On Sunday, 1 December 2013 15:52:40 UTC, Dawlish wrote:
On Sunday, December 1, 2013 11:01:58 AM UTC, John Hall wrote:

In article ,



Lawrence Jenkins writes:



John: For London it wasn't just a foggy spell it was 'the' foggy



spell and remarkably ten years after the 52 fog/smog. 62 smog/fog



was almost equal to 1952; since then we have never had another



spell quite like that. Probably the two worse post war and possibly



pre war fog/smog events in the twentieth century to date; for



London that is.







The good thing was that the 1962 fog resulted in a far smaller death



toll than in 1952, thanks to the "Clean Air" act starting to take



effect. Even though emissions of the nasty stuff hadn't yet ceased they



were much lower than 10 years previously.







Out her in rural Surrey I don't remember the 1962 fog as having been too



bad. (I was only four in 1952 and don't remember that fog at all.)



--



John Hall "He crams with cans of poisoned meat



The subjects of the King,



And when they die by thousands G.K.Chesterton:



Why, he laughs like anything." from "Song Against Grocers"



In industrial Castleford it was appalling. Not fog, but nasty smelling smog, which necessitated scarves around one's mouth to attempt to strain the pollution out of it. I remember it very well, though I was very young. My parents were not able to get home to Pontefract on Christmas Eve 1962 and us all had to stay with an aunt and uncle. Only one prezzie on Christmas morning wasn't fun! Santa didn't know where I was and delivered them to Pontefract, of course!



If you stood in the middle of a 5m wide pavement, you could see neither the road, nor the walls of the terraces, the smog was that thick. The bus conductors were hanging out of the bus calling the distance from the kerb to the driver - before they stopped running, of course, leaying us stranded! We had great difficulty finding our way only 200m along the pavement to our relations' flat in that fog. By far the worst I've ever known and thank goodness we don't see the like of it any more.


Blimey Paul. you are no spring chicken then?

As to the smog and fog : call me masochistic but I still love the stuff that feeling of enclosure when it came down with sunset late in a November early December was just wonderful.