Digging out the truth of the real impact of coal
For centuries coal powered Britain and its industrial growth, but it also exacted a huge toll on the nation’s health. On World COPD Day, which affects 3 million people in the UK, Professor Anthony Seaton traces the grubby history of coal’s ascendance and
We often hear a warning on the radio that pollution levels in cities are high. To most people in Europe this conjures up a mental picture of cars, buses and lorries belching out exhaust smoke in a congested street. To people of my generation it reminds us of the cold winter days in the 1950s when the fog descended, making our eyes sore and stopping us being able see the houses across the road. To Australians it may mean another forest fire. To someone in California it means a stinging haze that obscures distant views, and to people living near a factory it means the smoke from the chimney. For some it is a stench, for some a sense of irritation of the eyes and nose or a cause of cough, and for others a loss of visibility; but there are many to whom it causes neither physical nor mental discomfort and who might reasonably wonder what all the fuss is about.
Yet the announcement on the radio is then accompanied by news items that solemnly inform us that the rise in pollution levels will kill thousands of us and urging governments to do something about it.
What is this deadly air pollution and just how deadly is it? In our cities it has a history. From the 14th century onwards fleets of ships took sea-coal down the east coast of Britain to London, where it was burned by brewers, dyers, soap and salt makers, lime burners, and hundreds of small trades in their furnaces within the city.
In 1661, four years before the Great Plague struck and five years before the City of London was largely consumed by fire, the scholar and diarist John Evelyn (1620-1706), one of the original Fellows of the Royal Society, wrote a tract addressed to King Charles II called Fumifugium: or the Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoake of London Dissipated, complete with sycophantic dedication – “It was one day as I was walking in Your Majesties Palace at Whitehall (where I have sometimes the honour to refresh myself with the sight of your illustrious presence, which is a joy to your peoples hearts) that a presumptuous smoake issuing from one or two tunnelsneer Northumberland-house, and not far from Scotland-yard, did so invade the Court; that all the rooms and galleries and places about it were filled and infested with it; and to such a degree, that men could hardly discern one another for the clowd, and none could support, without manifest inconveniency.”
In spite of this, his blunt exposition of the perils to human health, trees, flowers and buildings from coal smoke went unheeded by the king. Coal continued to come down and be burnt and Evelyn’s recommendations for abatement fell on deaf ears.
An early note of the health effects of London fogs was by the physician Sir Charles Floyer (1649-1734) who in 1698 wrote a detailed account of the disease asthma, from which he suffered himself. He commented: “Any kind of smoak offends the spirits of the asthmatic, and for that reason many of them cannot bear the air of London, whose smoak, like fire itself, irritates their spirits into an expansion.”
In a 1933 reprint of Fumifugium, the novelist Rose Macaulay drew attention to the then current problems, using Evelyn’s words: “Still do the chimneys of London and of the more dreadful cities to the north belch forth noxious and gloomy vapours from their sooty jaws, so that these cities resemble rather the face of Mount Etna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli and the suburbs of Hell, than an assembly of rational creatures.”
Nevertheless, not everyone complained and some even liked the smogs, speaking of the ‘London Peculiar’. Indeed, London became known to artists such as JMW Turner, Claude Monet and Whistler for the impressionistic effects of the clouds of pollution on sunlight.
You can’t see air, but you are always aware of its presence. It may be warm or cold, humid or dry. If you run you need to breathe more of it into your lungs, and when you sing you learn to control the way you breathe it in and out. Sometimes you can taste it or smell it. Like water, it may be completely transparent, hazy or opaque, its clarity depending on the amount of particulate matter in it. Sometimes, in spring or
By the time the weather had changed and the fog had cleared on 9 December 1952, at least 4,000 excess deaths had occurred in the city
summer, it may make your eyes and nose stream with hay fever.
In a sense, everything in air is natural – that is, produced by the planet and its inhabitants, animal, plant and microbial – but we tend to regard some components as pollutants because they imply some harm to us, the dominant species living on the Earth, or to our fellow animals, plants and buildings.
Everything in the air is in some sort of equilibrium; pollution implies a disturbance of that equilibrium. Even aquatic organisms are part of this as, with a few deep-sea microbial exceptions, they also depend on oxygen or carbon dioxide derived from the atmosphere.
In 1952 Britain had suffered a cold November with a persistent anticyclone and the night of 4-5 December was cold with clear skies. The air was moist and a mist started to form in the morning of the 5th. The inhabitants of London lit their coal fires and the fog became denser as the condensing water in the cold air mixed with smoke and was trapped by warmer air above. On the 6 and 7 December the fog was so dense that it was sometimes impossible to see a yard ahead, and transport ceased.
The hospitals filled with people, mostly elderly, choking to death, though there was little effect on young people, save possibly for small infants. By the time the weather had changed and the fog had cleared on 9 December, at least 4,000 excess deaths had occurred in the city. The Meteorological Office later estimated that 1,000 tonnes of soot and 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid had been emitted each day, together with sulphur dioxide that was converted into 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid. The acidity of the choking fog was illustrated by 13 deaths among cattle at the annual Smithfield show in the city.
Prize cattle, kept in carefully cleaned stalls, died while others in less well attended stalls survived, the ammonia from their urine neutralising the acid of the pollution.
In public health terms, this episode was worse even than the cholera epidemic of 1854.
The people living in Britain’s cities were used to fog and smoke, but this episode was something altogether different. Some attempts were made to attribute the deaths to influenza by a government opposed to further regulation, but public pressure, largely expressed in the newspapers, led to an inquiry under Sir Hugh Beaver, an engineer and industrialist who was later to found the Guinness Book of Records.
The committee’s report, which stressed the cost of air pollution in terms of damage to property and loss of productivity as well as effects on health, persuaded a reluctant government to pass the first Clean Air Act of 1956. This was the first nail in the coffin of King Coal: official recognition that coal killed not only miners.
● Professor Anthony Seaton, a consultant chest/copd physician became Director of British Coal’s Institute of Occupational Medicine in 1978 and when the National Coal Board withdrew their funding he led the Institute to independence as a research charity which will celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2019. Professor Seaton also headed the research that led to miners getting compensated for COPD as an industrial disease.
● Extract taken from his book, Farewell, King Coal published by Dunedin at £24.99.
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