Big Fog

The yellow jog came creeping down The bridges, till the houses' walls Seemed changed to shadows, and St. Paul's Loomed like a bubble o'er the town. --Oscar Wilde

A swirling fog held London in a clammy clasp last week, muffling its powerful pulsebeat to a mere mark-time. The air tasted vaguely sulphurous and had the faintest odor of wet ashes.

Street lights swung suspended in midair like furry halos. Snub-nosed busses, bunched in convoys, crawled in low gear behind inspectors pacing ahead with lanterns. Three passengers were killed in a suburban train crash; hundreds of fenders were dented.

Anywhere else, the fog that seeped into noses, ears and throats would have frayed thousands of tempers, but Londoners had long since come to regard a Big Fog as a kind of picnic. Under the cloak of pea-soup anonymity, whistling as they felt their way, strangers walked and talked with strangers in a manner unthinkable in bright daylight.

Newspapers called it the worst fog in 20 years. Officially, it was no record. The women clerks in the Air Ministry who test fogs by searching from the roof for 14 well-known landmarks (like Nelson's Column), reported that they could just discern "Object X," a building 30 yards away. Weather bugs, who call fogs by colors, dubbed this a "yellow"--worse than a "white" but not as bad as a "black."

The Bad Old Days. Like most of London's weather, last week's fog was not as bad as fogs "used to be." Cabbies remembered when "yer couldn't see yer blinkin' 'and in front of yer fice."

That fogs have eased in the last 40 years is borne out by fact as well as old fogies. The London Fog Inquiry Board in 1903 reported that visibility from atop St. Paul's dome averaged only a half-mile daily between 2 and 3 p.m. from Dec. 20, 1902 to March 17, 1903. The Air Ministry found that during the winter of 1943-44 average visibility had risen to one and one-quarter miles.

The difference lies in the fact that London nowadays burns far less fog-making soft coal. Although the yearly discharge of soot and ashes is down to 300 tons per sq. mi., London's diligent Smoke Abatement Society is by no means satisfied. For one thing, deaths from respiratory diseases increase during foggy weather. But, as a Smoke Abatement spokesman unequivocally stated: "The most injurious effect of fog is more subtle--in obstructing sunlight and daylight."

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