It must be difficult for anyone born after the end of the 1950s to imagine what
British fogs were like before then.
The worst fog I remember was in the late 1950s. I was
on my way back from the Washington Singer Laboratories in Exeter to my lodgings in Pinhoe. It
was my custom to make this journey by bike every day, and that day was no
exception as there had been no fog in the morning.
On the way back it was impossible to ride my bike
because I couldn't see far enough ahead of me. I had to walk with the
bike, guided by the kerb which I could just see. It was crucially
important to keep a map in my head of where I was and this required a
surprising amount of concentration as distances were difficult to judge. Had I, for example, arrived at a
bend in the road? Or was it a turning into another road? . Fortunately I
did come across a few road signs which I could just read if
they were close enough. It was all quite frightening, and the memory
stays with me. Fortunately I did get back
to my lodgings eventually, but it was a close thing.
Neil Cryer
These fogs were a mixture of natural mist
(water droplets) with smoke, soot and tar from countless chimneys. At that time
almost all family homes were heated with coal fires, and factories and power
stations worked from coal too. So a better word to describe the fogs would be 'smogs'
although I don't ever remember hearing that word while I was growing up in
the 1940s and 1950s.
Smog is a contraction of the two words 'smoke' and 'fog'.
How I remember the fogs of the first half of the 20th century.
This photo appears on a number of websites, but no-one so far has
responded to my queries about its copyright. If you own the
copyright, please get in touch.
Fogs could be really dense. I remember them from my childhood, but
they were common earlier in the century and in Victorian times.
Quite apart
from the problem of limiting visibility, fogs were also extremely dirty, and they
could last days if there was no wind. They were at their worst in winter
when the air was naturally more damp, and coal fires were burning in every
house. The extra hours of darkness made visibility worse, and the
street lighting was much less
effective.
Being caught out in a bad fog could be dangerous. It was all too
easy to lose one's way, because one street tended to look like any other, and
buses could not see their way to run. At my
school, the rule was that if a
certain tree could not be seen from a certain window, then the school packed
up for day to allow time for everyone to get home before it thickened as
darkness fell.
These old fogs were widely known as 'pea soupers', presumably because of their
likeness to pea soup. This may say something about the diets of people
living in the 1800s and early 1900s, as I don't think that pea soup would be
the first likeness that would come to mind for anyone today.
Pat Cryer
The fogs were dangerous for old people and anyone with breathing
difficulties. They had to stay indoors with doors and windows shut.
Nevertheless the fog still managed to get in somehow. A quotation from a Sherlock Holmes book
from 1917 describes those old-style fogs well:
"... for the fourth [day] after pushing back our chairs
from breakfast, we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us
and condensing in oily drops upon the window panes .. "
The Bruce-Partington Plans, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I remember my mother taking down the net curtains to wash after one
particularly bad fog.
So what happened in the late 1950s that made these fogs a thing of the
past in Britain? In 1956 the Government passed the Clean Air Act which
legislated for zones where smokeless fuels had to be burnt and which
relocated power stations to rural areas. Later acts legislated still further
against air pollutants.
This website Join me in the 1900s is also known as
Join me in the 1900's and is ©
Pat Cryer.
The 1940s and 1950s are also written as the 1940's and 1950's
