15. Saviours of the Unfinished House
For 12 years I had lived at the home on the hill from where I first viewed the smoke from ReChem and now, in 1989, that home was clearly at risk from Rechem’s writ. It was in 1977, when my daughter Nikki was 15 months old and Denise was expecting Christian, we made a shock decision to move from a modern home on a housing estate in Caerleon, to an older and unfinished shell of a house in the nearby countryside. My priorities in the snowy February of our arrival were to fit doors and find other ways to keep us warm. Our source of heat was a coal-burning cutaway steel drum of the type found at ReChem.
I first encountered the house when out cycling along a local country lane. Looking sideways from the road across fields I caught sight of the imposing structure sticking out of a hillside. During my rides I would sometimes rest my bike against a farm gate to take in the building. It was tall and dignified, with three stories and a steeply sloping roof with a bit of a churchy look.I the evenings, sun from over my shoulder reflected from the bricks in a blaze of orange and red. There were no windows, just openings topped by shallow, pointed arches and there was no sign of life. At first I assumed the house was derelict and every time I cycled that lane I would lean on the same gate to stare and wonder at the sleeping structure, then one day, when cycling in a different lane for the first time, I rounded a bend and was faced with a close-up view of the other side of the house. I clamber over a barbed wire fence to get a closer look.
I entered straight into the first floor by means of a drawbridge-style platform and I looked up in amazement. From the outside I’d been impressed with the building’s structure but inside it was even more stunning. I could see right up into the roof, past large oak beams and jointed trusses. There was a massive fireplace with arched alcoves above it. The roof was lined with timber and everything appeared too good to have decayed into this incomplete state and I learned that it was a house that had just never been finished. When leaving, I tilted my neck to see the ornate brick chimneys: three tall straight stacks together on one side of the roof and a single, huge concave structure on the other side. Cycling back along the lane, I made up my mind to find out more about that unusual house. It was quite a story. The house wasn’t as old as it appeared, was known locally as The Unfinished House, and it had been the labour of one man, who was Mr C. W. Ulett. I discovered that he came to Wales, from London, to work for the National Coal Board on mining buildings as either a surveyor or an engineer or perhaps both. His structural expertise was evident in the house, where he employed a mixture of ancient and modern principles. The ground floor had end-to-end arched vaulting, supporting a concrete first floor with no need for internal load-bearing walls. He wanted the whole of the vaulted lower floor to be a workshop. From the concrete first floor, four symmetrically-positioned reinforced concrete columns supported the twelve stout, horizontal oak beams bearing the top floor. On that floor, the concrete columns led to vertical oak posts carrying the roof structure, which itself was a masterpiece of engineering. To top it all, 9,000 baked Rosemary tiles, in their rich reds and burnt oranges, complemented the brickwork’s mottled appearance. The outside of the building contained ornamental cast reliefs together with patterns of glazed tiles and the knowledge that this had mainly been the work of one man was to comprehend.
To build his masterpiece, Mr. Ulett bought a piece of land from a Zephaniah Ford and, with the help of his brother for a while, began to dig the foundations in his spare time during the 1930’s.Over decades the building grew slowly until Ulett retired, built a shed and lived in it to work on the house full-time. He did have a wife and a daughter and but I didn’t discover where they fitted in with the building site before they left for London. C.W. Ulett alone continued to be committed to his building, though apparently in no hurry since he recognised that he wouldn’t finish the house in time to occupy it himself. When the roof was on he became ill and his daughter took him away to London, where I believe he died. Much later I was informed that the daughter eventually drifted into the life of a bag lady and died prematurely after a fire in a London squat.When I arrived at the house, Mr. Ulett’s live-in shed provided a wonderful workshop. Built of marine-ply sheets, it was equivalent to a medium sized caravan. There was a cast iron stove with a cylindrical boiler on top, a sturdy workbench, an armchair, a sink and a lavatory cupboard. Outside there was another large workbench with a huge oak vice. Cooking utensils and building tools were there too and I kept them as a reminder of the man who built the house.
Buying the house was a surprise.One Saturday in 1978, I was out shopping in Newport with Denise with time browse but not meaning to move home, when we spotted the building in an estate agent’s window.Out of nothing more than curiosity we went in to investigate. After the most difficult purchasing exercise I had ever encountered, we moved ourselves six months later. From Saturday 3rd February 1979, as snow fell on and off for a week, the standard of accommodation in the house was way below the standard in the shed outside. At first my progress on the house was fast and it needed to be, in order to get the building up to the standard necessary for the building society to release the part of the mortgage I was financing with a bank loan. That first bout of work took three tiring months during which I made great strides learning plumbing, electrics, and carpentry. After getting the money from the building society and paying back the bank loan, with our son Christian about to arrive I was glad I could now afford to slow down. After that I seemed to emulate Mr. Ulett, with an imperceptibly slow rate of progress in a labour of love at a home we felt blessed to have. Just more than ten years after beginning work on the house and with our children past their first decade, the arrival of the writ threatened not just a home but our dream.
When the writ arrived after I had shunned the warning following The World Tonight, with it there was a form entitled “ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF SERVICE OF WRIT OF SUMMONS” and it was headed “IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE : QUEENS BENCH DIVISION”. I needed to complete this form to indicate whether I would be defending the writ. I interpreted the guidance as saying that I had fourteen days to acknowledge the writ, from the date it had been posted. It also indicated that, if I was to be challenge the writ, I would be given a further fourteen days to submit my defence and if I was to fall foul of a deadline, the judgement could automatically be made against me. Having decided to defend all aspects of the Writ, I needed to think how I would do that, and quickly. I couldn’t afford a solicitor, so I would just have to learn do it myself, I thought, and I was preparing to go-it-alone against ReChem when a benefactor suddenly materialised.
Having had a close association with the campaigning group Greenpeace, I telephoned Madeleine Cobbing at the environmental organisation’s UK headquarters and put her in the picture about my writ. I was overwhelmed by the response. I didn’t ask for any help but I was immediately told not to worry about legal expertise, as Greenpeace would be happy to provide that. I was soon collaborating with the enthusiastic, sympathetic solicitor who didn’t emit the usual vibes of fear and despair, who was Sarah Burton of Seifert Sedley Williams. The condition attached to the help given to me was that I couldn’t let the arrangement be known, because if in the end I came undone and Greenpeace were known to be my sponsors, then the damages would be such as to reflect the wealth of the organisation. I kept to the pact and not for a moment did Greenpeace flinch from their belief in me. As the news of my writ broke, friends and neighbours came along with pages of postage stamps and donations of cash. Through the mail goodwill messages came thick and fast and then, in a series of articles in the Observer, John Sweeny really rallied the troops. His call led to a nationwide response that was very was moving and which made me feel that receiving the writ had been a privilege.
John was a young journalist working at the Sunday Times when I first met him in December 1984. We’d previously spoken on the telephone, when he rapidly understood the technicalities of the toxic waste issue and he asked me to catch a train to London quickly. I spent several hours in the newspapers Gray’s Inn Road building with him. He asked me for contact details of the best people in the world for different aspects of the issue and then he set about telephoning them to talk of toxicology, technology and chemistry. Soon after our meeting in London John came to Wales and stayed at our home until he became something of an expert on incineration and toxicology himself and I remember how disturbed he was by what we saw at Tirpentwys tip, where the burnt material from Rechem’s incinerator was dumped.At the messy site I felt that he shared my misgivings about the concept of total destruction.
Our visit to the tip arose from one of the most fruitful enquiries I made during the first Toxic Watch mounted at Rechem in October 1985. I followed a skip lorry as it left the plant with incinerated material ready to dump. The lorry took me to the picturesque valley of Tirpentwys, which had contained a colliery employing 1600 men at its peak and before closing in 1969. The beautiful hillsides now converged downwards into a valley of waste. At the entrance to the dump was the municipal waste tip for the whole of Torfaen. When the lorry that I was following went into the site and then went off-road, I paused to watch it disappear down the narrowing valley. I then detoured and parked-up until the coast was clear. With darkness approaching I returned to the lorry’s trail until I encountered an unholy, stinking mess amongst a few relics of the old coal mine. Many times after that I returned to the tip in daylight and hid amongst the trees on the hillside to watch skips from Rechem being emptied and, through my binoculars, I could see capacitors falling out. When there were no lorries around I clambered down the hill to find that some of the capacitors littering the surface appeared far from completely burned and a number of them were exuding liquid.
John Sweeney came to Tirpentwys with me on a bitterly cold Sunday afternoon at the turn of that year. The valley was bleak, with snow on the hillsides and, at first, no sign of life apart from the two of us.We walked along a hillside path looking down over the waste tip, when a creepy figure came up the embankment. He cut a stark silhouette against the snowy background. Gaunt and unkempt in a shabby overcoat tied with rope, he cradled several whole capacitors like babies and he carried them to a pick-up truck some distance away. The scavenger was collecting undestroyed capacitors for their scrap value, in ignorance of their possible chemical content and the tip became a continuing interest for the Sunday Times reporter. He went on to write large articles about ReChem in the Sunday Times and in the magazine New Society before the BBC’s Newsnight picked up the Rechem story, did their own investigation of the tip and got some dumped capacitor material analysed.After the TV broadcast revealed high levels of PCBs in some of the burnt material it ran into ReChem’s lawyers and Newsnight needed to prove that the contaminated material had come from Rechem. The BBC presenter Julian O’Halloran was so incensed by the legal action that he returned to South Wales of his own volition, to bolster the defence, but his efforts were in vain. As for John Sweeny, he managed to avoid litigation and he went on to enjoy a steep rise through the world of journalism, before he returned to the ReChem story following my writ in 1989.
Between his period of writing on the ReChem in 1984 and his columns in the Observer in 1989 our paths didn’t cross, but when John returned to the subject in my time of need I was utterly elated. Using the haughty Pendennis column to support me, he engineered a shift in the subject matter of the broadsheet’s weekly commentary with his “David and Goliath” article. In it he wrote:
Gossip columns - even this one, intent on subverting the rules of the genre - too often dwell on Famous People: Prince Charles this, Joan Collins that. So today we toast an unsung village Hampden: physics teacher David Powell . . . . Powell has played a leading role in persuading the Canadians to reconsider sending their Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCBs) to the ReChem incinerator near Powell’s home. The publicity at one point knocked a cool £24 million off ReChem’s share price. Powell was sued. He was not alone: ReChem issues writs like Clint Eastwood bullets. Thames Television’s For What Its Worth and Channel Four’s Scarlet TV were already fighting Rechem actions, when last month the firm sued the BBC’s Six O’clock News, the Western Mail and Echo, Red Dragon Radio, the Daily Star and Greenpeace. The latter’s solicitor, Sarah Burton said: ‘They have gone much further than protecting their own reputation. It’s now a question of gagging full and open debate on the subject.’ ReChem denies the charge.
ReChem has also obtained an injunction against its local council, Torfaen, preventing it from publishing an environmental report on the plant. Powell and the other media cited are fighting their corner, but, on the advice of BBC lawyers, a North-West magazine show has backed down and Radio Four’s The World Tonight grovelled on air after a feature which quoted Powell. The firm printed “The World Tonight’s apology in a press release and commented, ‘Provided the debate is kept within the bounds of truthfulness we are always prepared to listen to criticism’
The resourceful journalist had somehow obtained ReChem’s internal accident reports and to steer the article towards its finale he proceeded to quote the company’s accounts of dangerous occurrences, including explosions, before concluding:
All of which sits rather oddly with ReChem’s claim that there is no evidence that its operations are ‘in any way whatsoever unsafe.’ If ReChem is to banish squint suspicion, would it not be better to call of its lawyers and just publish its recent safety reports? Donations to help David Powell should be sent to him at Ulett House, Ponthir, Gwent NP6 1HT
John Sweeney didn’t get Rechem to take the solicitors of my back but for some weeks of that autumn of 1989, alongside the legal mail on my doormat there would be envelopes containing money and letters of support. The numerous small donations were very welcome but the messages that came with them, from Aberdeen University to The Art Shop in Truro, were a great boost for me too. Then, astonishingly, in addition to the gifts from individuals, there were some larger, more formal cheques. In my media work, I’d never asked for payment for contributions to radio, TV or newspapers but when I received unsolicited cheques from a couple of national media organisations I knew there was a god. The media people acknowledged their own weakness in the face of ReChem’s lawyers and they were delighted that I was trying to do what they had failed to do. Support also came from a many local political figures who were quick to condemn ReChem for putting me in the dock and who asserted my right to air the prevailing public’s view of Canadian waste shipments.
Messages of support, donations and my own commitment didn’t guarantee victory, yet I had a calculated confidence. My confidence came from predicting the future sequence of events and aiming to survive long enough for those events to weaken my opponents.I would have to help those events to happen and knowing that I was thinking of years, in the legal process I would need to buy time.
During the long period of support for me, Greenpeace never once mentioned the cost to the organisation nor put any other form of pressure on me.I was hopeful that the way we were constructing the defence meant that the case wouldn’t incur the typically crippling costs but when two years into the writ, one Friday evening after school with no end in sight and feeling guilty about being a burden to my benefactor, I caught a train to the Islington. I sat with the UK head of Greenpeace, Peter Melchett and explained to him that whatever my fate I would be forever grateful for his support but that I didn’t want to be an indefinite drain and I would understand if Greenpeace wanted to stop backing me. I found myself on the end of very gracious admonishment from the environmentalist and Lord. He said that I was silly to make the suggestion and that his support would remain for as long as I needed it. Feeling much better for that, I arrived home after midnight, relieved, re-energised and doubly determined to fulfil the faith placed in me.