A recent reprint of a book first published in 1968, this is interesting for a couple of reasons:


First, in a world where we are continually deluged with reports of environmental doom - acrolein in french fries, drowning polar bears, feminized alligators, tumor-inducing cell phones, and obesifying trans-fats - the London smog of December 1952 was a legitimate, bone fide, no-doubt-about-it human-caused pollution disaster.


Second, 1968 was before most of the US environmental laws - CAA, CWA, RCRA, FIFIRA, CERCLA, TSCA, SARA, SDWA and all the other wonderful acronyms - were passed. Thus the book is a kind of a window into environmental attitudes of the time. (I was there but I was paying more attention to hormones at the time. And not in the water, either.) It also provides some insight (though the author’s filter) of environmental attitudes of 1952.



The author, William Wise, is not a professional scientist; he’s published in a variety of areas, mostly “young adult” and children’s books (his best-selling work seems to be Ten Sly Piranhas). Authors of this sort are sometimes called “hacks” but that seems very unfair in the current case; the book is adequately documented and well-written. Mr. Wise just seems to be interested in a lot of different things. However, since he’s not a scientist, this is not a technical work; one map, no charts or tables, numbers interspersed with text when present at all (it’s hard to make “0.9 parts per million sulfur dioxide” flow smoothly into a gripping narrative). Thus we have more or less the standard disaster story: first, historical background (Edward I Longshanks had someone beheaded for using coal instead of wood in his furnace, Bleak House has a passage describing an out-of-towner imagining something is on fire upon first encountering London fog, and the “pea-soupers” of the Sherlock Holmes stories are famous). Then we have the cast of characters: middle-aged housewife with bronchitis, retired doctor with a heart condition, teenage girl rebelling against her parents who won’t let her take her hair out of braids, American newspaperman expecting a visit from his sister-in-law, young couple with an asthmatic newborn, dedicated neighborhood doctor, groundskeeper for a soccer team, public health official, etc. You may now place your bets on who dies. (All of the characters are fictional but “based on” real people). Next, the action starts. A temperature inversion forms over London on December 4th, 1952 and remained in place until December 7th. It remained cold enough for everyone to keep their comfortable home coal fires burning, and witnesses reported the astonishing sight of smoke rising a short distance out of chimneys then flowing downward back to the ground. The smog quickly became so thick that visibility diminished from yards to feet to zero; buses had to have conductors carrying flares walk in front to find their routes, and drivers simply abandoned their cars. (In one nice little human-interest touch, after becoming lost on his way to a patient and walking in a circle back to his own door, the dedicated neighborhood doctor mentioned above recruited a blind patient to lead him on his rounds). The darkness, of course, put extra demand on the city’s coal-fired power stations. And people started to die. Nowadays, “excess deaths” from air pollution are usually “calculated” by increasingly dubious statistical methods, but despite the unsophisticated numerical techniques of 1952 the public health officials quickly determined that something unpleasant was going on. Deaths in London - and that’s just immediate deaths during the smog period with no allowance for long-term effects - were four times what they were during the previous week. The absolute death numbers were greater than the worst period of the 19th century cholera epidemic, and were only exceeded by the worst week of the 1918 influenza pandemic.


The last quarter of the book discusses the aftermath. I was pleasantly surprised at the author’s even-handedness here. Any more recent book would be quick to point the finger at evil multinational corporations, but while Mr. Wise doesn’t let them off the hook, a major part of the blame is assigned to the government, media, and private citizens. It’s not just the government being “in the pocket of corporations”, either; in 1952 England the government, to an extent, was the corporations - the power stations that were a large contributor were all nationalized. The problem of different bureaucracies working at cross purposes that I’m so familiar with was also evident - although the smog problem had been getting worse for centuries, government departments charged with keeping coal mines working forbid private industries from switching to low-sulfur coal, and national health agencies prohibited local health department from making their own pollution control regulations. Although health agencies were aware of previous smog disasters in the Meuse Valley in the 1930s and Pennsylvania in the 1940s, temperature inversions were thought to be an extremely rare phenomenon and the meteorological agencies did not issue a warning of potential problems. Although the BBC interviewed the chief medical officer, who stated a severe crisis was underway and volunteered to be quoted, the interview was never aired, and most media reports were concerned about a fictional crime wave during the smog (there was actually a sharp decrease in crime - the crooks couldn’t see where they were going, either. Lastly, the citizens of London were just very fond of open grate coal fires. No raindrop ever thinks it’s responsible for the flood.


I think I’ll give this one four stars. Of course, there’s a lot more technical information I’d like to see - for one thing, how was sulfur dioxide measured in 1952? (I suspect some sort of chemical test which probably wasn’t very sensitive). I’d also love to see an estimate of exactly what was in London air other than smoke, with some attempts to estimate concentrations. However, for the kind of book this is a good one. If you’re interested in more details, see if you can find a copy of The Big Smoke, now unfortunately out of print. This has a much more detailed account of the atmospheric conditions during the 1952 event. ( )

There had been previous 'killer smogs', but this was the first one to affect a major metropolitan area, killing an estimated 4000 people in four days. A good book about an unusual, man-made disaster. ( )

Has a touch of frantic environmentalism to it, having been written in the late 60's, but nonetheless a very interesting tale of a large scale catastrophe. ( )