The Great Smog of London, 1952: A Memoir and a Warning
On the day that the Great Smog descended on London — Friday, December 5, 1952 — my mother, Irene Glausiusz, was working as a junior shorthand typist at her first job in a stockbrokers’ office in the City of London. She was sixteen years old and had recently graduated from Pitman’s Secretarial College in Southampton Row. In a story that I never tire of hearing, she told me how my grandfather, David Harris, came to collect her from work in the middle of the afternoon, as the pea soup fog was thickening.
“We realized that there was a fog descending on London,” my mother says. “I suppose I would have left work at 5.30 p.m. and got the bus home. At some point during the afternoon my father walked in and said, ‘get your coat, the buses are stopping running, there’s no transport, and we’re going home.’”
“So I looked at the secretary,” my mother continued, “who in my imagination was about 100 years old, she was probably about fifty, she was the old dragon in the office. She said, ‘oh if your father says you’ve got to go home, bye bye.’ So I got my coat and we walked home [to Hackney, in East London] from Liverpool Street. I don’t know how long it took us to walk home — but an exceedingly long time.”
Without her father, my mother said, “I wouldn’t have known where I was going. The fog was so dense that nobody could see where they were going. If he hadn’t been with me, I don’t know what I would have done; I might have been marooned in the office all night. When we got home, all my friends had a similar experience: there was a dark rim around their skirt or slip, of the grime that had settled into the city.”
The Great Smog lasted five days, until December 9, 1952. The smog — a word created from a combination of “smoke” and “fog” was triggered by a temperature inversion, in which a layer of warm air trapped the stagnant, cold air at ground level. The inversion stopped sulphurous smoke from coal fires (used to heat homes at the time) from rising. This air pollution caused the deaths of 4000 people and possibly up to 12,000. The yellow-black smog, stinking of rotten eggs, was so toxic it was reported to have choked cows to death in the fields, according to the BBC. Memorably documented in the Netflix series The Crown, the Great Smog led to the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1956, which banned the emission of black smoke from chimneys, trains and industrial furnaces.
Even so, and sixty-five years later, about seven million people die each year from exposure to air pollution, according to the World Health Organization. On December 6, 2017, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) warned that 17 million babies under the age of one — three quarters of them in Asia — are breathing toxic air, putting their brain development at risk. The report, Danger in the Air, notes that breathing in particulate air pollution can damage babies’ brain tissue and undermine cognitive development, permanently impairing the children’s futures. Air pollution also significantly increases the risk of low birth weight in babies, according to a study conducted in London.
In November this year, air pollution in the Indian city of Delhi grew so bad that doctors compared it to smoking more than two packs of cigarettes a day. Delhi’s chief minister Arvind Kejriwal was quoted as saying that the city had turned into a gas chamber. The city of London is not immune to air pollution, either, although these days it comes not from coal but from polluting vehicles. Some 9,500 Londoners still die every year from long-term exposure to air pollution, according to a statement by Mayor of London Sadiq Khan. In an action plan unveiled in July 2016, Khan called for a variety of measures to combat air pollution, including the introduction of a central London Ultra-Low Emission Zone in 2019.
My own city of Modiin, Israel — a quiet place dotted with parks and trees — is not pollution-free, either. According to Breathe Life, a World Health Organization initiative, levels of atmospheric particulate matter in Modiin are 2.3 times the WHO safe level. Some 1,219 people die in Israel from an air pollution-related disease each year. (You can look up your own city here.)
We can certainly do more to remedy this dire situation — for example, choosing to walk every day instead of driving short distances. Significant change would save money and lives: According to research by Mark Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering Stanford University, shifting to 100% renewable energy by 2050 would prevent 90 million premature deaths.
Even though I wasn’t there to witness my mother and my grandfather walking side-by-side through the toxic gloom, I can still picture them, in my mind’s eye, on their long trudge home. My grandfather was a man of few words — he was famously said to never to use two words where one would do — but the love and protection he offered my mother moves me every time I hear her story. Maybe that story also inspires my own determination to teach my children to protect the environment, and to encourage them to walk to school every day. As children, we need this guidance and direction from our parents. Or, as my mother said of my grandfather, “I don’t know what I would have done without him.”
