03 October 2016
Fading Icons – The Pea Souper
by J.R.Thomas
In the early years of the Second World War, James Lees-Milne, socialite, secret diarist, architectural historian, and at the time, junior member of Britain’s armed forces, was driving from his parent’s home in Worcestershire back to his house in Chelsea. It was November and thick fog covered the whole of the south of England. As he drove up the Great West Road into London, the fog combined with the smoke from the power stations in west London and a million household hearths became an almost impenetrable barrier to further progress. The blackout was in force so only slits of light glimmered from the car headlights; no heaters in cars of that era, so a fogged up windscreen completed the dangerous illusion of being the last man driving. Lees-Milne edged along at walking pace, alarmed to find he was only passing Slough, about to give up and spend the night in the car. Then; salvation. On the pavement appeared the figure of a young sailor, with his right thumb swinging, hitchhiking.
Lees-Milne stopped; a bargain was struck. The sailor climbed into the passenger seat, wound the window down and stuck his head out. He then called directions to Lees-Milne at the wheel and they proceeded slowly into Chelsea and to Lees-Milne’s exquisitely arranged town house (the rest of the evening is not relevant to our story).
Those of us who are addicts of the Sherlock Holmes stories are well used to the swirling threats lurking in London pea-soupers. In the dangerous reaches of Limehouse or Spitalfields villains go about the very nastiest of their appalling trades as the fog descends, a yellow grey swirling blanket which obscures and chokes. Respectable citizens collide with a fleeting figure; life is silently snuffed out. Prominent gentlemen shuffle under cover of the shrouding cloud into, and occasionally out of, opium dens. As Doctor Watson taps nervously along a fog bound pavement a pile of rags crumpled on a doorstep suddenly rears up to be revealed as “Holmes! My dear fellow! You gave me such a fright.”
Fog, or more properly smog, was one of those things that used to define London as much as Big Ben and Trafalgar Square, an insidious hidden killer, but one almost glamorized for the mystery it lent the city, from Dickens in “Bleak House” (Dickens knew London fogs only too well from his upbringing in the exceptionally smoky caverns of what is now Bloomsbury) via the film thriller “Midnight Lace”, through every version of Sherlock Holmes ever filmed, to, of all movies of innocence, “Mary Poppins”. By the time “Mary Poppins” was made, smog was already on its deathbed and London chimney sweeps were becoming extinct. In 1952 an exceptionally bad autumn fog is thought to have led directly or indirectly to the deaths of around 30,000 people. The resultant outcry led rapidly to the 1956 Clean Air Act which banned open domestic fires, put severe restrictions on industrial smoke, and led to the closure of all the inner London power stations – now in new uses as art galleries (Tate Modern) and Apple hip-quarters (Battersea).
It is odd that smog could ever be thought to be romantic; it was creepingly deadly as it attacked the respiratory systems of the old and sick, carcogenic in its longer more sinister aspects, and created conditions in which healing was delayed and skin infections multiplied. And it was filthy; there was an oiliness in the air, a sort of thin yellow grease which streaked and smeared everything. Windows had to be cleaned almost daily in the worst of it, traffic accidents multiplied, pedestrians tripped, and fell, and stumbled in front of buses – and were, no doubt, sometimes pushed.
It affected even the sociological makeup of London. From the time of the medieval development of the Great Wen it was realised that living conditions were much more desirable to the west than to the east; the prevailing westerly winds moving the thick poisonous blanket slowly towards the Continent, melding the fog coming down from the Thames Valley with the output of thousands of chimneys, and braziers (ironically often used to mark key street junctions but of course merely intensifying the greasy soupy fug). By the time the air had drifted to the east of the City, the poor of the East End were breathing industrial gases, blinded by rank fog and choked by pollutants. So of course the smart set lived west in Knightsbridge and Chelsea, and the poor were crammed in Mile End and Whitechapel, often unable to afford to heat their own rooms but choked by the smoke from the coal fires of the western rich. It was astonishing that those living conditions did not create a revolution.
Modern buses and trains no longer have the excuse of thick fog to explain their failure to run to time, or at all. Nor, thank goodness, do trains pass signals unseen in the grey gloom, their disoriented crews lost until they hit the stationary train in front. Both the terrible crashes at Harrow of October 1952 and at Lewisham accident in December 1957 occurred in thick fog, the Lewisham one in such appalling conditions that for a while the rescuers were unsure as to what or how many trains were involved.
In spite of the current Mayor of London’s campaign to clean London’s air, it is very much cleaner than it has been since the eighteenth century (though diesel pollutants are a new and unseen threat to our long-term health indeed). Now, grey Novembers offer just the mildest hint of what once was. It is rare indeed not to be able to see from one end of a street, even the longest, to the other. It is possible on a few rare autumn days to sail up the Shard to see – nothing, just cloud; or for the exceptionally lucky, to find a grey fluffy cushion below with just a few City towers poking their snouts into the sunshine above the gloomy streets around their feet. St Paul’s Cathedral used to also offer this experience occasionally, though it was rare for the top gallery to be above the cloud. The cathedral authorities seem to close the great spiral staircase now if visibility from the top is in anyway impaired, whether for fear of having to return disgruntled visitors money because of a lack of view of anything but cloud, or for dread of litigation from those slipping on damp stone, we do not know.
The fading of traditional London smog we cannot regret; it was an unpleasant malevolent killer with no redeeming features. But a nice thick autumn fog, where all is changed, the great city overcome by the power of the earth, when the familiar becomes mysterious, landmarks vanish and horizons shrink, where sounds are sometimes muffled and sometimes amplified, where we find our hats from the back of the hall cupboard and wrap our scarves that bit tighter to find London parks become enchanted forests and her streets deep caverns, where dawn is late and dusk early, where we leave work a bit sooner to lock out the night for the warmth and comfort of home; we might just wish for that.
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