Coal

© Roy Hall
2nd January 2006
[last article Home Education, Regulations and Control 19/12/05]

I purchased coal, A Human History, by Barbara Freese, at Angus and Roberrtson for just $6.95. I guess coal is not a subject a lot of people would want to read about. It is a well researched and well-written book.

Barbara Freese was Assistant Attorney General in Minnesota for more than twelve years. She helped to enforce her state's air polution laws.

She refers to London's historic "Black Fog" December 1952. I was in Cyprus at that time but Beverley's mother was in London. A previous bad fog in 1950 I remember well; I was sixty miles from London and it was very bad there. I did not see the sun for four days. The visbility there was at times just a few feet. Each day I looked at it and wondered when it would end.

Dec 5th -9th 1952
"A temperature inversion trapped the cities smoke close the ground. On the first day it aqs still a white fog, but so extraordinary dense that the cars and buses moved slower than a walk, and the opera had to be cancelled when fog seeped into the theatre and made it impossible for the singers to see the conductor. By the last day, the fog had turned black, visbility was limited to a mere eleven inches, and the hopitals were full of Londoners perishing from the smoke. Many of the 4,000 or so people killed by this eposode never made it to the hospital but died on the streets; fifty bodies were rmoved from one small city park. In 1956, after seven hundred years of compaints about the coal smoke in London, Parliament finally banned the burning of soft coal in central London, and the air immediately improved."
Barbara Freese

Just one of the many reasons why we came to Australia.

[Roy Hall is Beverley Paine's father. The above is an excerpt from one of his letters, reprinted with permission.]