Book launch highlights dangers of asbestos

Geoff Tweedale speaks to a packed audience at Rochdale Town Hall

Rochdale Town Hall was packed for the launch of ‘Defending the Indefensible’; a book by Geoffrey Tweedale and Jock McCulloch about the history of asbestosits role in the world today, and fears about its use in the future, especially in the developing world.

The crowded meeting watched the short film ‘Mesothelioma- Human Face of an Asbestos Epidemic’. This was followed by an excerpt featuring T&N Rochdale from Yorkshire TV's award-winning 1982 documentary ‘Alice Fight for Life’.

Rochdale is the birthplace of the multi-national Turner & Newall (T&N) asbestos factory. First using chrysotile fibre from Quebec, asbestos production began in the Spodden Valley of Rochdale in the 1870s and continued until the 1990s.

The vast 72 acre site is at present, subject to a controversial planning application to build more than 600 homes and a children's nursery. After four years of campaigning against the development by the Save Spodden Valley group, plans remain on hold.

Many in the audience had worked at the asbestos factory and had lost loved ones to asbestos related disease. Knowing now how asbestos has affected so many, there was anger towards T&N's attitude to the documentary in the 1980s.

The audience was shocked when a further presentation of photographs and documents demonstrated that T&N had early knowledge of asbestos related disease and cancer in Rochdale.

The daughter-in-law of Nellie Kershaw, who was death was the world's first attributed asbestosis, was in the audience to hear how T&N refused to pay funeral expenses in 1924 to Nellie's grieving widower. A management memo chillingly stated that to do so ‘would create a precedent and admit responsibility’.

The T&N archives show that the first mesothelioma death occurred in its Rochdale factory in 1936. In 1942 a Rochdale Inquest heard: “There have been so many of these cases in Rochdale that I must say I think the cancer was produced by the asbestosis.”

Confidential company documents from 1957 confirm that a huge amount of asbestos waste was dumped and that the air surrounding the factory was even dustier than inside the factory production areas. Yet a 1961 T&N letter confirms the company knew ‘that the only really safe number of fibres in the work's atmosphere is nil.’

At the Town Hall event, shocked former T&N workers vowed that history should not repeat itself in the Spodden Valley but also in the developing world. Although asbestos in now banned in the UK and EU it is still being peddled into emerging markets in Asia. A call went out from former asbestos workers for an outright worldwide ban.