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A nether sky of fog…
The model Julie Harrison
On Saturday 6 December 1952 the performance of La Traviata at Sadler’s Wells was abandoned at the interval. The incessant coughing of the audience had become intolerable due to the dense ‘pea-souper’ smog which had been slowly creeping into the auditorium making the stage almost invisible to the people who had sat further back. Further west across London the greyhound racing at White City was halted when the dogs couldn’t see the hare, and reportedly a Mallard duck flying blindly across London smashed into Victoria station and crash-landed onto platform 6.
Before the dense fog had enveloped London the weather for the previous few weeks had been colder than normal. Houses throughout the capital in those pre-central heating days were burning large amounts of coal in a million fires and stoves – all of which were emitting a particulate-ridden sulphurous acidic smoke. Although it had been cold, the weather had been relatively fresh and clear but by Thursday 4 December the conditions had began to worsen. The breezes had stopped and the skies became greyer and 
the atmosphere had become noticably dank. By the next day the whole city had started to appear almost like a scene from Dickens’ Bleak House:
the atmosphere had become noticably dank. By the next day the whole city had started to appear almost like a scene from Dickens’ Bleak House: Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city…Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
The Fog on that Friday morning was thicker than anyone could remember even by people who had long considered the London smog just another aspect of living in the capital. The portmanteau smog was coined only forty five years earlier, by HA Des Voeux, who first used it in 1905 to describe the conditions of fuliginous (sooty) fog that occurred all too often in the capital city.
The unpleasant impermeable fogs had been a feature of London for centuries and it wasn’t just Dickens who wrote about, as he would call it, the London Particular. The London fogs were described in the Sherlock Holmes’s stories and Louis Stephenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the mythical quality of the fogs was reflected in any Hollywood film set in London, even after the era of the London ‘pea-soupers’ had past. Indeed the great smog of 1952 was the beginning of the end of the eye-stinging London Particulars.
By nightfall on Friday 5 December the smothering fog thickened and visibility in most of London dropped to a few metres. During the next day, the sun was too weak and low in the sky to make much of an impression on the fog and that night, and on the Sunday and Monday nights, it again thickened. In most of London, it was almost impossible for pedestrians, totally disorientated through lack of familiar landmarks, to find their way home. While, because of the dirt and the unpleasant taste of the smog, many people held ‘masks’ of gauze, scarves or handkerchiefs to their faces. On the Isle of Dogs, almost surrounded by the Thames, visibility was occasionally reported to be nil – the fog was so dense that people could not see their own feet.
Hospitals were soon filled with patients suffering from acute respiratory diseases and, almost un-noticed, deaths in the city began to mount. No one noticed at first until undertakers started to run out of coffins and florists were likewise running out of flowers. The very ill weren’t helped by ambulances, searching in vain for victims and clanging their bells frantically, unable to extricate themselves from the snail-paced traffic jams.
The London smog, compared with a normal fog or even other urban smogs, was especially lethal because it contained high quantities of sulphur oxides (from the cheap sulphurous coal) that reacted with the moisture in the air to produce a dilute, but lung-corrosive, sulphuric acid mist. The killer brew could, to some people, trigger a massive inflammation of the lung – in other words thousands of people were dying almost through suffocation.
The British Committee on Air Pollution finally estimated that during the five days that the smog smothered London, there were 4,000 more deaths than would have occurred under normal circumstances and during the next two months there were another 8,000 deaths caused by a direct result of the killer smog. Even during the next summer the death rate was 2% higher than normal.
Legislation followed the Great Smog of 1952 in the form of the City of London (Various Powers) Act of 1954 and the Clean Air Acts of 1956 and 1968. These Acts banned emissions of black smoke and decreed that residents of urban areas and operators of factories must convert to smokeless fuels.
Nothing on the scale of the 1952 Great Peasouper has ever occurred again and it remains the nation’s worst single air pollution disaster. There has been an astonishing hundredfold reduction in atmospheric particulate levels in London over the last fifty years and the air, in most respects, is cleaner in the capital city than at any other time since the middle ages.
British Government film from the 1950s about the dangers of pollution.
What an incredible set of photographs. I thought for a moment I was looking at prints from one of those early British science fiction movies, like the Quatermass Experiment.
There is such a wealth of interesting information (and one hopes film footage) top be had from this decade, that I’ve never understood why more creative use was never made of it in terms of the cinema and television. The British, it would seem, still have an unquenchable appetite for watching Jack Hawkins and John Mills chasing German U-boats across their Sunday morning TV screens.
To me, the 1950s have been the great “lost opportunity” as a resource for new works. I think that’s certainly the reason people like myself find this blog in particular so appealing. Where else can you find stuff like this?
once again .. well written, well research story.
Great story and photos too. Your blog is totally awesome and I am so glad I found you through “I’m Learning To Share!”
Sublime photos, chillingly evocative.
love those vintage old-timey fog stills, so haunting.
Just included a link to this post at the Pop Culture Institute… Love love love the photos, and I agree that there’s so much out there sitting in file drawers that needs to be put on the Internet, especially from the 1950s and before.
I was looking for a picture of Mandy R.-D. for a comment of mine and found a set of very fine ones here.
This smog contribution is even more smashing – the environment fanatics of today can get an impression, what air pollution really is. Impressive photos! Thanks!
[...] See smog [...]
really what was the aftermath of the london smog disaster. and some of the images of this. If you could help me out that would be really great. I thank you for your time
sarah wilson
skyview highschool
I was 5 at the time, but still have vivid memories of that smog: yellow writhing snakes that crept indoors so that sitting at our table you had a blurred view of the coal fire.
My great-grandfather died as a result of a chest infection (his lungs had been damaged by gas whilst serving in the army during the First World War). I remember us visiting him whilst they had him in an oxegen tent, thne looking out the window and seeing – nothing.
Although thgings improved it was not until the mid 60’s that it was just fog rather than smog.
When it was smog there were tims when you had problems seeing your own hands when held in front of you.
These pictures took me back to my childhood in the 60s, when you literally could not see yours hands in front of your face, the smog was so thick. Loved the photos. They reminded me of some of those early scifi films in the 50s.
I would like permission to use two photos for an educational exhibit on air sampling machines. To whom can I address this request?
Thank you.
Stephen Horne
I was born on 5th December, 1952. My mum had a rotten time when she was in labour, because a man had to walk in front of the ambulance to make sure they didn’t hit anything. Apparantly every couple of minutes he would bang on the front of the vehicle to say move ahead about 6 ft. Eventually I was born on the steps of St. Mary’s Paddington,(or at least my head was). Mum said I was put in an incubator. I was probably the only person in London enjoying fresh air.
holy cow,i never even heard of that smog in 1952.12.000 people killed.man that is a disaster.
Forgot.
let´s hope this will never,ever happen again.
We have to take more care so this won´t happen again.
Very nice photos =).
Fascinating photos. The 1952 smog had a huge impact on my life’s direction. I was only a baby, born in London in 1951, but the smog led my dad to decide to migrate to Melbourne, Australia, which we did in 1954. My mother, Olive Turner, was a Londoner (Iverson Road, West Hampstead – the cottages are still there, I believe) and my dad, Loreto, was a Maltese member of the Royal Air Force stationed in London. (He changed his name to York after the War). Anyhow, my mother, and my father, both told me how he decided then and there, horrified by the smog and its affect on me as a baby, that we’d be going to Melbourne where he had a brother who worked on the wharves.
I wonder if others emigrated for similar reasons? Was I among the first of the “eco-refugees”?!
The good news, of course, is that we humans can conquer these kinds of problems.
These pictures bring back many memories for me. I was 20 years old in December 1952 and working in London, near Victoria Station, and living in South London (Lewisham). When I left work on that first night there was no transport running and a group of us banded together and walked to Lewisham using the tram lines as our guide as we could not see more than a foot or so ahead of us. It took ages – and when I finally reached home (after a long slow walk) I found the fog had even seeped into the house. I can still remember the awful taste it left in your mouth (a sort of sulphurous taste) and the dreadful smell the fog caused. Thank goodness such a thing cannot happen in London again.