Speaker 1: Happy Saturday. Since the Great London's mog came up in
Speaker 1: our recent episode on Thomas Midley Jr. And his development
Speaker 1: of leaded gasoline, we are boringing that out as Today's
Speaker 1: Saturday Classic. This episode originally came out on July two.
Speaker 1: Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. Today we
Speaker 1: have a listener request. It is for listeners Stewart. So,
Speaker 1: London has a long and established history as a very
Speaker 1: foggy place, and for many centuries that fogg was also
Speaker 1: very dirty. In the eighteen fifties, Charles Dickens described London
Speaker 1: as fog up the river where it flows among green
Speaker 1: airs and meadow, was fogged down the river where it rolls,
Speaker 1: defiled among the tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions
Speaker 1: of a great and dirty city. Like in the eighteen
Speaker 1: eighties when Jack the Ripper was, you know, in London,
Speaker 1: being a serial killer. That was even more terrifying because
Speaker 1: it was all going on in this disgusting smog. Claude Monet,
Speaker 1: who uh you know, his his paintings really examined light
Speaker 1: and shadow. Went to London at the turn of the
Speaker 1: twentieth century specifically to paint what the smog was doing
Speaker 1: to the sun. So smog is not a modern Los
Speaker 1: Angeles thing, no, So that is why when the Great
Speaker 1: London Smog descended in December of nineteen fifty two, nobody
Speaker 1: quite realized anything unusual was going on. People had been
Speaker 1: burning cold to heat their homes in London at least
Speaker 1: since the Middle Ages, and this dense, grimy pea soup
Speaker 1: fog had been documented all the way back to the
Speaker 1: sixteen hundreds that it really did get worse. Of a
Speaker 1: lot of this, like filth, was coming from people burning
Speaker 1: cold to heat their homes, but the Industrial Revolution did
Speaker 1: make it worse by adding industrial smokestacks to the mix.
Speaker 1: There had also been some possibly deadly smog before nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two at various points. This dense smog had rolled
Speaker 1: in during the dead of winter, and it seemed like
Speaker 1: maybe more people were dying than normal, but it was
Speaker 1: also usually during a bitter cold snap, and so it
Speaker 1: wasn't completely clear whether it was the smog or the
Speaker 1: cold that was killing people. Doctors had suspected since the
Speaker 1: Victorian era that smog could be deadly, but they didn't
Speaker 1: really have a good way to prove it. But in
Speaker 1: the case of the Great London Smog, it was conclusive.
Speaker 1: This was an environmental disaster that was worse than anything
Speaker 1: that had been documented at that point. It UH. It
Speaker 1: dwarfed some more recent smog related deaths that had built
Speaker 1: Belgium in nineteen thirty and Donora, Pennsylvania in night and
Speaker 1: by the time it was over, there was no real
Speaker 1: there was a There were attempts to argue that it
Speaker 1: was not the smog's fault, but it was obvious that
Speaker 1: it was the smog's fault. UM. And at its largest,
Speaker 1: the smog was a thirty kilometers or eighteen miles around
Speaker 1: London and before it was gone, it had killed thousands
Speaker 1: of people. Yeah. And it all started on Friday, December
Speaker 1: five of nineteen fifty two. UH. And at first this
Speaker 1: smog wasn't particularly unusual as small went. During that first day,
Speaker 1: it was just your standard dry, smoky fog and people
Speaker 1: went about their business. Uh. That night, however, the fog
Speaker 1: thickened and it took on a distinctly sulfurous smell. So
Speaker 1: normally air near the ground is warmer than the air
Speaker 1: above it, so hot air like smoke from a chimney
Speaker 1: can rise up through the cold air. But on night
Speaker 1: of December five, as the ground got colder, the air
Speaker 1: near the ground also got colder, and it wound up
Speaker 1: cooling off to a lower temperature than the air above it.
Speaker 1: That's create that created what's known as a thermal inversion,
Speaker 1: so smoke from chimney, chimneys and smoke stacks got trapped
Speaker 1: near the ground, and a high pressure area over the
Speaker 1: city contributed to this problem as well, and a mist
Speaker 1: also formed in that layer of cool air, which was
Speaker 1: also a very big problem. As water condensed out of
Speaker 1: the air, it collected on the particles of soot, tar,
Speaker 1: and sulfur dioxide, basically creating acid fog. Acid fog was
Speaker 1: also not really an extraordinary situation in London at this point,
Speaker 1: but normally in the morning, the sun would come out
Speaker 1: and it would heat up the air in the ground again,
Speaker 1: so smoke could start to rise normally and the sun
Speaker 1: would evaporate all of this acid mist that was lingering.
Speaker 1: But on the morning of December six, the smog was
Speaker 1: so thick that the sun could not break through it,
Speaker 1: so the air that was near the ground stay cold
Speaker 1: and the smog did not go anywhere. It was also
Speaker 1: colder than normal, so people had to burn more cold
Speaker 1: than usual to heat their homes. So as the smog
Speaker 1: wore on, more and more pollution was added to this
Speaker 1: already stagnant cloud of hovering acid rain. Every night during
Speaker 1: the smog, when the when night fell to fog would
Speaker 1: just get thicker and thicker, and at the worst of it,
Speaker 1: which was that Sunday, visibility dropped to as little as
Speaker 1: a meter or about three ft. According to the Met Office,
Speaker 1: Here's what was pumped into the air around London every
Speaker 1: day during the smog. One thousand tons of smoke particles,
Speaker 1: two thousand tons of carbon dioxide, a hundred and forty
Speaker 1: tons of hydrochloric acid, and fourteen tons of fluorine compounds.
Speaker 1: On top of that, about three hundred and seventy tons
Speaker 1: of sulfur dioxide going into the air were converted into
Speaker 1: eight hundred tons of sulfuric acid. During the worst of
Speaker 1: the smog, you could not see the sun or as
Speaker 1: the saying goes, your hand in front of your face,
Speaker 1: or your own feet while you were standing up. Soot
Speaker 1: basically settled on and blackened everything. Everything smelled terrible, and
Speaker 1: it was physically difficult to breathe. People wore masks or
Speaker 1: covered their noses and mouths with handkerchiefs. This might have
Speaker 1: helped a little bit, but not a lot. Invisibility was
Speaker 1: so bad that taxi and bus drivers couldn't see to drive,
Speaker 1: so transportation along the roads ground to a halt, and
Speaker 1: people abandoned their vehicles because they either couldn't see or
Speaker 1: couldn't get through the resulting gridlock. This completely overloaded the
Speaker 1: London underground, which was spared from the smog by virtue
Speaker 1: simply of being underground. The BBC published an account of
Speaker 1: Barbara Feuster, who described having gone out to dinner with
Speaker 1: her fiance during the smog, and the smog was so
Speaker 1: thick that her fiance couldn't see to drive home, and
Speaker 1: the headlights of the car just reflected off the smog
Speaker 1: and couldn't penetrate through it at all, so they used
Speaker 1: the sidelights. She walked ahead of the car the whole
Speaker 1: way in the range of the sidelights, while her fiance
Speaker 1: leaned his head out the window so he could see her.
Speaker 1: They also could not stop because the people behind them
Speaker 1: would not be able to see their break lights, so
Speaker 1: if they stopped, that would have meant risk and getting
Speaker 1: rear ended. And they proceeded in this manner for sixteen miles,
Speaker 1: just a very long distance. Tracy and I have both
Speaker 1: done some distance running and we know that that is
Speaker 1: a very long distance. That's more than off of marathon.
Speaker 1: So they got home at five in the morning and everything,
Speaker 1: their faces, their clothes, their vehicle completely black with soot.
Speaker 1: So this may sound like the extraordinary effort of one
Speaker 1: person to get home, but at ambulances and fire trucks
Speaker 1: were doing exactly the same thing to get to where
Speaker 1: they needed to go. When the ambulance has failed to run,
Speaker 1: people who needed to get to the hospital walked there,
Speaker 1: so uh, you know, not so delightful. Patients arrived with
Speaker 1: blackened faces and blue lips from their lack of oxygen.
Speaker 1: Because you remember, the air was unbreathable. Boat traffic on
Speaker 1: the Thames ground to a halt, as did air traffic
Speaker 1: at Heathrow Airport. Flights were either canceled or diverted to
Speaker 1: other airports that were outside of the smog, and this
Speaker 1: smog disrupted the train schedules as well, and one ferry
Speaker 1: across the English Channel was delayed by fifteen hours. It
Speaker 1: had to anchor off the coast of France because visibility
Speaker 1: was simply too bad for it to get to England
Speaker 1: and Great Britain. Parents were advised to keep their children
Speaker 1: home from school, not just because the air was foul,
Speaker 1: but because people were literally afraid that the children would
Speaker 1: get lost in the smog on their way there. And
Speaker 1: because it was almost dark as night outside all the
Speaker 1: time and the impassable roads kept police from being able
Speaker 1: to respond, crime rates skyrocketed. Most sporting events during this
Speaker 1: mog were canceled, including rugby and soccer games. This was
Speaker 1: the first time that an event in Wimbley Stadium had
Speaker 1: been canceled since the facility had opened in On the
Speaker 1: other hand, Oxford and Cambridge were due to have a
Speaker 1: cross country running competition competition and for some reason that
Speaker 1: went ahead as planned, but because the runners couldn't really
Speaker 1: see the field, there would be volunteers stationed to yell
Speaker 1: at them which way to go, like come here this way.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine what breathing at the rate of a
Speaker 1: speed runner in that air quality must have felt like well.
Speaker 1: In doing the research, I did not find anything about
Speaker 1: like what the medical condition of these runners was when
Speaker 1: it got to the end. Oh, sounds horrible. On the
Speaker 1: night of the eighth, a theater in London had to
Speaker 1: cancel the remainder of its performance of the opera La
Speaker 1: Traviata after act one because the building had filled with smog.
Speaker 1: Archivis also we're finding smog in the stacks at the
Speaker 1: British Museum, So this sounds pretty horrifying to me. And
Speaker 1: it went on like this for days until the wind
Speaker 1: finally came to the rescue and it blew the fog
Speaker 1: down the Thames and out to the North Sea on
Speaker 1: Tuesday the ninth. It does indeed sound like a sci
Speaker 1: fi film in many regards. I'm sure Vin Diesel will
Speaker 1: star in the story of the smog. Uh busses and
Speaker 1: taxis were able to return to their service fairly quickly
Speaker 1: after the wind blew this stuff away, but rail delays
Speaker 1: did persist for a bit so apart from the inconvenience,
Speaker 1: a lot of people died during this mog. A normal
Speaker 1: death toll during this period of time in London would
Speaker 1: have been one thousand, eight hundred fifty two people, but
Speaker 1: during the smog, four thousand, seven hundred and three people died.
Speaker 1: The death rate in the East End, which was home
Speaker 1: to a lot of factories as well as being a
Speaker 1: very poor and overcrowded part of town, was nine times
Speaker 1: higher than normal. Most of the people who died between
Speaker 1: December five and December t were people who already had
Speaker 1: some kind of problem with their lungs or their ability
Speaker 1: to breathe. The majority was elderly, which was another reason
Speaker 1: it wasn't immediately apparent that something unusual was really happening. Uh,
Speaker 1: and often repeated story is that because so many of
Speaker 1: the people who died were already sick, nobody really realized
Speaker 1: that the number of people dying was actually higher than
Speaker 1: normal until the supplies of coffins and flowers started to
Speaker 1: run low because of all of the um funeral services
Speaker 1: that they had to have. I found multiple places citing
Speaker 1: the story, but I couldn't find the original source of it.
Speaker 1: But that's too crazy to leave out. Yeah, so people
Speaker 1: were basically breathing acid, So, especially for people who already
Speaker 1: had bronchitis or asthma or some of their condition, they're
Speaker 1: already irritated, lungs would just get more and more irritated,
Speaker 1: and they would produce more and more mucus and an
Speaker 1: effort of protecting themselves, which this amount of mucus just
Speaker 1: made it harder to breathe. People wound up choking on
Speaker 1: the mucus that their bodies were producing, or they died
Speaker 1: of heart failure as their bodies struggled to support their
Speaker 1: efforts to breathe. Twice as many children died as usual
Speaker 1: for that period of time, and three times as many
Speaker 1: adults between the ages of forty five and sixty four.
Speaker 1: Babies were particularly hard hit as well, since the lungs
Speaker 1: of infants are not as fully developed as older children.
Speaker 1: According to the General Register Office, during the weekending December
Speaker 1: so the week after the smog ended, fifty nine percent
Speaker 1: of the increases and deaths came directly from respiratory diseases.
Speaker 1: That number jumps to seventy six percent the following week
Speaker 1: when the smog had cleared, but its effects on people's
Speaker 1: respiratory systems lingered, and it's probably no surprise that the
Speaker 1: smog also killed animals. The annual Smithfield Cattle Show was
Speaker 1: going on in West London, and according to news reports,
Speaker 1: a dozen prize cattle died. Some of these had to
Speaker 1: be slaughtered because they were beyond help. Many other animals
Speaker 1: needed serious veterinary attention. Interestingly, the animals sleeping and dirty
Speaker 1: bedding largely survived, and the theories that the ammonia in
Speaker 1: their betting neutralized the acid in the air. So the
Speaker 1: This smog had a lot of effects for people in
Speaker 1: London and for life in London afterwards. Even though the
Speaker 1: worst of the fog moved out on the wind on
Speaker 1: December nine, more people than normal continued to die for
Speaker 1: several more months afterward. By March of nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: about thirteen thousand, five hundred more pole than usual had died,
Speaker 1: and it wasn't until three weeks after the smog had cleared,
Speaker 1: when the registrar published the death tolls that anybody knew
Speaker 1: really how bad it had been. People compared this spike
Speaker 1: and death to a cholera epidemic that had struck nearly
Speaker 1: a hundred years earlier, and they also compared it to
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighteen flu, which we've talked about before. Even
Speaker 1: when it was conclusively shown that the smog had definitely
Speaker 1: killed people, and killed lots of people. A number of
Speaker 1: politicians acted like smog was just an unchangeable fact of
Speaker 1: life in London. Legislation for cleaner air was decried as
Speaker 1: being a move of over regulation and basically a lot
Speaker 1: of worrying over nothing. In the words of Harold McMillan,
Speaker 1: who was then the Minister of Housing, quote today everybody
Speaker 1: expects the government to solve every problem. It is a
Speaker 1: symptom of the welfare state. For some reason or another,
Speaker 1: smog has captured the imagination of the press and people.
Speaker 1: I would suggest we form a committee. We cannot do
Speaker 1: very much, but we can seem to be very busy,
Speaker 1: and that is half the battle nowadays. There were also
Speaker 1: fears that the city, which was still facing rationing and
Speaker 1: debt in the wake of World War two, could not
Speaker 1: afford for people to switch to a cleaner fuel, and
Speaker 1: for a while the government even tried to pin this
Speaker 1: spike in deaths on the flu instead of on air quality. However,
Speaker 1: this investigative committee, originally formed to just sort of look busy,
Speaker 1: found that there really was an actual problem that needed
Speaker 1: to be addressed, and consequently Parliament passed the Clean Air
Speaker 1: Act in nineteen fifty six. The Clean Air Act included
Speaker 1: provisions for setting up smoke free zones and to provide
Speaker 1: money to homeowners to convert their heat source to something
Speaker 1: cleaner than coal. It also prohibited furnaces from putting out
Speaker 1: dark smoke. This didn't fix things overnight, and there was
Speaker 1: at least one other deadly smog in London. There was
Speaker 1: one that killed almost a thousand people in January of
Speaker 1: nineteen fifty six, and then another year later another similar
Speaker 1: event occurred. Some of this was because it just takes
Speaker 1: time to change how an entire city is heating itself
Speaker 1: in the winter. New power stations and delivery systems had
Speaker 1: to be built to accommodate the increased demand as people
Speaker 1: converted their homes to use different sources of heat. The
Speaker 1: air did get better, though, and the last London smog
Speaker 1: that you know was this monumental but not so deadly,
Speaker 1: took place in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 1: natural gas became widely available in London and many households
Speaker 1: converted to its use. There is still pollution in London,
Speaker 1: you know, just like most industrialized places. Um The smog
Speaker 1: in London now more has to do with summer than
Speaker 1: with winter, because the pollutants of the air are mostly
Speaker 1: tied of vehicle emissions rather than home heating, and they
Speaker 1: react with heat and sunlight. And according to the World
Speaker 1: Health Organization, every year around the world, seven million deaths,
Speaker 1: which breaks down to about one in eight are tied
Speaker 1: to exposure to air pollution pollution, So while there's not
Speaker 1: a deadly smog blanketing everything, air pollution is still definitely
Speaker 1: a problem. So I'm glad Stewart asked us to talk
Speaker 1: about this. Was that something that I personally was very
Speaker 1: familiar with, although people who lived in London at the
Speaker 1: time like, that's definitely a story that they remember. Well,
Speaker 1: I've seen it mentioned, but I had never really investigated
Speaker 1: it and didn't realize the breadth of it. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: the recency. Yeah, pay so much for joining us on
Speaker 1: this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive,
Speaker 1: if you heard an email address or a Facebook U
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