London Event

London Event
Type:	Battle
First appearance:	The Web of Fear
Appearances:	PROSE: Doctor Who and the Web of Fear [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Web of Fear (novelisation)"] COMIC: The Heralds of Destruction [+]Loading...["The Heralds of Destruction (comic story)"] AUDIO: The Web of Time [+]Loading...["The Web of Time (audio story)"]
Dates:	Sometime in the 1960s or 1975
Location:	London
Combatants
Great Intelligence
London
Leaders
Great Intelligence
Second Doctor, Colonel Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart, Corporal Nicholas Blake
Strength
Robot Yetis, the Web
British Army, the Doctor's companions
Result
Earth victory Defeat of the Great Intelligence The Doctor meets Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart

The London Event (PROSE: Downtime) or London Underground Incident (AUDIO: Time Heals) was the later official name for the takeover of London and its underground rail system by robot Yeti controlled by the Great Intelligence. (PROSE: Downtime)

Dating the event

There were multiple accounts as to when the London Event happened. During the event itself, Edward Travers stated that his last encounter with the Second Doctor, in 1935, was "over forty years ago". (TV: The Web of Fear) In line with this, one source claimed that it took place in March 1975. (PROSE: The Enfolded Time) Other sources placed the event in August 1966, (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy) 1968, (PROSE: Downtime, Revolution Man, HOMEVID: Global Conspiracy?) and February 1969, (PROSE: The Forgotten Son) , A Sourcebook for Field Agents) Despite these contradictions, one account called it a fixed point in time. (PROSE: Home Fires Burn)

History

The event began with mist across central London, causing a rash of disappearances. On the fifth of the month (which may have been the start date), the mist had reached the Natural History Museum and the affected area was evacuated and cordoned off. The mist kept spreading, reaching South Kensington tube the next day; by the seventh, a web-like fungus infected the Underground, causing that to be closed off.

The British Army, from a command hub based in a Second World War transit camp at Goodge Street tube station, tried to hold back fungus and Yeti. Radios could not broadcast through the mist and while telephones were used at first, the Yeti soon destroyed the phone lines. The army tried laying their own lines between station bases. What the Yeti were was unclear to the average soldier, with Corporal Blake believing this attack must be a foreign power (and Travers was "off his nut" about aliens) while even weeks in, Weams was unaware the Yeti were robots. At some point, the fungus ceased growing. (TV: The Web of Fear)

River Song visited London during this time, trying to acquire a valuable painting on behalf of the art collector Mx Neon. She encountered Captain Ben Knight and his soldiers who were sweeping the streets of Soho and Bloomsbury, searching for stragglers who had evaded the evacuation. The Intelligence, thinking River Song was the Doctor, ambushed them, killing all of his men while River and Knight escaped via River Song's vortex manipulator. Together, River and Knight destroyed the Intelligence's base in Euston station, including one of its pyramids. As a result, the Intelligence was forced to relocate its base elsewhere in the London Underground. (AUDIO: The Web of Time)

Ramón Salamander materialises in the deserted London. (COMIC: The Heralds of Destruction)

Three weeks after the fungus had stopped spreading, and a few days after River Song's involvement, the Intelligence brought the Second Doctor's TARDIS to London after ensnaring it in space. At this point the army believed that the mist covered "the entire area enclosed by the Circle Line" (TV: The Web of Fear) After being ejected out of the TARDIS as the TARDIS left 2018, (TV: The Enemy of the World) Ramón Salamander was caught in the temporal wake of the TARDIS and was brought to London as well. (COMIC: The Heralds of Destruction)

The arrival of the Doctor saw the fungus starting to grow faster than before, an engagement of troops at Holborn, a sustained attempt by the Intelligence to cut off the transit camp, and the arrival of the new commander Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart.

An army operation followed with the intent to retrieve the Second Doctor's TARDIS from the web fungus in the London Underground. Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart and seven other soldiers were ambushed by Yeti at Covent Garden as they attempted to reach the TARDIS from the surface. Although they managed to destroy a number of the robots, the soldiers were vastly outnumbered and soon ran out of ammunition. Only Colonel Lethbridge-Stewart, having lost all seven of his men, including Corporal Blake, made it back to HQ following the engagement. (TV: The Web of Fear)

Following this engagement the Doctor was able to sever the Intelligence's connection to Earth, but almost the entire Army platoon was wiped out in the operation. (TV: The Web of Fear)

The Event lasted three months. (HOMEVID: Downtime)

Aftermath

The cover story for the event was that there had been a major nerve gas leak. While the government claimed this had been an industrial accident, journalist James Stevens later reported it was more likely an attack by an undisclosed foreign power. (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy)

The London Event directly led to the creation of UNIT, (PROSE: Who Killed Kennedy, Fighting the unknown, TV: The Invasion) after a meeting was held between Lethbridge-Stewart and Air Vice-Marshall Ian Gilmore, (PROSE: The Scales of Injustice, The Dogs of War) though another account showed the establishment UNIT had started in 1958. (TV: Survivors of the Flux)

A battered cardboard file containing a full Ministry of Defence report on the London Event was discovered by Sergeant Beagles in the security vault at UNIT H.Q. Being pre-UNIT, the report was not known to exist except on hard copy. Brigadier Crichton had hoped the file would be of help during the Great Intelligence's fourth attempted invasion of Earth in 1995. However, before the information contained therein could be acted upon, the file was stolen by Captain Cavendish. (PROSE: Downtime)

Sarah Jane Smith was paid by New World University to investigate people connected to the London Event. She would claim that she'd had to uncover documents about it and nobody remembered it happening. (HOMEVID: Downtime)

In 1999, the Ninth Doctor retrieved "large silver metal ball" from the Mornington Crescent underground station. Simon Cooper saw the Doctor at the station, and, six years later in March 2005, wrote about it on the conspiracy website Doctor Who?. (PROSE: Have You Seen This Man?)

In the 2020s, The Blue Box Files interviewed someone involved in the Yeti incident. (AUDIO: SOS)

New Jupiter had some knowledge of the attack, with replica Yeti walking around the EarthWorld museum's Twentieth Century Zone. (PROSE: Earthworld)

Behind the scenes

Contradicting the other sources in the lead, the narrative portion of The Secret Lives of Monsters places the London Menace on a February, and states the "events in Tibet" from 1935 happened "forty years earlier".