London is no stranger to smog, which is why when the Great London Smog descended in December of 1952, nobody quite realized anything unusual was going on. At its largest, it extended 30 kilometers around London, and it killed thousands of people. Read the show notes here.
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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house works dot Com. 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 foggy place, and for many centuries that fog was also very dirty. In the eighteen fifties, Charles Dickens described London as fog up the river where it flows among green airs and meadows, fogged down the river where it rolls, defiled among the tears of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great and dirty city. Uh 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 twentieth century specifically to paint what the smag 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 burning cold to heat their homes in London at least since the Middle Ages, and this dense grimy pea soup frog had been documented all the way back to the sixteen hundreds that it really did get worse. Um A lot of this like filth, was coming from people burning cold to heat their homes, but the Industrial Revolution did 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 wasn't completely clear whether it was the smog or the cold that was killing people. Doctors had suspected it's 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 dwarfed some more recent smog related deaths that had hit Built, Belgium in nineteen thirty and Donora, Pennsylvania in eight 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, the smog was a thirty co pometers 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 ninety two. UH. And at first this smog wasn't particularly unusual as small went during that first day, 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 the night 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 them as well, and a mist 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 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 stayed cold and the smog did not go anywhere. It was also colder than normal, so people had to burn more cold 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, the 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, 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 of sulfur dioxide going into the air were converted into eight hundred tons of sulfuric acid. During the worst of a smog, you could not see the sun or as a saying goes your hand in front of your face or your own feet while you were standing up, so basically settled on and blackened everything. Everything smelled terrible and it was physically difficult to breathe. People wore masks or covered their nose the mouth 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 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 Fuster, 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 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 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 marathon. So they got home at five in the morning and everything, 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. And when the ambulance has failed to run, people who needed to get to the hospital walked there, so uh, you know, not so delightful. Patients arrived with blackened faces and blue lips from their lack of oxygen. Because 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Buses and taxis were able to return to their service early 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. 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 ten 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 it wasn't immediately a parent 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 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 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 you. Twice as many children died as usual 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 week ending December so the week after the smog ended, fifty nine percent of the increases and deaths came directly from respiratory diseases. That number jumped 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 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 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 ninth, more people than normal continued to die for several more months afterward. By March of nineteen fifty three, about thirteen thousand, five hundred more people than usual had died, 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 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, 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 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 forms to just sort of look busy, 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 Acts 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 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 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 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 play us in nineteen sixty two. In nineteen sixty five, 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 to vehicle emissions rather than home heating, and they 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. While there's not a deadly smog blanketing everything, uh, air pollution is still definitely a problem. So I'm glad Stewart asked us to talk about This was 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 the recency. Yeah. So I also have some listener mail that is also about breathing and dying. So stupid Mary. Yes, Mary writes to us UM and she writes about our nineteen eighteen influenza epidemic. Uh, and she was one of a few letters that we got about the distribution of masks. She says, you made the comment that masks are not effective at preventing viral transmission. This is actually untrue, and mask isolation, along with handwashing, is the primary method to prevent fluid transmission and healthcare settings. The problem in nineteen eighteen and now is that infected persons are able to spread influenza. For a couple of days before they have symptoms, and waiting to mask them when they have symptoms is too late. In addition, small children and the elderly can shed virus for a while after their symptoms have improved. I also suspect that anyone in nineteen eighteen with sneezing and a cough who felt well enough to be out in public may have merely had a cold. Um. Another point is the remark that the hemorrhagic pneumonia scene with this illness was all due to secondary infections. That was the thinking for a long time. Recently, the studies done on the virus identified in the Inuit cadaver is suggested this particular viral strain actually was more virulent than most strains and was often the cause of this catastrophic and fatal UH pneumonia. There's a great story of one community's response to the epidemic. I believe it was Silverton, Colorado, which completely isolated the town. Anyone trying to enter the town was arrested and jailed. I believe this was one of the only communicate communities in the United States that did not have a death due to the Spanish flu. Keep up the great work, Mary, thank you, Mary, It's very funny. My sources that I was researching during the podcast unanimously felt that the distribution of masks was not effective, and we have gotten several letters uh after the podcast came out saying the apposite. 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