Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE DAMAGE DONE BY SMOKE. Few people have any idea of the immense and varied damage done by smoke. What has been well called " The Black Smoke Tax " falls upon everybody living in our cities. The tax is levied on buildings, furniture, curtains, wall-paper, "goods in shops and warehouses, trees and other vegetation, paint, and clothes, and,above .all on personal health and well being. The extent of the damage is not realised largely because it is so difficult to measure. It is only recently that any successful efforts have been made to arrive at a reliable cash value for some of the damage. An interesting report (reprinted in the appendix) works out the difference in the cost of the weekly wash in working-class houses in a clean and dirty town respectively. The conclusion, confirmed by a certificate from a leading firm of accountants, who state that the figures are on a very conservative basis, shows that the cost of household washing in Manchester would be reduced by about £250,000 a year if Manchester was as clean as Harrogate. Again, we may estimate the extra cost of washing one single item of clothing : namely, collars. In Manchester a collar can hardly be worn more than one day ; in really clean air it can easily be worn two or three days. The pre-war charge for washing a collar was one penny, so that assuming one extra collar to be needed every other day, the cost of living in Manchester in this item alone may be taken at Jd. per head per day. It is interesting to speculate as to what proportion of the population wears reasonably clean collars; but taking it as low as one in ten, the extra annual cost ofwashing Manchester collars owing to the smoky atmosphere works out at well over £50,000 at pre-war prices. Another interesting case where it has proved po...