregard.’
There were smogs again, but never so bad. A campaign by backbench MPs forced the introduction of the Clean Air Act in 1956. It enforced the use of smokeless fuels in homes, and ordered the relocation of power stations further from cities.
London would never again see the return of a fog as choking, blinding and terrifying as the Great Smog which suffocated the capital city 60 years ago.

A beacon of light: Piccadilly Square can hardly be seen and is only partially lit by the light from a fruit seller's stall in this picture from 1952 as London was plunged into darkness from the fog

Glow 'ello 'ello: In these Daily Mail photographs, PC Reg Nicol is seen helping pedestrians find their way through the fog (left) and smoke pours from chimneys, into the fog that 'caught' it and turned it into smog, seen from the top of Westminster Cathedral (right)

One culprit: Much of the pollution was put down to household fires using cheap coal heavy with dust