LITERATURE ON ASBESTOS AND THE SPODDEN VALLEY
The world’s modern asbestos industry started in Rochdale in the 1870’s. Originally
known as Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA), it developed into the multinational
conglomerate known as Turner & Newall (T&N). The head offices for T&N were in
Rochdale until 1948. A book giving a thorough history of our local asbestos factory
site has been written by Dr Geoffrey Tweedale, a descendant of James Tweedale,
an original ‘Rochdale Pioneer’ of the Co-operative movement.
Dr Tweedale’s “Magic Mineral to Killer Dust” is a thorough account of the history
of the Spodden Valley site. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand
why asbestos and the planned development of the Rochdale factory site is so
significant, locally, nationally and worldwide.
As the saying goes: “Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it”.
Magic mineral to killer dust: Turner & Newall and the asbestos hazard
Geoffrey Tweedale. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
ISBN 0198296908.
A review by Dr Barry Castleman, environmental consultant, Maryland USA.
By insightful analysis of vast records, Geoffrey Tweedale reveals an extraordinary
portrait of evil in the business world. Magic Mineral to Killer Dust is a well-written,
comprehensive account of the UK asbestos scandal. This book is based primarily
on a million pages of documents unearthed during legal discovery by Chase
Manhattan Bank from Turner & Newall (T&N), an asbestos-based multinational
corporation dominant in the UK over the past century.
T&N's systematic effort to minimise or deny compensation to dying former
employees and their families is shown in all its horror. In case files letters from
desperate workers mix with correspondence between company officials and
lawyers calculating the strategy of delays and use of legal technicalities, reports
from insurance-company spies who kept claimants under surveillance, and
threatening replies sent by the company to the workers.
In 1964, T&N's solicitors reported that they had so far been lucky enough to not
encounter experienced and capable lawyers adequately financed by legal aid or
unions, who would carry out a detailed investigation and "recognise that there
is no real defence to these claims and take us to trial".
Government regulation was obstructed, and the introduction of health-protection
measures were vigorously resisted. Sprayed asbestos was introduced in 1932,
but the request in 1943 from labour inspectors to provide respirators to adolescents
working in shipyards adjacent to asbestos sprayers was strongly opposed by T&N
as a serious precedent that threatened business. Company men at many levels
marched to the same drumbeat: The firm's senior corporate lawyer repeatedly lied
to the government, writing in 1945 and 1950 that there had been no asbestosis
among employees in T&N's insulation subsidiary, in an effort to delay and ultimately
weaken regulation of asbestos hazards in the ship yards.
Top executives sought to suppress publication of research linking asbestos and
cancer. In 1969, as Johns-Manville in North America began to affix warning labels
to sacks of asbestos from its mines in Canada, in fear of lawsuits in the USA, the
T&N board decided against similar labels, reasoning that the company's exposure
to uninsured risk was not as great as the potential loss of sales.
Public-relations messages were issued over decades to assure doctors,
government officials, customers, and workers that the company had spent a
fortune on dust control, and that all the hazards in the industry were related to
past conditions. T&N managers pressed the government to limit dust control
and medical monitoring regulations to the factory setting only, thereby ensuring
that the government did nothing for another 30 years that would disclose
(through medical monitoring requirements) or prevent the epidemic of disease
among millions of workers exposed to dust from insulation products. Other
employees browbeat doctors, coroners, factory inspectors, journalists, the
Ministry of Defence, and the Medical Board.
Doctors played key roles in this tragic history. Publicity in the Sunday Times
over the 1965 report of epidemiologists Newhouse and Thompson (showing
that malignant mesothelioma was strongly associated with even household
contact and neighbourhood exposure to air-borne asbestos),
"set light to a powder trail" in the words of one company man. This report led to
regulation and public rejection of asbestos. The UK set an occupational-exposure
limit of 2 fibres/cm3 in 1969.
Donald Hunter at a medical meeting in the 1930s had called sprayed asbestos a
“murderous process” and he supported London dock workers protesting at having
to handle dusty and often torn jute sacks of asbestos in 1965. But T&N's use of
company doctors and outside medical consultants, its sponsorship of medical
research, and its handling of contact with medical inquiries and government doctors
all show an un-distracted focus on business priorities.
Independent experts were cultivated as advisers to the company--it was smart to
find ways to work with potential critics like epidemiologist Richard Doll and
pathologist Matthew Stewart. The firm's first medical director, John Knox,
approached Richard Doll to do a study on lung cancer in 1953, only to later find
that the company executives were dead set against having the results published.
Knox's successor, William Kerns, departed after only 1 year because management
refused to let him publish a report on cases of mesothelioma. Kerns, like his
successor Hilton Lewinsohn, was appalled at conditions in some of the plants
and worried about his own exposure to asbestos.
When Lewinsohn published a report in 1972 of asbestosis at T&N's flagship plant
in Rochdale, US physician Irving Selikoff promptly noticed that the prevalence of
asbestosis was about 10 times higher than had been reported by Knox only about
5 years before. Knox's readings of the chest radiographs and his diagnoses of
asbestosis had been crucial in setting the 1969 UK limits of occupational exposure.
When Selikoff, concerned that the 1972 US workplace asbestos standard had been
largely influenced by the UK standard, did all he could to press for an independent
reading of the 1966 chest radiographs of the Rochdale work force, he was jointly
stonewalled by T&N, John Gilson (Medical Research Council Pneumoconiosis Unit),
and Robert Murray at the Trades UnionCongress.
Murray's 1973 notes to T&N presaged his later service as an expert witness for T&N
in fighting damage suits from asbestos-exposed workers. Doctors reading this book
may be struck by the ways the medical community failed to limit the extent of the
asbestos catastrophe. All the main doctors in this story seem to have
"known their place" in the nation's social order.
Society's best protection against such a grave and insidious threat is the courageous
doctor, a fact illustrated one way or the other in the remaining countries where the
discredited technologies of asbestos make their last stand today
(Am J Ind Med 1999; 36: 227-29).
Magic mineral to killer dust is a case study in toxic corporate crime. It describes
how a dominant corporation in an ultra-hazardous industry managed to externalise
the health and economic costs of its business to workers and to society at large
for generations. This careful analysis by an academic historian, written in language
tempered by the apprehensions of the publisher's lawyers about being sued under
British libel laws, is a unique and valuable contribution.
For all of us concerned with occupational diseases and their prevention, it is
paramount to have a realistic understanding of the arena of occupational health
not based on naive illusions that might be more comfortable to embrace. We may
never be able to understand the minds of those who spend their lives building
fortunes as the directors of T&N did, but we ignore the reality of such conduct at
our peril.
Dr Barry Castleman
Purchase this book: Magic mineral to killer dust (link to Amazon web site)
This book is also available to borrow at Rochdale Library. It can be made
available to libraries throughout the UK. If it is not in stock, it can be reserved
through the UK local inter-libraries lending scheme.
If you still have difficulties in obtaining a copy to read, lodge a polite
but firm complaint with your Library. Your taxes pay for library book purchases!
