I subscribe to The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media. It’s a daily poem and a collection of small essays and snippets about things that have happened on the day the newsletter is sent round.
On December 5th, it was the 60th anniversary of The Great London Smog, these days we’d call it air pollution and there would be a massive outcry. No-one really knows, but the smog of December 1952 is estimated to have been responsible for the deaths of about 12,000 people.
This is what the Writer’s Almanac had to say:
London had been famous for its fog for hundreds of years; it was one of the city's defining characteristics. In his novel Put Out More Flags (1942), Evelyn Waugh wrote: "The decline of England [...] dates from the day we abandoned coal fuel. We used to live in a fog, the splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood [...] We designed a city which was meant to be seen in a fog."
The weather had been especially cold that early December in 1952, and Londoners responded as they always had: by burning more coal to keep their houses warm. But late on December 5, one of the city's trademark fogs rolled in, blanketing the capital. The fog mingled with soot, tar particles, and sulfur dioxide, and it was all trapped over London by a weather pattern known as a thermal inversion. A cold, still air mass hovered over the city, and the sun — which normally would warm and disperse the air mass — was unable to break through the clouds of smog. So the cold, dense, yellow-black air lingered. And the moisture in the fog reacted to the chemicals in the pollution, creating droplets of sulfuric acid, or "acid rain."
For five days, visibility was so poor that the city was virtually shut down. At some points, people couldn't even see their own hands and feet, and were getting lost in their own neighborhoods. A hundred thousand people were made ill, and ambulances couldn't drive in the smog, so the sick received no treatment unless they could make their own way to the hospital. People didn't panic, though; they were used to London's thick fogs. It wasn't until the undertakers were running out of coffins, and the florists were running out of flowers, that they realized how deadly the Great Smog had been. When the smog finally lifted, it left 4,000 Londoners dead in its wake, and over the following months, an additional 8,000 — mostly the elderly and those with chronic respiratory conditions — died of complications from exposure to the acid smog.
The Great Smog changed the way people looked at pollution, and, in 1956, Parliament passed the first Clean Air Act, which regulated the burning of coal in urban homes and factories.
The debate about clean air in the 1950s and whether to legislate or not is reminiscent of the current debate around CO2 emissions and global warming. Many politicians opposed the clean air legislation, the scientific evidence was disputed and rubbished; some claimed any Englishman had the right to burn coal in his grate and others questioned what it would do to society and family life if there wasn’t an open fire burning in the living room.
I can remember the Clean Air Act coming into force in Cheshire where I lived. It would have been the late 1950s or early ’60s. We had the open fire in our living room replaced by a stove, which burned smokeless fuel call Furnicite (little black eggs) or Coalite. The Aga in the kitchen (it was actually a Rayburn, but I’m using Aga as a common noun) had always burned coke and when we needed the fire in the front room, we used Coalite in the open grate.
When I was a boy, it was my job to get the coal in and tend to the fires (it was a job I generally enjoyed), although going down the end of the yard to the coalhouse in the pitch dark was a task I had to steel myself to undertake (on account of wolves, vampires and various other monsters that Hammer films put in my head). If only head torches had been invented ...
We always had two types of fuel - coke for the Rayburn and house coal for the open fires. They were tipped in the coalhouse, which was a large brick building on the back of the house, with two stalls divided by thick wooden planks. The coalman would carry the fuel in sacks of 1cwt (about 50kg) loads on the back of a flat-back lorry. Coalmen wore leather protectors on their backs and worked two or three to a lorry so that a steady stream of them would troop down the entry, down the yard and into the coalhouse to tip the sacks, which they took away with them. They carried the coal on their backs, lifting it off the lorry and walking with a stoop to tip it over their shoulder into the coal pile. My mother would have me count how many sacks were brought in. Every coal lorry had a large set of scales on the back and sacks were checked on the scales before being carried in. The coalmen were always dirty and quite scary. I don’t think I’ve have wanted to argue if they’d delivered seven sacks instead of eight.
We had a bucket for coal and a scuttle for coke, which was tipped in at the top of the Rayburn and would last for about 12 hours. I could just about carry each one when full. The coal was shiny, brittle and hard. Sometimes it came in huge slabs, which had to be hit with a heavy coal-hammer to break them up so they would burn. At the bottom, there would be an accumulation of small pieces of coal and dust (which we called slack) and you’d use this to dampen down the fire when it was burning too quickly or to bank it up if you were going out. I liked breaking the coal and would cheerfully have smashed it all to slack given the chance.
When we had new coal delivered, there was always a debate as to whether it was good coal or not and sometimes my mother would threaten to change coalman. Great interest was taken as to how well it was burning and from time to time, there would be some shale in the coal which would cause it to burst with a bang and shoot pieces out of the fire. There was always great interest in clinker, which was solid pieces in the ash-pan.
There’s nothing like watching a proper coal fire - it sizzles and flames, you could bring it alive by a couple of stabs of the poker and good coal also had gloops of tar running out as it burns and little jets of flame spouting from the pieces of coal.
Coal was the means of heating our house until I was about 15 when my dad (who was a plumber) installed an oil-fired boiler with radiators and took the old Rayburn out of the kitchen. The coalhouse was part filled with a large oil tank. He installed oil as it was considered cheaper than gas (natural gas from the North Sea hadn’t yet arrived).
Coal wasn’t just a fuel for heating back in the 1950s, it also powered almost every train and was the main means for generating electricity and for producing gas (a by-product of coke). The smell of smoke was everywhere and when I smell it now (very rarely) it has a pungency that surprises me. With street upon street burning house coal, no wonder we almost poisoned ourselves.
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