London's Killer Fog

Here is a little historical perspective for those of us dealing with Beijing's daily smog. The London "killer fog" of 1952 felled 4,000 people over the course of a few days.

* * * * *
The Killer Fog of '52
Thousands Died as Poisonous Air Smothered London

All Things Considered, December 12, 2002 · Fifty years ago this month, a toxic mix of dense fog and sooty black coal smoke killed thousands of Londoners in four days. It remains the deadliest environmental episode in recorded history.

The so-called killer fog is not an especially well-remembered event, even though it changed the way the world looks at pollution. Before the incident, people in cities tended to accept pollution as a part of life. Afterward, more and more, they fought to limit the poisonous side effects of the industrial age.

NPR's John Nielsen went to London to prepare two reports on the killer fog of 1952.

Funeral director Stan Cribb of T. Cribb and Sons has led thousands of funeral trains through the smoggy streets of London. But he says the 1952 event dwarfs all others he has seen. He remembers the moment he saw the first gray wisps:

"You had this swirling," Cribb recalls, "like somebody had set a load of car tires on fire."

Cribb was then a mortician’s assistant, working for Tom Cribb, his elderly uncle. On Friday Dec. 5, they were driving to a wake, with a line of cars full of mourners close behind. Neither man knew a catastrophe was brewing. They didn't know that a mass of stagnant air had just clamped a lid over London, trapping the smoke from millions of residential coal fires at ground level.

Cribb remembers being stunned by the blackness of the gathering fog. After a few minutes he couldn't see the curb from his spot behind the wheel. After a few more minutes, Tom Cribb got out and started walking in front of the hearse, to keep his nephew on the road. He carried a powerful hurricane lantern in one hand, but it was useless.

"It's like you were blind," says Cribb.

Everyone in London walked blind for the next four days. By the time the smog blew off on Tuesday Dec. 9, thousands of Londoners were dead, and thousands more were about to die. Those who had survived no longer spoke of London's romantic pea-soup fog.

As the smoke coming out of London's chimneys mixed with natural fog, the air turned colder. Londoners heaped more coal on their fires, making more smoke. Soon it was so dark some said they couldn't see their feet.

By Sunday, Dec. 7, visibility fell to one foot.

Roads were littered with abandoned cars. Midday concerts were cancelled due to total darkness. Archivists at the British Museum found smog lurking in the book stacks. Cattle in the city's Smithfield market were killed and thrown away before they could be slaughtered and sold -- their lungs were black.

On the second day of the smog, Saturday, Dec. 6, 500 people died in London. When the ambulances stopped running, thousands of gasping Londoners walked through the smog to the city's hospitals.

The lips of the dying were blue. Heavy smoking and chronic exposure to pollution had already weakened the lungs of those who fell ill during the smog. Particulates and acids in the killer brew finished the job by triggering massive inflammations. In essence, the dead had suffocated.

Some 900 more people died on Tuesday, Dec. 9, 1952. Then the wind swept in unexpectedly. The killer fog vanished as quickly as it had arrived.

In his 60 years as a mortician, Stan Cribb has only stopped two funeral trains. Once in the fog of '52, and once when Nazi warplanes bombed the road around him. In the blitz, 30,000 Londoners died. According a recent study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, 12,000 may have been killed by the great smog.

* * * * *

London's Historic "Pea-Soupers"

by David Urbinato
[EPA Journal - Summer 1994]

Americans may think smog was invented in Los Angeles. Not so. In fact, a Londoner coined the term "smog" in 1905 to describe the city's insidious combination of natural fog and coal smoke. By then, the phenomenon was part of London history, and dirty, acrid smoke-filled "pea-soupers" were as familiar to Londoners as Big Ben and Westminster Abby. The smog even invaded the world of Shakespeare, whose witches in Macbeth chant, "fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air."

Smog in London predates Shakespeare by four centuries. Until the 12th century, most Londoners burned wood for fuel. But as the city grew and the forests shrank, wood became scarce and increasingly expensive. Large deposits of "sea-coal" off the northeast coast provided a cheap alternative. Soon, Londoners were burning the soft, bituminous coal to heat their homes and fuel their factories. Sea-coal was plentiful, but it didn't burn efficiently. A lot of its energy was spent making smoke, not heat. Coal smoke drifting through thousands of London chimneys combined with clean natural fog to make smog. If the weather conditions were right, it would last for days.

Early on, no one had the scientific tools to correlate smog with adverse health effects, but complaints about the smoky air as an annoyance date back to at least 1272, when King Edward I, on the urging of important noblemen and clerics, banned the burning of sea-coal. Anyone caught burning or selling the stuff was to be tortured or executed. The first offender caught was summarily put to death. This deterred nobody. Of necessity, citizens continued to burn sea-coal in violation of the law, which required the burning of wood few could afford.

Following Edward, Richard III (1377-1399) and Henry V (1413-1422) also tried to curb the use of sea-coal, as did a number of non-royal crusaders. In 1661, John Evelyn, a noted diarist of the day, wrote his anticoal treatise FUMIFUNGIUM: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, in which he pleaded with the King and Parliament to do something about the burning of coal in London. "And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismall Cloud of SEACOALE?" he wrote, "so universally mixed with the otherwise wholesome and excellent Aer, that her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour..."

Laws and treatises failed to stop citizens from burning coal, however. Too many people burned it and there were no real alternatives. Anthracite coal was much cleaner but too expensive. By the 1800s, more than a million London residents were burning soft-coal, and winter "fogs" became more than a nuisance. An 1873 coal-smoke saturated fog, thicker and more persistent than natural fog, hovered over the city of days. As we now know from subsequent epidemiological findings, the fog caused 268 deaths from bronchitis. Another fog in 1879 lasted from November to March, four long months of sunshineless gloom.

When it wasn't fatal, the fog could at least disrupt daily life. A 1902, bi-weekly report from a fog monitor gives an indication. He wrote: "White and damp in the early morning, it became smoky later, the particles coated with soot being dry and pungent to inhale. There was a complete block of street traffic at some crossings. Omnibuses were abandoned, and several goods trains were taken off."

These conditions were not rare. "It was soon found that light fogs largely attributable to smoke were permanent," the same monitor wrote of the winter of 1901-1902. "From the summit of St. Paul's Cathedral of Westminster Tower for instance the average limit of visibility was only one-half mile."

At the turn of the century, cries to reduce the smoke faced a tough opponent. Coal was fueling the industrial revolution. To be against coal burning was to be against progress. "Progress" won out.

Not until the 1950s, when a four-day fog in 1952 killed roughly 4,000 Londoners was any real reform passed. Parliament enacted the Clean Air Act in 1956, effectively reducing the burning coal. It was the beginning of serious air-pollution reform in England.