SYMHC Classics: Great London Smog

This 2014 episode covers why when the Great London Smog descended in December of 1952, nobody initially realized anything unusual was going on. At its largest, it extended 30 kilometers around London, and it killed thousands of people. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. Since the Great London's mog came up in
our recent episode on Thomas Midley Jr. And his development
of leaded gasoline, we are boringing that out as Today's
Saturday Classic. This episode originally came out on July two.
Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a

(00:24):
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
have a listener request. It is for listeners Stewart. So,
London has a long and established history as a very

(00:47):
foggy place, and for many centuries that fogg was also
very dirty. In the eighteen fifties, Charles Dickens described London
as fog up the river where it flows among green
airs and meadow, was fogged down the river where it rolls,
defiled among the tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions

(01:07):
of a great and dirty city. Like in the eighteen
eighties when Jack the Ripper was, you know, in London,
being a serial killer. That was even more terrifying because
it was all going on in this disgusting smog. Claude Monet,
who uh you know, his his paintings really examined light
and shadow. Went to London at the turn of the

(01:29):
twentieth century specifically to paint what the smog was doing
to the sun. So smog is not a modern Los
Angeles thing, no, So that is why when the Great
London Smog descended in December of nineteen fifty two, nobody
quite realized anything unusual was going on. People had been

(01:52):
burning cold to heat their homes in London at least
since the Middle Ages, and this dense, grimy pea soup
fog had been documented all the way back to the
sixteen hundreds that it really did get worse. Of a
lot of this, like filth, was coming from people burning
cold to heat their homes, but the Industrial Revolution did

(02:13):
make it worse by adding industrial smokestacks to the mix.
There had also been some possibly deadly smog before nineteen
fifty two at various points. This dense smog had rolled
in during the dead of winter, and it seemed like
maybe more people were dying than normal, but it was
also usually during a bitter cold snap, and so it

(02:33):
wasn't completely clear whether it was the smog or the
cold that was killing people. Doctors had suspected since the
Victorian era that smog could be deadly, but they didn't
really have a good way to prove it. But in
the case of the Great London Smog, it was conclusive.
This was an environmental disaster that was worse than anything
that had been documented at that point. It UH. It

(02:56):
dwarfed some more recent smog related deaths that had built
Belgium in nineteen thirty and Donora, Pennsylvania in night and
by the time it was over, there was no real
there was a There were attempts to argue that it
was not the smog's fault, but it was obvious that
it was the smog's fault. UM. And at its largest,

(03:18):
the smog was a thirty kilometers or eighteen miles around
London and before it was gone, it had killed thousands
of people. Yeah. And it all started on Friday, December
five of nineteen fifty two. UH. And at first this
smog wasn't particularly unusual as small went. During that first day,

(03:39):
it was just your standard dry, smoky fog and people
went about their business. Uh. That night, however, the fog
thickened and it took on a distinctly sulfurous smell. So
normally air near the ground is warmer than the air
above it, so hot air like smoke from a chimney
can rise up through the cold air. But on night

(04:00):
of December five, as the ground got colder, the air
near the ground also got colder, and it wound up
cooling off to a lower temperature than the air above it.
That's create that created what's known as a thermal inversion,
so smoke from chimney, chimneys and smoke stacks got trapped
near the ground, and a high pressure area over the
city contributed to this problem as well, and a mist

(04:22):
also formed in that layer of cool air, which was
also a very big problem. As water condensed out of
the air, it collected on the particles of soot, tar,
and sulfur dioxide, basically creating acid fog. Acid fog was
also not really an extraordinary situation in London at this point,
but normally in the morning, the sun would come out

(04:45):
and it would heat up the air in the ground again,
so smoke could start to rise normally and the sun
would evaporate all of this acid mist that was lingering.
But on the morning of December six, the smog was
so thick that the sun could not break through it,
so the air that was near the ground stay cold
and the smog did not go anywhere. It was also
colder than normal, so people had to burn more cold

(05:07):
than usual to heat their homes. So as the smog
wore on, more and more pollution was added to this
already stagnant cloud of hovering acid rain. Every night during
the smog, when the when night fell to fog would
just get thicker and thicker, and at the worst of it,
which was that Sunday, visibility dropped to as little as
a meter or about three ft. According to the Met Office,

(05:31):
Here's what was pumped into the air around London every
day during the smog. One thousand tons of smoke particles,
two thousand tons of carbon dioxide, a hundred and forty
tons of hydrochloric acid, and fourteen tons of fluorine compounds.
On top of that, about three hundred and seventy tons

(05:53):
of sulfur dioxide going into the air were converted into
eight hundred tons of sulfuric acid. During the worst of
the smog, you could not see the sun or as
the saying goes, your hand in front of your face,
or your own feet while you were standing up. Soot
basically settled on and blackened everything. Everything smelled terrible, and

(06:15):
it was physically difficult to breathe. People wore masks or
covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs. This might have
helped a little bit, but not a lot. Invisibility was
so bad that taxi and bus drivers couldn't see to drive,
so transportation along the roads ground to a halt, and
people abandoned their vehicles because they either couldn't see or

(06:37):
couldn't get through the resulting gridlock. This completely overloaded the
London underground, which was spared from the smog by virtue
simply of being underground. The BBC published an account of
Barbara Feuster, who described having gone out to dinner with
her fiance during the smog, and the smog was so
thick that her fiance couldn't see to drive home, and

(07:00):
the headlights of the car just reflected off the smog
and couldn't penetrate through it at all, so they used
the sidelights. She walked ahead of the car the whole
way in the range of the sidelights, while her fiance
leaned his head out the window so he could see her.
They also could not stop because the people behind them
would not be able to see their break lights, so

(07:21):
if they stopped, that would have meant risk and getting
rear ended. And they proceeded in this manner for sixteen miles,
just a very long distance. Tracy and I have both
done some distance running and we know that that is
a very long distance. That's more than off of marathon.
So they got home at five in the morning and everything,

(07:44):
their faces, their clothes, their vehicle completely black with soot.
So this may sound like the extraordinary effort of one
person to get home, but at ambulances and fire trucks
were doing exactly the same thing to get to where
they needed to go. When the ambulance has failed to run,
people who needed to get to the hospital walked there,

(08:05):
so uh, you know, not so delightful. Patients arrived with
blackened faces and blue lips from their lack of oxygen.
Because you remember, the air was unbreathable. Boat traffic on
the Thames ground to a halt, as did air traffic
at Heathrow Airport. Flights were either canceled or diverted to
other airports that were outside of the smog, and this

(08:28):
smog disrupted the train schedules as well, and one ferry
across the English Channel was delayed by fifteen hours. It
had to anchor off the coast of France because visibility
was simply too bad for it to get to England
and Great Britain. Parents were advised to keep their children
home from school, not just because the air was foul,
but because people were literally afraid that the children would

(08:51):
get lost in the smog on their way there. And
because it was almost dark as night outside all the
time and the impassable roads kept police from being able
to respond, crime rates skyrocketed. Most sporting events during this

(09:15):
mog were canceled, including rugby and soccer games. This was
the first time that an event in Wimbley Stadium had
been canceled since the facility had opened in On the
other hand, Oxford and Cambridge were due to have a
cross country running competition competition and for some reason that
went ahead as planned, but because the runners couldn't really

(09:37):
see the field, there would be volunteers stationed to yell
at them which way to go, like come here this way.
I can't imagine what breathing at the rate of a
speed runner in that air quality must have felt like well.
In doing the research, I did not find anything about

(09:58):
like what the medical condition of these runners was when
it got to the end. Oh, sounds horrible. On the
night of the eighth, a theater in London had to
cancel the remainder of its performance of the opera La
Traviata after act one because the building had filled with smog.
Archivis also we're finding smog in the stacks at the

(10:18):
British Museum, So this sounds pretty horrifying to me. And
it went on like this for days until the wind
finally came to the rescue and it blew the fog
down the Thames and out to the North Sea on
Tuesday the ninth. It does indeed sound like a sci
fi film in many regards. I'm sure Vin Diesel will
star in the story of the smog. Uh busses and

(10:41):
taxis were able to return to their service fairly quickly
after the wind blew this stuff away, but rail delays
did persist for a bit so apart from the inconvenience,
a lot of people died during this mog. A normal
death toll during this period of time in London would
have been one thousand, eight hundred fifty two people, but
during the smog, four thousand, seven hundred and three people died.

(11:06):
The death rate in the East End, which was home
to a lot of factories as well as being a
very poor and overcrowded part of town, was nine times
higher than normal. Most of the people who died between
December five and December t were people who already had
some kind of problem with their lungs or their ability
to breathe. The majority was elderly, which was another reason

(11:27):
it wasn't immediately apparent that something unusual was really happening. Uh,
and often repeated story is that because so many of
the people who died were already sick, nobody really realized
that the number of people dying was actually higher than
normal until the supplies of coffins and flowers started to
run low because of all of the um funeral services

(11:48):
that they had to have. I found multiple places citing
the story, but I couldn't find the original source of it.
But that's too crazy to leave out. Yeah, so people
were basically breathing acid, So, especially for people who already
had bronchitis or asthma or some of their condition, they're

(12:08):
already irritated, lungs would just get more and more irritated,
and they would produce more and more mucus and an
effort of protecting themselves, which this amount of mucus just
made it harder to breathe. People wound up choking on
the mucus that their bodies were producing, or they died
of heart failure as their bodies struggled to support their
efforts to breathe. Twice as many children died as usual

(12:32):
for that period of time, and three times as many
adults between the ages of forty five and sixty four.
Babies were particularly hard hit as well, since the lungs
of infants are not as fully developed as older children.
According to the General Register Office, during the weekending December
so the week after the smog ended, fifty nine percent

(12:56):
of the increases and deaths came directly from respiratory diseases.
That number jumps to seventy six percent the following week
when the smog had cleared, but its effects on people's
respiratory systems lingered, and it's probably no surprise that the
smog also killed animals. The annual Smithfield Cattle Show was

(13:16):
going on in West London, and according to news reports,
a dozen prize cattle died. Some of these had to
be slaughtered because they were beyond help. Many other animals
needed serious veterinary attention. Interestingly, the animals sleeping and dirty
bedding largely survived, and the theories that the ammonia in
their betting neutralized the acid in the air. So the

(13:38):
This smog had a lot of effects for people in
London and for life in London afterwards. Even though the
worst of the fog moved out on the wind on
December nine, more people than normal continued to die for
several more months afterward. By March of nineteen fifty three,
about thirteen thousand, five hundred more pole than usual had died,

(14:02):
and it wasn't until three weeks after the smog had cleared,
when the registrar published the death tolls that anybody knew
really how bad it had been. People compared this spike
and death to a cholera epidemic that had struck nearly
a hundred years earlier, and they also compared it to
the nineteen eighteen flu, which we've talked about before. Even

(14:29):
when it was conclusively shown that the smog had definitely
killed people, and killed lots of people. A number of
politicians acted like smog was just an unchangeable fact of
life in London. Legislation for cleaner air was decried as
being a move of over regulation and basically a lot
of worrying over nothing. In the words of Harold McMillan,

(14:51):
who was then the Minister of Housing, quote today everybody
expects the government to solve every problem. It is a
symptom of the welfare state. For some reason or another,
smog has captured the imagination of the press and people.
I would suggest we form a committee. We cannot do
very much, but we can seem to be very busy,
and that is half the battle nowadays. There were also

(15:13):
fears that the city, which was still facing rationing and
debt in the wake of World War two, could not
afford for people to switch to a cleaner fuel, and
for a while the government even tried to pin this
spike in deaths on the flu instead of on air quality. However,
this investigative committee, originally formed to just sort of look busy,

(15:35):
found that there really was an actual problem that needed
to be addressed, and consequently Parliament passed the Clean Air
Act in nineteen fifty six. The Clean Air Act included
provisions for setting up smoke free zones and to provide
money to homeowners to convert their heat source to something
cleaner than coal. It also prohibited furnaces from putting out

(15:56):
dark smoke. This didn't fix things overnight, and there was
at least one other deadly smog in London. There was
one that killed almost a thousand people in January of
nineteen fifty six, and then another year later another similar
event occurred. Some of this was because it just takes
time to change how an entire city is heating itself

(16:18):
in the winter. New power stations and delivery systems had
to be built to accommodate the increased demand as people
converted their homes to use different sources of heat. The
air did get better, though, and the last London smog
that you know was this monumental but not so deadly,
took place in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty five,

(16:40):
natural gas became widely available in London and many households
converted to its use. There is still pollution in London,
you know, just like most industrialized places. Um The smog
in London now more has to do with summer than
with winter, because the pollutants of the air are mostly
tied of vehicle emissions rather than home heating, and they

(17:02):
react with heat and sunlight. And according to the World
Health Organization, every year around the world, seven million deaths,
which breaks down to about one in eight are tied
to exposure to air pollution pollution, So while there's not
a deadly smog blanketing everything, air pollution is still definitely

(17:24):
a problem. So I'm glad Stewart asked us to talk
about this. Was that something that I personally was very
familiar with, although people who lived in London at the
time like, that's definitely a story that they remember. Well,
I've seen it mentioned, but I had never really investigated
it and didn't realize the breadth of it. Yeah, and

(17:44):
the recency. Yeah, pay so much for joining us on
this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
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(18:09):
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(18:31):
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