The Great London Smog
On This Day in History: December 5, 1952
The Fog was a 1980 horror film about a fog—duh—that brought with it pissed-off drowned sailor ghosts who died a century earlier who take vengeance on a coastal town because leprosy. Wikipedia can fill you in on the rest. Anyway, London’s “Great Smog” had a much higher body count than the movie. Fog + air pollution = thousands of people dead in just a few days.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 5, 1952--
For weeks the city had been really cold [laughs in Canadian]. I mean, this was London. They may be at the same parallel as me, but our winters are not the same. Anyway, it was cold for London, plus fog, plus no environmental protection agency type thing cuz 19-fuckin-50s. It turned the air to poison.
Fucking coal. We really need to stop using that shit. Goddamn dinosaur rocks are polluting as shit, and London had been using it for centuries, not just for power generation but heating homes. I visited London in 2016 and the air seemed pretty clean—I went for a run and didn’t barf up a lung—but six decades previous it was more polluted than the parking lot of a Confederate flag convention. Coal-rolling pickup trucks, or gene pool? You decide.
Because of the cold the coal furnaces were working overtime for several days. Then throw in an “anticyclone” and it created a stagnation of heavily polluted air containing all sorts of nasty shit like sulfur dioxide, carbon dioxide, and smoke particles hovering in the air across the city. It began on December 5, 1952, when a fog rolled in. A short time later, the color of the fog transformed to a sickly yellowish-brown color. There were certainly many survivors of World War I gas attacks living in the city who said ah fuck not this bullshit again.
The typical Londoner was all stiff upper lip suck up the nasty rotten egg smell and go to work. Except no matter how stiff said lips were, they couldn’t protect lungs from the toxic fumes. For five days the smog punished the city, and in some locations it was so thick you couldn’t see your feet on the ground. Boat, train, and air traffic halted because visibility was for shit. If you spent any time outside, you’d return home with a greasy black coating on your face looking like you’d spent the day working in a coal mine.
People didn’t realize just how bad it was until the undertakers said, “Uh, we’re running out of coffins.” Small children, the elderly, heavy smokers, and anyone with lung problems were dropping like cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon at a Wilco concert. In the aftermath, as many as 12,000 people died from lung problems related to the Great Smog. Lotta birds bit the dust too, not just from bad air but from not being able to see fuck-all and crashing beak-first into buildings.
Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down. They make great gifts, and ‘tis the fuckin’ season!
Cool story, bro! And the punchline was that coal said “oh, pardon the fuck out of me, how about the miners going out on a strike, prefer that?” And then everyone froze during yet another ghastly London winter. God that place puts its citizens through it, and has done so for centuries. Inversion layers hold the smog in during the winter; one freezing December in San Jose I nearly had to go to the hospital for asthma. Grew up in LA where the bad joke was “Don’t trust air you can’t see.” (Can’t remember the title, but there’s an indifferent Christopher Isherwood adaptation that’s part of the Julianne Moore fest on Criterion, set in the early sixties LA, and they used CG to recreate the almost phosphorescent sunsets of the smog era.) All gone now thanks to smog checks, and of course Trumpist shitbirds are trying to bring them back.
This is a great article. I had know idea so many people perished because of this. Too bad our government has no interest in basic science (or reading!). (US citizen, here)