Edmund Reid

London Fog: A Memoir
Christine L Corton
Cambridge Massachusets: Harvard University Press, 2015
ISBN:9780674088351
Hardcover; 391pp; illus; notes; index
£22.95
“Even now I can recall the foggy evenings, and hear again the raucous cries of the newspaper
boys: “ Another horrible murder, murder, mutilation, Whitechapel.” Such was the burden of their
ghastly song.”
So wrote Sir Melville Macnaghten. But, of course, the nights when Jack killed were not foggy.
The image of Jack disappearing wraithlike into a swirling pea-souper is one of the enduring canards
about Jack, but the famous London fog - or smog, a mixture of smoke and fog - is so ingrained in
both Ripperlore and London history that it’s almost impossible to escape it. It’s been gone now for
fifty-three years, but even today non-Londoners still refer to the capital as “the smoke”.
Christine Corton discusses Jack the Ripper and the fog, but in a chapter about the danger the fog presented for
women. The chapter opens with reference to the closure by Richard Mansfield of his play Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and
moves on to Marie Belloc Lownde’s masterful The Lodger, which opens on a day “so cold, so foggy, so-so drizzly”, and
a knock on the door that heralds the peculiar presence of a desperately needed lodger, Mr Sleuth. She also mentions
William Hardinge’s novel Out of the Fog, published in 1888 though it had been serialised the previous year. This story
portrays the fog as a prison, which it must have been for a great many women, its thickness determining how far she
dare walk outside, if she dare walk outside at all.
Lots of authors referred to the dangers
that coud lay in wait in the fog. In Love
and Mr Lewisham H G Wells painted a
picture of the fog - “…the street lamps,
blurred smoky orange at one’s nearest,
and vanishing at twenty yards into dim
haze, seemed to accentuate the infinite
need of protection on the part of a
delicate young lady who had already
traversed three winters of fogs, thornily
alone.” I’d always thought - when I had
thought about it at all - that the London
fog was a side effect of the Industrial
Revolution, was born in the 19th century
and lasted into the 1950s. The geography
would always have made London a little
prone to mists - the Thames basin is
surrounded by low hills, a mist making
environment, especially in the early
morning. But smog - the smoke from
fires burning wood and sea-coal (brought by boat from Newcastle) mixing with the fog - was in fact a problem during
the Elizabethan period. Elizabeth I complained of it, saying she was “greatly grieved and annoyed with the taste and
smoke of sea-coales”.
The diarist John Evelyn, who thought the sulfurous clouds caused by the burning of sea-coal had turned London into
a “hell upon earth”, proposed moving industry elsewhere and surrounding London with flowers and hedges. His idea met
with the enthusiastic approval of Charles II, but nothing was done. Nor would anything be done until the 1950s. On 4
December 1952 a thick yellow fog hung over London and everywhere up to 20 miles from the centre, and this unwanted
guest stayed for a week, even penetrating buildings. This “Great Killer Fog” claimed 12,000 lives. It was an MP named
Gerald Nabarro who eventually got the Clean Air Act pushed into law.
It was in Victorian times that the thick, yellow fog that lay heavy beyond the Bunting’s red damask curtains really
became a feature of London. Some sixty of these fog occurred every year. East London invariably copped the worst of it,
Ripperologist 147 December 2015 61