There was an admirable journalist who signed himself TOUCHSTONE who filled the back page of The Exeter Flying Post with 'Local Gossip'. On 5th December 1891 he reported a great fog:
"People a good deal older than I am have assured me that they never saw in Exeter a more impenetrable fog than that which settled over the city - especially in the less elevated parts - on Sunday last. It was absolutely impossible to see more than two feet ahead and many persons were literally lost.
A friend of mine told me he heard - he couldn't see - two young women discussing as to where they were, and eventually one of them declined to move a step further than where she was standing in the middle of the road until the mist lifted. The fog came up the valley of the Exe in great banks, whose limits could be easily distinguished. It filled the places of worship till the congregation on one side could scarcely see those on the other side, and being generally inhaled, the result was that 'coughing drowned the parson's saw' to an unusual extent..
I remember feeling my way through such dense, coal-dust-laden, poisonous fogs from the nineteen-forties, when I was a boy in Liverpool. We always found them exciting. People do not fear them these days and many perhaps can hardly imagine them. There's progress for you! Such fogs, however, were a direct product of the Industrial Revolution. There perhaps, was regression!
'Touchstone' was no fool when it came to the plays of the Bard. I am always pleased when Victorians et.al. quote (in this case, misquote) from Shakespeare. It is a kind of bonding exercise which still works across the centuries, The coded message is: ''Let us rejoice in the genius of our National Poet!'
Nota Bene: This impenetrable fog, it would seem, didn't stop the good people of Exeter filling the churches .
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