Rochdale mesothelioma deaths the 'tip of the iceberg'

Widows of mesothelioma victims at the International Asbestos Memorial opposite Rochdale Town Hall

Jason Addy of the Save Spodden Valley Campaign, who has campaigned for years about the dangers posed by the former Turner Borthers Asbestos site comments on the publication of recent statistics on mesothelioma showing the rise in asbestos related deaths in Rochdale and elsewhere.

Mr Addy says:

According to my ongoing PhD research this statistic may only be the tip of the iceberg for the true damage the products and decisions made by the Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA) factory has caused, and will continue to cause for many years to come...

Decades ago the diagnosis of mesothelioma was sometimes missed - especially if a person's occupational history wasn't taken into account properly. In addition, a significant cohort of Rochdale workers died at an early age of the fibrotic disease asbestosis before asbestos cancer had a chance to manifest itself. Sometimes even the acknowledged asbestosis was not recorded on death certificates further complicating local occupational disease statistics. In addition, the archived Turner & Newall (T&N) files also show repeated examples of statistical blindness and obfuscation of the health and safety data as part of a concerted asbestos industry lobbying campaign orchestrated from the 1950s at the Rochdale offices of TBA.

A significant amount of the TBA workforce was transient - in the days of full employment workers often came and went for short periods of time before emigrating to places like Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Displaced People in the 1940s, refugees from the Hungarian Uprising in the 1950s and Pakistanis and Bangladeshis from the 1960s, often started their working lives in Britain at TBA, usually to move on to other jobs quite quickly. Often, the official statistics miss these.

The rumours of dangerous working were suspected decades ago. One TBA memo during WWII has a senior manager bragging of threatening a worker with libel for expressing concern about asbestos dust levels and suspected dangers to health.

In the 1960s there was apparently an unwritten rule from the Labour Exchange that people could refuse to be placed at TBA. However the wages were better than average and some former workers that I have interviewed suggest a "Faustian pact" with the better wages, fatalistically compensating for a little ill health in later life. This may have been seen as the norm with dusty occupations in a polluted textile mill town with soot belching from hundreds of factory chimneys. However, the real difference with TBA and asbestos is the potential for terminal, incurable cancer.

In addition, many more people that never worked at TBA have died of asbestos disease. This is because of their exposure to TBA's asbestos dust when it left the factory gates - as products, as environmental pollution or on the overalls washed by housewives.

Finally, mesothelioma is not the only cancer caused by asbestos. Even by the HSE's conservative estimates for every mesothelioma may be an asbestos related lung cancer. Other cancers have also been attributed to asbestos but again, the archives suggest that aggressive lobbying by T&N in the 1960's and 70s was used to cover up the growing scandal.

The toxic legacy of the Rochdale TBA site is known worldwide. That is why we must ensure that it's victims are never forgotten. The story hinted at in the official statistics must never be allowed to repeat itself. Damage and harm must be properly acknowledged so that the site can be made permanently safe. That way, as a town, we can help right past wrongs and have a "green lung" that we can be proud of for future generations of Rochdalians.