1

Home Fires Burning: The London Fog of 1952 and the

Movement to Clean Air

2

Introduction 3

Chapter I: Seeing through London’s Problem with Fog 6

Chapter II: Britain’s Shift to Coal and Early Air Pollution Monitoring 12

Chapter III: From London Particular to Deadly Phenomenon 24

3

Introduction

as a veil to conceal crime in the stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as a

symbol of urban gloom in the novels of Charles Dickens, or captured by artist Claude Monet

in his paintings of the Thames, London fog was a recognizable element of British culture.

While fog functioned as a device for scene setting in literature and art, it became legendary

and the subsequent production of smoke that coupled with and stayed trapped in the

atmospheric wetness of naturally occurring fogs. One particularly terrible fog descended on

London for four days in December 1952. It settled over the city and prevented chimney

smoke from rising and escaping while also keeping new air from coming in. The smoke from

the millions of domestic coal fires remained trapped as the city continued to burn more fuel

during those cold December days. Ultimately these conditions led to the deaths of thousands

of people (possibly as many as 12,000) namely through the fatal exacerbation of respiratory

conditions like asthma, bronchitis, and other lung conditions.

in the chronicling of British environmental history. One has likely never heard of it unless

4

effects, but instead he had the production company fill a great huge warehouse with fog.

Similarly, in a recent episode of the classic American television game show Jeopardy, an

answer to a clue relating to London’s deadly fog appeared in a category titled “Apocalypse

Then.” Considering the 1952 fog in this light, as an apocalyptic killer rather than something

to be merely tolerated and endured, marks a shift in environmental thinking and societal

perception. Though such a view is very much a part of our current narrative, Londoners in

London Fog: The Biography through a wealth of representations of fog in popular culture,

literature, cartoons, and art history. Much of her work is grounded in the metaphorical and

symbolic use of fog in literature. As an overall study of London’s atmosphere, this source is

very useful, yet her overall approach gives too much attention to fog fiction. Peter

Brimblecombe’s The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times

offers insight into smoke abatement movements and early attempts at legislation to curb air

pollution. His engaging account of the social and economic development of air pollution

controls provides helpful background for the legislative history of London’s clean air. The

story of air pollution in London leading up to the 1952 fog, the “Big Smoke,” or the “Great

London Smog” as it is often called today, is not just to be a biography of fog, however. It is a

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the decades before the 1952 fog and in the years after the disaster as the essential foundation

in tracking the developments of environmental perspectives in London. In seeking to trace

cultural assumptions of London’s fog, this thesis relies particularly on newspaper articles from

sources such as The Daily Telegraph and The Manchester Guardian to investigate the way the

1952 fog was reported and the change in public opinion that ensued. This thesis seeks to

lackluster until a year after the incident.

and it took the 1952 fog for Britain to not only make a change toward cleaner air but to change

the perception of fog in the public mindset. London’s general public did not perceive the

1952 fog as an immediate crisis—for most, it was part of the modus operandi of London life.

Only when hospital records were made official and national statistics realized did a

psychological shift take place. As the severity of the incident was grasped in the aftermath, a

shift in collective consciousness became both conceptual and linguistic: London’s historic fog

became smog. The 1952 disaster was thus a critical juncture in which London’s fog

underwent a transformation in British cultural imagination.

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Chapter I: Seeing through London’s Problem with Fog

was by diarist John Evelyn, who presented his Fumifugium: or the Inconvenience of the Aer

and Smoake of London Dissipated to Charles II in 1661. Evelyn suggested that the burning of

sea coal shortened the lives of people living in London, and he regarded it as a “sullen” fuel

that wreaked havoc on architecture, vegetation, and human health.

2

Evelyn brought attention

3

He reasoned that the objectionable smoke was “not from the culinary fires, which for being

weak, and lesse often fed below, is with such ease dispelled and scattered above.”

His

treatise firmly blamed industry for London’s smoke problem however, and saw a feasible

solution in relocation, arguing to move smoke-producing works outside of the city.

His

document laid the groundwork for a debate on smoke that would continue for centuries, and

though his argument placed the blame on the industrial side, it was critical in establishing the

smoke problem as a London problem. Throughout the nineteenth century London fogs

increased in both frequency and duration, and by the 1880s, there were on average sixty fogs a

year.

as well as the casual labor market, with midday close-downs becoming more commonplace.

7

endured fog conditions akin to semi-darkness.

of the metropolis, and Londoners were familiar with their severity.

memorability, as sulfurous soot particles in the air mixed with naturally occurring water vapor

to create an atmosphere that was thick, persistent, and often described as greenish-yellow or

even black in color.

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This was so much the case that the public denoted these fogs as

man of fashionable, Regency-style dress, making his way through a foggy city, seemingly

unable to view the oncoming horse and carriage in his path as he holds a yellow handkerchief

to his mouth as a means of protection against the pollutants in the air (see Fig. 1).

It is an

image that confirms the commonplace nature of a fog serious enough to block a man’s view of

his periphery and require the use of a handkerchief while navigating London’s streets. Though

the notion of a London particular was quickly becoming used in a colloquial manner, it was

indeed something particular to London, as fogs of this coloring and density were not found

elsewhere, even in the most polluted cities of the industrial north.

The idea of the London

particular was so compelling that even leading Victorian art critic and historian John Ruskin

commented on it in one of his lectures, referring to a London particular as an “extremely

8

The New York Times in 1855, describing an American fog, wrote that except for its density,

the fog had “none of the characteristics of our ‘old London particular.’”

(color lithograph)

this engraving.

Biography, p. 24

U.S. Minister to England, wrote to an acquaintance while visiting London:

“We are in the beginning of our foggy season, and to-day

are having a yellow fog, and that always enlivens me, it

has such a knack of transfiguring things. It flatters one’s

self-esteem, too, in a recondite way, promoting it is very

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Corton, London Fog: The Biography, 25.

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picturesque also. Even the cabs are rimmed with a halo,

and people across the way have all that possibility of

suggestion which piques the fancy so in the figures of

new and unexplored world not unpleasing to one who is

being in London was witnessing the fog. Indeed a ‘London particular’ was something unique

and almost enviable, especially in the eyes of an American. London’s cliché fogginess was

secure for decades to come.

which sought to raise awareness for their danger. One of the most prominent and intensely

prophetic voices was that of Robert Barr (1850-1912). Barr was born in Scotland and moved

to Canada when he was a child. He relocated to London as an adult and was eager to capture

and write about London fog, a phenomenon which he had never previously experienced. He

began prolifically publishing short stories in the 1890s after settling in the city, and became

better known through socializing with some of the best-selling authors of his day, including

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its widespread readership in Victorian London, comparable to the impact of Rachel Carson’s

Silent Spring in our own time.

difficult for reformers to make a strong case for political action that would interfere with an

individual’s entitlement to have an open coal fire in the home. Though publications like

Russell’s London Fogs propelled the domestic side of the issue to the forefront of the

gathered by the disparate investigations of private individuals.

Smoke abatement societies

like London’s Coal Smoke Abatement Society and the Smoke Abatement League of Great

Britain worked to raise awareness of the problems through exhibitions, public lectures, and

extensive pamphleteering, though many of their efforts were localized and limited.

Efforts

of smoke abatement groups brought the issues to the public’s attention. Nevertheless,

reformers struggled to bridge the credibility gap that existed in the public conscious. This

problem of credibility stemmed not only from the empiricist outlook of public professionals,

who wanted more comprehensive statistical data, but also from the general public opinion that

activists were an unconsolidated group of cranks unnecessarily stirring up trouble.

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of both the manufacturer and of the public.”

Though smoke abatement groups worked

continuously to change public perceptions of coal smoke as something inevitable to something

preventable, its associations with wealth creation, employment, and home comfort were

difficult to break.

Anti-smoke activists did not provide enough scientific data to convince

the public toward their understanding of the air quality issue.

very little public persuasion amounted by the time the issue was brought before Parliament

with the Public Health (Smoke Abatement) Bill of 1926. The work of smoke abatement

groups was significant in spurring this Parliamentary consideration, yet the bill proved to be a

feeble piece of legislation. In the House of Commons, Sir Arthur Holbrook argued strongly

for the need to handle the domestic side of the issue, emphasizing to his fellow MPs:

“…we must make a start somewhere. There can be no harm whatever in

of the smoke which is doing damage to property and vegetation and

factories. That is not so. I have been in Manchester on a Sunday morning

enormous volume of smoke as was then to be seen is almost

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individual in their own private dwelling, and the government was unwilling to pass legislation

that would invade the Englishman’s sacrosanct right to a roaring fire. Smoke from the

traditional domestic fireplace conjured up feelings of well-being and comfort, and the

fireplace was often the hub around which family life revolved. The open fire was considered

such an essential part of the national home that attempts to abolish it were simply out of the

though associations of comfort for the domestic hearth were present in earlier periods, they

became intensified during the war years and in post-war society.

The nation was encouraged

to “Keep the Home Fires Burning” as the 1914 patriotic song by Novello and Ford goes;

indeed the widespread popularity of the song alone reflects the position of coal fires in the

cultural mindset of the early twentieth century.

home fires of the nation, and one of its greatest advocates was George Orwell, who considered

the fire as an essential value of British society. In a column in the Evening Standard, Orwell

writes that for “a room that is to be lived in, only a coal fire will do” and that subsequently

“the survival of the family as an institution may be more dependent on it than we realise.”

To Orwell, the coal fire encouraged sociability and was therefore a pivotal aspect of family

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were part of an English “chain of being” symbolic both of the individualized family home and

of the nation, that seemed impossible to break.

outside the home, the public viewed the idea of switching to gas inside the home as

impracticable on account of supply, cost, and unfamiliarity. Fear of being poisoned by a gas

fire in one’s own home was a substantive threat in the public imagination.

Smoke abatement

industrial production only, tightening the regulation of industrial emissions through steeper

fines and expanding the definition of ‘smoke nuisance’ to include soot, ash, and non-black

smoke.

Keeping the focus on industrial production was not an entirely misplaced effort, yet

the legislation largely ignored and thus perpetuated the preconditions of the 1952 disaster.

similarly the issue of public opinion came to the fore. Lord Parmoor put forth his view that

real reform and modification of atmospheric pollution would not be possible “until public

opinion is further educated in the right direction” and that the “great difficulty” of this issue

remained the “prejudice of the ordinary man in favour of burning coal upon the open

hearth.”

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House of Lords were keen to tout public ignorance yet engaged in no discussion of ways to

shift public opinion. Smoke nuisance remained a local nuisance rather than a national one.

offenders and were considerably worse in combustion compared to industrial furnaces, and

this less complete combustion ultimately made for greater levels of tar and soot.

It was not

simply the numbers of individuals burning coal fires in open grates, but the fact that the

subsequent waste of fuel made for economic loss to the nation, and that it could therefore

potentially be good business to encourage the use of electric heating or gas heating.

went so far as to suggest a slight remission of income tax in the case of houses in which there

were no bad smoke-producing appliances.

His suggestion was not a palatable one, and it

was quickly passed over for talk of the overall expense of switching to gas.

consumer to make the switch to gas in the home was out of the question in this political

moment. In such an economic downturn, the 1931 Labour government faced political danger

in going after the ‘ordinary working man,’ and encouraging a shift away from coal use in the

home would have been precisely the disruption that the government was unwilling to

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miners’ wages and introduce a system of quotas in the mining industry.

government had no intention to attack coal, hence matters with smoke nuisance were largely

left to local politics.

coal fires and atmospheric pollution, though public persuasion was slow to build. Even before

the passage of the 1926 Public Health Act, The Daily Telegraph had published an article that

responsible for “hours of sunshine lost and fogs created” as well as the “loss of millions of

pounds yearly, bad health, and soot-laden buildings with a dingy appearance.”

growing awareness of the link between the domestic hearth and air pollution, it was difficult to

break the image of the grand old English custom, bound up in sentimentality and nostalgia. In

the minds of most of the British public, the resulting air pollution from domestic coal grates

made for soot covered buildings, had negative impact on vegetation, and contributed to the

London fogs that to many were part of the common occurrence of living in London, but no

urgency existed in the matter. Though the issue was addressed in Parliament using the

terminology of public health, domestic chimney smoke was not widely viewed as detrimental

to health—it was a ‘nuisance’ rather than an emergency, viewed as a necessary consequence

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The Public Health Landscape

contextualization is to look at the perception of another issue that today seems inseparable

from public health: cigarette smoking. According to current British public health expert and

historian Virginia Berridge, cigarette smoking was not even a part of the British public health

agenda until the 1950s.

on domestic coal grates.

The initial response to the link between smoking and lung cancer

was also conditioned by the financial importance of tobacco and the close role of the British

tobacco industry with government.

It was not until the 1960s that smoking was redefined as

a public health issue, and with this redefinition eventually came a rise of new ideology that

stressed individual responsibility for healthy lifestyle and behaviors.

needed the adoption of a stronger public health lens, and the parallels between these two

issues help to illuminate general public attitudes toward health. Though it is easy to see these

two issues today as essential pieces of the public health landscape, is it only in the 1950s and

onward that these issues started to have a national public health framework, let alone be tied to

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answering, yet the question itself reflects more than just a public awareness issue. As medical

experts conducted more research and published more medical reports throughout the 1950s,

Britain saw the formation of a public health “policy community” that weakened political

considerations and counterbalanced the priorities of industry.

In the cases of tobacco and

coal, the electoral dangers of intervening in popular mass habits necessitated evidenced-based

policy through strong networks of public health research. For tobacco, a major turning point

would come with the Royal College of Physicians’ 1962 Smoking and Health report, while for

coal, it was the aftermath of the 1952 fog and the findings of the committee assigned to

investigate the incident where the initiations of a new style of public health commenced, as

risky behavior among individuals slowly became a matter for government.

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Chapter III: From London Particular to Deadly Phenomenon

The 1952 Fog as It Occurred

th

- 9

th

1952, it certainly caught the

public’s attention, though not immediately as a matter of public health. For those five days

London was in chaos: the blanket of sulfurous fog was so dense that visibility was less than

could not see the river.

London transport was virtually shut down, with nearly all buses out

of action. The London Underground was still running, but severely affected by the resulting

congestion: on December 8

around 3,000 people queued for tickets for the Central line at

Stratford in the evening.

Officials even cancelled the football match at Wembley

Stadium—the first time the stadium had closed since its 1923 opening.

also allowed for a rise in footpad crime and burglaries, and Scotland Yard reported more

robberies than would have been likely in an evening without the fog.

disrupted daily life, yet when the air finally cleared, most Londoners resumed life as normal,

assuming the turmoil was over and having no idea the number of lives cost.

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with the estimate of 4,000 lives, relying principally on hospital records.

was a steep figure, Donald Acheson, a resident medical officer at the time of the fog at the

Middlesex Hospital on Goodge Street (who later served as Chief Medical Officer of the

United Kingdom from 1983-1991) believes the number was likely even higher. He suspects

that given the extreme lack of visibility in the streets, more people died at home, without help,

than in the hospital.

Though there was certainly pressure on hospital beds during the fog,

In the months following the disaster, the British press began to circulate the scale of damage

done to health. As the national figure of 4,000 deaths gained currency in the press it also

served as the impetus for a political response.

had died from breathing dirty air. In the House of Commons debate on air pollution in

January 1953, there seemed little enthusiasm on the part of the government for new

legislation.

The Minister of Housing at the time, Harold Macmillan, drew attention to the

powers of local government authorities to enforce smoke abatement and expressed the view

that no “further legislation [was] needed at present.”

the “broad economic considerations which have to be taken into account and which it would

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toll, proposing “12,000, Not 4,000 Killed by London Smog.”

because it seemed impossible that London’s historic fog could be responsible for this level of

atrocity. The transition from fog to smog marked a linguistic departure representative of a

shift in collective consciousness from the notion of fog as a tolerable phenomenon to instead a

significant danger to be eliminated.

confirmed the reality of London’s killer smog. No longer would Londoners be expected to

hold handkerchiefs or cloths to their mouths while travelling through fog—now smog masks

were the required response.

with limited value, as both groups realized that the true danger came from the sulfur dioxide

fumes, and smog masks did not offer any substantial protection against gaseous contents.

Lord Amulree held up a smog mask before the House of Lords and gave his opinion on their

inadequacy, stating that a mask:

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Distressed by the lack of any comprehensive official government response, doctors still urged

Londoners to protect their lungs with sixpence worth of gauze folded into a mask to be tied

over the mouth and nose. Doctors hoped the mesh of the mask would “arrest most of the soot,

while moisture from the breath, condensed on the mask, would prevent passage of some of the

chemicals that cause lung trouble.”

opportunity, with reports of chemists’ shops running out of gauze.

whom smog is especially dangerous.

In response to the masks, the British Medical

Association released a statement that “the whole problem of the effect of smoke on health

needs to be tackled at the source” and that the country needed clean air.

Smog masks were

at least a discernible start to tackling this great issue, and they served as a visual symbol of a

preventive measure.

Government Investigation

1953 makes it clear that government reluctance to deal with the aftermath of the 1952 disaster

was still appreciable. In a memorandum to the cabinet, dated November 18th 1953, Harold

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busy—and that is half the battle nowadays.”

which the psychological underpinnings of smog’s conception kept the issue at the forefront of

politics. Though he mentions the Welfare State with sarcastic connotation, he is right to call

attention to its role in shaping the public’s expectations.

sense of national responsibility for the health. The formation of the National Health Service

consensus that the obligation to deal with matters of health fell to the government. Once the

1952 fog became ‘smog,’ i.e. the public understood it as a public health crisis, the expectation

that government would act was irreversible. Though Macmillan still sought to balance this

against considerations of Britain’s war debt, the actions and legacy of the Welfare State

primed the government with a willingness to intervene on matters of health to a newfound

degree.

spurred public understanding of smog, Labour MP Norman Dodds also deserves credit for

continually pressing the matter in Parliament. Five months after the fog episode, he fervently

urged the formation of an investigative committee to cover the 1952 disaster. While

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are thinking about 6,000 English people dying in Greater London alone.” Dodds made his

remarks with vigor and urgency, declaring that if nothing was to be done, “We may even

once again in the London streets hear the cry, ‘Bring out your dead.’” His rhetoric was hard

to ignore, and he was one of the key players that forced the attention of the British

government.

strong group whose mandate was to conduct a comprehensive study of “the nature, causes

and effects of air pollution, and the efficacy of present preventive measures.”

Committee’s final report summarized much of what was known about the effects of air

pollution at the time, condemning its harm on public health while also estimating that the

pollution caused £150 million in damage to textiles, metals, and buildings each year, and that

it cost at least another £100 million in time lost to illness and transportation delays.

The

report made it clear that air pollution did not just cost lives, but also cost a great deal to the

British economy. The committee’s work drew together much of the thinking on smoke

abatement that had accumulated throughout the previous decades and treated air pollution as

a public health crisis that required a campaign as vigorous as the one waged by nineteenth-

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expressly avoided basing our arguments on the danger to health of particular incidents, such

as the London smog of 1952. Not that we minimized that catastrophe in any way, but we felt

that undue emphasis on it, would distract attention from the fact that damage to health and

danger to life were going on all over the country, all the time, year in and year out.” All of

Britain, as he put it, constituted a “single permanently polluted area.”

and Birmingham.

The problem required more than damage control: it needed an extensive

and comprehensive national strategy.

The Clean Air Act of 1956

therefore action for clean air would receive broad enough public support that both the

Conservative and Labour parties supported air pollution reform in the 1955 election.

Building upon the findings of the Beaver Committee, the government passed the Clean Air

Act of 1956, which prohibited “dark smoke” from chimneys, and limited smoke, grit, and

dust from both industrial and domestic sources.

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Clean Air Act prohibited any smoke which appeared to be as dark or darker than shade two

on the Ringelmann Chart (see Fig. 4).

what one would have defined as “black smoke” proved a challenge and enabled too many

exemptions within the legislation.

opacity of smoke, the inclusion of the chart fulfilled an important need in smoke abatement

work and allowed for an established standard of compliance.!

The Ringelmann Chart for measuring

the density/opacity of smoke,

in Brimblecombe, The Big Smoke, p.

170

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smokeless zones) and within these areas the emission of dark smoke was prohibited unless it

was the result of burning an authorized fuel which was specified in the regulations and

included solid smokeless fuels.

and enforcement of smokeless zones was the responsibility of local authorities. The National

Smoke Abatement Society suggested the establishment of smokeless zones in the 1930s, but

went into effect in 1952).

target area in Manchester that it became a prime example for the Beaver Committee’s

recommendations. Such was the influence of the Manchester Corporation Act that the Clean

Air Act of 1956 stipulated identical fines for non-compliance of its conditions.

formation of smoke control areas in the most highly polluted parts of Britain—industrial and

residential places where large quantities of coal were consumed within a small area and

which experienced frequent natural fogs.”

energy sources to replace coal for domestic heating. Although gas and electricity offered

advantages, few people in the mid 1950s seemed willing to switch entirely, and the

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and £5, but converting it to burn gas cost between £10 and £20.

The Beaver Committee

also proposed that the national government reimburse owners or occupiers in smoke control

areas 50 percent of the cost of replacing old household coal-burning appliances with ones that

could use smokeless fuel, but the government’s bill reduced the size of the subsidy requiring

owners or occupiers of private houses to pay 30 percent of the cost, with local authorities

paying another 30 percent, and the national government contributing the final 40.

Here

had not even developed a plan to deal with their smoke—twenty-one localities denied that

industry discovered natural gas in an area of the North Sea claimed by Britain, and within a

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matter of years the country converted entirely from manufactured gas to gas from the North

Sea.

decline relative to coke, the long-held assumption that coal would continue to be Britain’s

main energy supplier began to dissipate. The Beaver Committee had originally deemed 294

areas in England as “black areas” and in urgent need of smoke control, and by 1974, all but

fourteen local authorities had taken steps toward implementing the act.

Great Smog.

However, the focus on visible smoke did not get to the root of the problem,

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ordinary coal, also ultimately helped to reduce sulfur dioxide levels. This was an instance

where legislative flexibility worked in favor of the environment over time.

significant: annual averages of smoke and sulfur dioxide concentrations in London have

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