SPEAKING FREELY Not to worry, old chap
By Ronan Thomas
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
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LONDON - You might think this city had never faced threats before. Amid the
current chatter about an imminent terrorist attack and assumed forthcoming
disaster, Londoners are putting things in perspective with a glance at their
own history.
London has suffered disasters of all kinds, both man-made and natural. From the
Roman occupation to the present day, armed destruction, plague, fire, water,
chemical poisoning, aerial bombing and terrorist attacks have all made their
mark. The threat to life and fear of disaster, even if much reduced today, are
nothing new to London.
Invasion and destruction. London saw its first recorded catastrophe as
the newly created Roman settlement of Londinium, when it was burned to the
ground by the forces of Queen Boudicca in her revolt of AD 60-61. The city was
abandoned to the advancing rebels on the orders of Roman governor Suetonius out
of strategic necessity, allowing for an orgy of destruction and mass
decapitation of its inhabitants.
Plague. Events such as London's outbreak of the Black Death between 1348
and 1350 killed perhaps one-third of the city's population. In 1665, plague in
London - as recorded in Daniel Defoe's 1705 Journal of the Plague Year -
killed between 70,000 and 100,000 Londoners. Together with later outbreaks of
cholera, typhus and smallpox, London has a long record of biological suffering.
Fire. After the plague came London's Great Fire of 1666: four nights of
terror entailing massive destruction of property, homelessness for up to a
quarter of a million people and mass refugee flight, although mercifully few
deaths. Only six were recorded. But the costs to the city were horrendous -
reconstruction cost 800 times the city's annual income. At the time, the fire
was believed to be an act of divine displeasure at the wickedness of London
rather than the accidental negligence of a single household.
Water.Before the building of the Embankment in the 19th
century and the Thames Barrier in the 20th, the River Thames presented
Londoners not only with unpleasantness but also very real risks. Until
relatively recently, the river was well known as a toxic artery carrying
effluent of every kind: household rubbish, chemicals, waterborne diseases and
even corpses. This was typified by the Great Stink of 1858 when the pungent
combination of raw sewage and summer heat forced parliament to close
temporarily. The Thames has been a killer in more recent times too. In 1928, 14
died in central London flooding, and in 1953, the Thames Estuary and parts of
the Essex coastline suffered from unprecedented flood damage.
Chemical poisoning. Aside from the filth in the Thames, toxins took to
the air in the great smogs and pea-soup fogs. The industrializing metropolis
was enveloped by the smoke of thousands of wood- and coal-burning fires and
factory chimneys, producing the great sunset vistas captured by artist Claude
Monet in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but also lethally mixing with
London's weather patterns to kill and create respiratory distress for
thousands. Charles Dickens memorably recorded the dangers of the fogs in Bleak
House and in his journalism. For him, the city had become horribly
fascinating in its depravity. He called London the new Babylon.
Periodically, London fog became a form of self-inflicted chemical warfare. In
the most famous incident, in December 1952, between 4,000 and 12,000 people are
now thought to have died as a direct result of a vicious cocktail of sulfur
dioxide, soot and smoke, and an unusual winter weather system. It took Clean
Air Acts between 1956 and 1968 to remove the fogs altogether.
Aerial bombing. Twice in the last century, London faced aerial
bombardment. During the Great War of 1914-18, Zeppelin airship and Gotha bomber
raids on central London killed more than 600 civilians. In the Blitz of 1940-41
an estimated 43,000 were killed as Luftwaffe bombers and flying bombs destroyed
or damaged much of the city's East End and more than 1.25 million homes in
Greater London.
Terrorist attack. "The attack must have all the shocking senselessness
of gratuitous blasphemy," wrote one of the fictional conspirators of Joseph
Conrad's 1907 novel The Secret Agent. Conrad's work tapped into fear at
the time of shadowy terrorist groups aiming to import anarchist bombing
campaigns into London from Europe. In 1936, film audiences felt the chill of
fictional London terrorism in Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage, in which a
London bus carries a bomb into the West End to deadly effect. More recently,
and tangibly, Irish Republican Army murders by bomb and assassination (46 in
mainland Britain since 1969 with dozens in London itself) brought a new
dimension to London life and removed rubbish bins from subway and train
stations seemingly forever.
Risks, history and perspective. The recorded historical response of
Londoners against perceived danger has always been one of ignorance blended
with a strong dose of fatalism. A sense of dark superstition, religious
destiny, complacent denial or sheer bloody-mindedness (exemplified by Winston
Churchill's "London can take it" Blitz spirit) have been common reactions.
Today, when people tell you that al-Qaeda suicide bombers will always get
through, they are merely echoing former prime minister Stanley Baldwin's words
in the 1930s concerning the prospect of an air attack on London. The whole
industry of dire prediction, including the current official obsession with
London's "resilience" and "networked solutions", recalls civil-defense
preparations for London in 1939 that were, in hindsight, appallingly
inadequate. The "Millennium Bug" fiasco, to take another example, is now itself
a historical example of hysteria rather than reality.
As they travel around the city, Londoners can reflect on the fact that no act
of terrorism or acts taken together have ever removed a city from existence,
despite current concerns about possible nuclear or "dirty" devices. Instead, it
is when people lose faith in society itself that history suggests real
disaster. And the history of London in particular shows that out of disaster
often comes renewal.
Ronan Thomas is a historian and former risk consultant living in London.
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest writers to have
their say.
Please click hereif you are interested in
contributing.
