London's killer fogs inspired artists and provided novelists with the perfect emblem of a sinful city. Fifty years after the 1952 smog, Lilian Pizzichini looks back at our filthy past
In December 1952, Lillian Maud Kingham, my asthmatic maternal grandmother, was confined to her home for fear of the killer fog that had invaded London. She had heard the news that undertakers were running out of caskets, and hospitals were filled with those whose lungs could not cope with the toxic smoke. In one week alone, 4,703 people died as a direct result of fog.
As murderous and malevolent as Jack the Ripper, Bill Sykes or the Kray twins, the thick, yellow pall had descended on London with no warning and with lethal effect. It clung to its victims' faces like a wet cloth. To children, it was an exciting mystery. When Lillian's daughter Greta ventured outside, she had to grope her way down the street as though she were blind. Visibility was nil, but even her footsteps lost their sound in a 50-foot mantle of noxious gases. It was a strange feeling to be utterly alone in the world's biggest city; its harsh edges were blurred and its echoes weirdly muffled. But Greta enjoyed the rare sense of peace that prevailed. Meanwhile, her mother was still struggling to find her breath; the fog was seeping through cracks and window panes. It smeared every surface with a film of sooty smut and its tendrils coiled around her, inflaming the lining of her raw and sensitive throat.
It began on Thursday 4 December. A high-pressure system had been sweeping over Britain all day, bringing dry air, cold temperatures and brisk winds. Londoners burned large quantities of coal in their open grates, as they had for centuries. But this was cheap, smoky stuff. All the good coal was being exported by the government, which was close to bankruptcy. Smoke continued to billow from chimneys during the night, but then the winds stopped and the Thames river basin suffered a severe temperature inversion. A warm, humid layer of air pressed down on the cold air nearer the ground. Pollution was trapped, too; smoke particles and gases emitted from factories throughout central London, as well as diesel from the buses that had recently replaced electric trams. A vast cloud lowering over the city could be seen from the heights of Hampstead Heath. From a ghastly shade of yellow, it turned amber, then green, chocolate-brown and finally black. It was the kind of sulphurous spectacle that had inspired artists such as Turner, Whistler and Monet.
Turner revelled in fog. Its opacity and shadows mirrored the subtle interplay of colours he found in the sea. It was said that when he lived in a cellar in London, he would fling open the shutters once a week, "and then, what incandescence! What dazzlement! What jewels!" For fire in the sky, he had coal to thank. Londoners had run out of trees to burn in the 17th century. With the burning of coal, the white eddies of fog for which the city was famous became a livid orange smog. In 1661, in his Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Air and the Smoke of London Dissipated, John Evelyn wrote of the city's "hellish and dismal cloud of sea-coal". The city was fast becoming hell on earth - and its people corrupted.
But Turner found beauty in the sky's filth. Hazlitt said of his misty fogscapes: "The artist delights to go back to the first chaos of the world . . . All is without forms and void; they are pictures of nothing, and very like." Anything can happen in shape-shifting fog; gruesome imaginings and sumptuous visions take shape because people and architecture lose their definition. Whereas Turner was inspired by its aesthetics, writers responded to the fear surrounding it. Eighteenth-century London was notorious for its unsuspecting travellers who lost their way and their purse (or worse) in the fog. London criminals adapted to the fog's challenge, taking advantage of the cover it provided. Without fog, Jack the Ripper getting away with murder in a mist as brown as the streets he prowled would surely have lost some of its resonance.
But what really got the writers going was "smog" (a portmanteau word meaning "fog intensified by smoke"), coined at roughly the same time as "London particular" or "pea-souper". These early 19th-century terms describe the meteorological phenomenon unique to the capital at the time. The industrial revolution saw it spread to other urban sprawls, heralding the unhealthy plight of the city-dweller. Novelists quickly picked up on the symbolism inherent in the smog that infected the atmosphere. Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll gave birth to Mr Hyde in its muddy whorls; Sherlock Holmes chased villains through the thick of it. Fog had become the perfect emblem for a sinful city; implacable and insidious, even its acrid smell contained sickness.
It oozed into almost every Victorian novel. In the opening paragraphs of Bleak House, Charles Dickens describes an implacably foggy November night: as a "soft black drizzle" settles on Holborn Hill, he conjures up a ghostly megalosaurus emerging from the mud and "waddling like an elephantine lizard" toward the reader. Inhuman and seemingly emanating from the marshy swamps of the underworld, this ghostly manifestation was the stuff of nightmares. Gothic novels are suffused with its insubstantial properties and the subterranean desires it invokes.
So fog had long been laying waste to London's residents. But during the day of 6 December 1952, huge quantities of impurities were being pumped into the layer of air confined in the Thames basin: 1,000 tonnes of smoke particles, 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid and 14 tonnes of fluorine compounds. Most dangerously, 370 tonnes of sulphur dioxide were being converted into 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid. It has been calculated that 12,000 Londoners lost their lives to the killer fog, four times the official estimates.
Subsequent legislation decreed that residents and factory-owners convert to smokeless fuels. Since this took some time to come into effect, fogs continued to inhabit the city. My own experience of it came a year after the Clean Air Act 1968, which makes me the third generation of women in my family to experience a fog-bound epiphany.
I was four years old and my mother had brought me to London to visit my grandmother for Christmas. I was in a state of high excitement as I skipped down Kensington High Street, shrouded in what seemed to me a glittering wraith of snow. I let slip my mother's hand. As I surged forward, a black mist fell between us. I lost sight of my mother, of the shop signs that had been beckoning me, of any safe haven at all. A moment's anxiety was followed by calm, as a large, horny hand took hold of me. But these were not the slim, maternal fingers that had been curled round mine. I looked up into the face of a pale man. His eyes were like flint and a suggestive smile played on his lips. My mother cried out my name, and I ran to her. In that instant, I knew I had escaped from the bogeyman my grandmother had warned me about. As I turned round for one more look at him, he vanished in a swirl of fog.
The Big Smoke: 50 years after the 1952 London smog, a commemorative conference, will be held at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London on 9-10 December. For information, visit www.lshtm.ac.uk/smog
Lilian Pizzichini has just received the Golden Dagger Award for her book Dead Men's Wages (Picador)
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