17. Smell, Smoke and Smokescreens
It was a few of months after the writ that the Statement of Claim for libel and slander was sent from ReChem’s solicitors. The time limit for serving my defence was first stipulated as 29th November 1989, but my solicitor Sarah quickly applied for the first of a number of extensions. We were satisfied that we could refute the Evening Standard’s claims about my comments on eye defects but we inevitably became bogged down in the meanings that ReChem had imparted to my words in BBC radio broadcast. When trying to find my own way through the quagmire, a solicitor from the BBC asked if I would co-operate in providing information for the defence of a separate ReChem writ, served against the BBC for a different broadcast.In the circumstances, especially after the BBC’s apology over my broadcast, I would have been forgiven for being unhelpful but I did co-operate and I did what I could to help other media defendants too. We liaised with solicitors for Guardian Newspapers, The Mirror Group, Thames Television, Channel 4, Express Newspapers, The Western Mail, Cardiff Broadcasting, Gwent Area Broadcasting and Greenpeace, most of who were keenly watching the progress of my defence. As important as these legal affairs were, I didn’t want to play into ReChem’s hands and let the writs become a distraction from the main campaign and I certainly didn’t want my pre-occupation with court proceedings to reduce the pressure on science and regulation. Our campaigning priorities were still to combat waste imports, to press for proof of local contamination and to turn the screw that would tighten control of the incineration plant. I also knew that to have any chance of success in court I would need the government and the regulators to change their opinions and back away from the view that the Pontypool plant was first-class. Therefore, from personal necessity, ReChem’s writ ensured that my mission had more meaning.
I explained to Sarah that I could demonstrate how ReChem’s interpretations of my BBC comments could not logically be deduced from my words. Nevertheless I told her I would rather be seen to agree with the bulk of those interpretations than to dissociate myself from them and that I could produce evidence to justify those deeper meanings. At first I thought this stance would be problematic for Sarah. I said the incinerator “smells and smokes,” that it was a “second rate activity sitting in a second rate regulatory system” and that we would “fight” to stop the Canadian Waste. Amongst the creative connotations in the writ was that I meant ReChem: “. . . were likely, through carelessness or inefficiency to release highly toxic matter into the atmosphere . . . “.If that was the way the company wanted, then it was OK by me, even though Rechem had held sway in every argument over contamination to date.My fears of being reigned in from such a strong stance in my defence were short lived, as after becoming acquainted with only some of my stockpile of ammunition, both solicitor Sarah and barrister Heather Rogers warmed to the idea of adopting the company’s own meanings and doing that before a jury if necessary.
Whilst being conscious of the inferences drawn on slender threads from my words, it was obvious that I needed to focus on the pure facts surrounding the contentious comments, so first on the list of priorities was the collation of enough evidence of smells and smoke to overwhelm the air-brushed official view of emissions. The Pontypool plant had been in operation for 15 years by the time I was sued and during that period there were countless official written responses to residents’ complaints about emissions.Most of these were of no help to me but one reply from the Pollution Inspectorate did say: “The problem of dark smoke emissions is well known to us and the company . . . “. My problem was that those words were but a drop in the ocean amongst the abundance of euphemistic assertions. Those more typical responses were presented in a language that typically played into ReChem’s hands, e.g. “. . . the incinerator was transiently overloaded with vapour, thus producing carbon particles in the exhaust gases.”Another reply went for the optical illusion excuse: “. . . a dark appearance of the plume can be caused by absorption of light.” Direct complaints to the company itself were also plentiful but once again, responses that might help me were in short supply. A letter from the Managing Director, Malcolm Lee, was both honest and potentially evasive in the choice of the word “appearance”. He said “. . . clearly we recognise the appearance of a chimney emission which does cause concern.” I thought that legally speaking, an “appearance” could be an optical illusion or an atmospheric aberration, so he wasn’t admitting anything untoward. Whilst official evidence of emissions generally contradicted the public’s perceptions of smoke, the situation surrounding smells was slightly different. Official acceptance that “odours” did exist was easier to find - though not in way that such odours would constitute a nuisance, or be officially unpleasant. Clearly, the simplicity of my saying the incinerator “smells and smokes” would not be acceptable to those who were skilled at linguistically changing the emissions into thin air. Suffering residents were exasperated by their real experiences and descriptions being constantly contradicted, so it was easy to see why the BBC might have been persuaded that smoke is not really smoke and why most of the media was afraid to entertain the idea that chemicals of any form might be coming out of the plant.
Some of the rationale for the official reluctance to admit the obvious may have been traceable to a conversation that took place in the early part of 1985 and which occurred between a well connected ecologist and the Secretary of State for Wales, Nicholas Edwards. Before that conversation and on a dismal night, a local TV presenter, John Osmond, had taken me through winding wooded lanes rising up steep hillsides, into the wilderness of the Brecon Beacons to meet the prestigious environmental pioneer, Gerard Morgan-Grenville. A man with noble lineage, he had founded a charity the Society for Environmental Improvement, had also established the Centre for Alternative Technology at Machyntlleth and was a world-leader in putting green ideas into practice. It was under the umbrella of the UK branch of his trans-European ecological group, Ecoropa, that we met. Gerard’s range of contributions to environmentalism was eventually recognised in the inaugural Schumacher awards of 1994, but without knowing much about him at our meeting in 1985, I could tell he moved in influential circles. During our evening together in their imposing home, he and his wife Fern showed a keen interest in what I had to say about ReChem and Gerard decided to satisfy his curiosity with a personal visit to the Pontypool plant. The report he wrote following his visit was stamped “Confidential” and it contained this intriguing section:
“I chanced to meet the Secretary of State at a social event later the same evening and I spent about an hour discussing this plant. It is obviously considered a very hot chestnut and the main worry is that if reasons are discovered why this plant would have to be closed, there are no alternative methods of disposing of the waste.”
I had already assumed that official attitudes to the issue might have been influenced by the strategic importance of ReChem, but now the government’s interest had been confirmed. It helped explain all my experiences of the intransigent, institutionalised linguistic inversion of the truth. Gerard finished his report in a balanced way with, “I remain open minded, but believe the subject is of such importance that further investigations should be made.” I had no doubt that he would have put that view to Nicholas Edwards, The Secretary of State for Wales, and I hoped his view would sow seeds of change in Government circles
I kept only limited contact with Gerard and Fern after my visit to the Brecon Beacons but I felt sure that they would continue to help in their own way.Impressed with the company Gerard kept, I may have felt anxious too if I’d known what I later learned of him. Amongst his acquaintances had been the 78 year-old anti-nuclear activist Hilda Murrell. She was spinster who died a violent death in 1984 in circumstances that didn’t seem to make sense. In the context of both the nuclear industry and the Falklands War, the manner of the murder led to speculation about official involvement. In the House of Commons in December of that year, Tam Dalyell made a marathon speech in connection with Miss Murrel’s death. He began by describing the role of her nephew, Commander Rob Green, who occupied a key position in intelligence in 1982 when the General Belgrano was torpedoed during the Falklands war by the British submarine Conqueror, with the loss of over 300 Argentinean lives. In his speech, the Linlithgo MP said:
There is also the evidence of my friend, Mr. Gerard Morgan Grenville, whom I have known for nearly 40 years. Mrs Morgan Grenville tells me how Hilda Murrell rang them up in a great state at the end of February, and how she fetched her husband. Mr. Morgan Grenville, with whom I have had a good deal to do and who is a deeply serious man, says that her parting words on the telephone were: “If they don't get me first, I want the world to know that one old woman has seen through their lies". One is reminded of Scudder, the diarist in John Buchan's "The Thirty-Nine Steps'. Mr. Morgan Grenville had never heard Miss Murrell speak in that way before. Why should an old lady be prompted to say that? There has been speculation that her death was connected with a paper that she had written on the problems of nuclear waste and reactor choice, which she hoped would be read at the Sizewell B inquiry.
In that speech, the anti-nuclear hypothesis was only the starter, before the MP became far more penetrating when continuing to tell of Hilda Murrel’s house being broken into:
I am informed that the intruders were not after money or nuclear information but were checking the house to see if there were any Belgrano-related documents of Commander Green in the home of his aunt. Things went disastrously wrong. They had no intention of injuring, let alone killing, a 78-year-old ex-rose grower. Yet, being the lady she was and in her home, Hilda Murrell fought and was severely injured. She was then killed or left to die from hypothermia, and the cover-up had to begin, because I am informed that the searchers were men of the British intelligence.
I ought to add that Commander Rob Green was, I am told, the person who physically sent the signal to Conqueror that sank the Belgrano. I understand from his friends that he was also responsible for passing signals from Endurance which had shown beyond any reasonable doubt that an invasion of the Falklands was likely to happen.
Rob Green considered the Falklands to be an unnecessary war, and the Belgrano sinking appalled him—albeit he judged it to be an unfortunate necessity—as it did some other senior officers of the senior service. He took early retirement after 20 years in the Navy and left. From this Prime Minister and her colleagues he would come under suspicion. It is from the head of our security services that Parliament should be demanding an explanation, because of one thing I am certain—that there are persons in Westminster and Whitehall who know a great deal more about the violent death of Miss Hilda Murrell than they have so far been prepared to divulge.
A decade after Tam Dalyell’s speech, Nick Davies in The Guardian evocatively described the climate around the time of Hilda Murrel’s mysterious murder in 1984: The article’s title was “Death in the time of conspiracies” and it began by setting the scene:
It was a rotten time, aggressive and cynical. The Task Force was back from the South Atlantic, the cruise missiles were coming into Greenham Common, they were shooting to kill in Belfast, they were banning unions at GCHQ and trampling down strikers in the coal fields. It was a time of ruthlessness in government and of the crushing of enemies. And everywhere, there was the shadow of the secret state, arrogant and apparently omnipotent.
Trade unionists, peace activists and almost anyone else who disapproved of the Government watched for signs of the security services tapping their phones or reading their letters or bugging their meetings and, while ministers sneered at their anxiety, hard evidence trickled out from the hidden corners of the corridors of power to confirm the worst of their fears.
West Midlands Special Branch were caught spying on a housewife whose only offence was to have written to a newspaper about nuclear weapons. The European Court accused London of tapping phones illegally. Devon and Cornwall Special Branch were ordered to weed their files when the new Chief Constable discovered the extent of their surveillance. The Government tried to suppress the evidence of Peter Wright and Cathy Massiter, but both of them emerged to disclose how their former colleagues in MI5 had bugged and burgled and opened files on 'the enemy within'.
Although Rechem wasn’t on the same political scale as the Belgrano affair or the Sizewell B inquiry, in the prevailing political climate, and when I learned of the link between the Morgan-Grenvilles, Hilda Murrel and the conspiracy theorists, I wondered whether I should be feeling a bit uneasy about my own position.
It wasn’t any form of conspiracy that caused the smells to come out of the Pontypool incineration plant. That was a natural consequence of the design and operation. My feelings of sore eyes and tingling lips from standing near the plant, as well as nausea and dizziness from breathing in the atmosphere, could only be explained by inhalation of substances in the emissions. Officially, that was not possible, for an edict from the Inspectorate said: “It is not reasonable to conclude that substances being burned in the incinerator would enter the bodies of people in that area.”The statement was scientifically ridiculous, especially when considering that a few months before the letter was written, Torfaen Borough Council’s Environmental Health Department reported:
During the morning of Monday 2nd September 1985, complaints were received concerning objectionable odours which arose during the evening of Friday 30th August 1985. It was alleged that the odour was such that residents were vomiting therefrom and the general medical practitioner was called out as a result.
The doctor confirmed that at least one of the persons was vomiting as a result of the odour and the Council’s report continued:
From the investigation it would appear that the objectionable odour at ground level did arise and the company ceased operations as a result. During the afternoon of Monday 2nd September, 1985, following the receipt of complaints, a visit was made to the New Inn area. As a result, the opinion was formed that the objectionable odour present was linked to the plume from the chimney at the ReChem plant, which was grounding at the time. The investigating officer was of the opinion that the intrusion of the plume into private properties amounted to nuisance and a breach of licensing conditions.
Friday’s emissions, witnessed by the GP, contained a smell. Monday’s emissions, in the presence of the environmental health officers, were of smoke and smell. The pressure on the Council to do something about it was irresistible and Torfaen launched into legal action against ReChem, for nuisance. Everyone around the plant knew of its smell and smoke. They walked in it, drove through it and suffered from it but it still wasn’t acknowledged as a nuisance by the main regulatory body. Therefore, the Council carried that particular handicap when going to court under Section 6 of the 1974 Control of Pollution Act and when using the condition numbered 14 on Torfaen’s licence, which required that the plant should not create a nuisance.It was this action, eventually containing five incidents involving emissions, which led to the company’s acquittal at Cardiff Crown Court two years later and for which, in the March before my writ, the Court of Appeal judged that The Control of Pollution Act’s powers were not wide enough to cater for the Council’s contentions. With such differences of opinion about something so obvious, I was quite aware that ReChem’s solicitors might have done their own homework on what constitutes smell and smoke long before I chose to use those words with the BBC.
Torfaen’s report would be helpful to me but I knew that I wouldn’t tease anything out of the more important Pollution Inspectorate and furthermore, I expected that forcing the Inspectorate into a corner would probably cause its officials to veer further to ReChem’s side. It would be more convenient for the Inspectorate to see me fail, than to contribute towards ReChem’s downfall. Perhaps I should have felt more annoyed, when I thought that a body set up to protect the public could be protecting of the polluter while I was being victimised. Fortunately, annoyance usually turned to motivation and for once, I decided to ignore the technicalities, abandon linguistic arguments and for the purposes of my smell and smoke allegations, I placed my faith in the public. In an early letter to my solicitor Sarah I emphasised that the case wasn’t just about me, it was about the rights of the public to have their perceptions and views represented instead of being shouted down from on high. I took the view that regardless of the Company’s cosmetic concept of emissions or the sanitised sentences of the Pollution Inspectorate, if the public believed that they experienced smell and smoke then I was entitled to say it. The strategy led to me collect 1,370 written accounts of occurrences of smell and smoke from a wide range of people, including non-campaigners.
In producing that evidence I almost literally threw a book at ReChem.It was a green school exercise book containing my most treasured store of records and it was the diary of a Margaret Williams, who had lived at 50 Monmouth Close, New Inn. The book contained 180 clearly written entries, from 1976 to 1986. The ten years of sightings helped me in a subtle way, too. The diary was old enough to show that the smell and smoke wasn’t a perception planted in people’s minds by recent campaigning propaganda. I knew it would be tricky for ReChem to claim that the incinerator did smell and smoke at one time but had stopped by the time of my World Tonight broadcast in 1989. An admission of earlier guilt could have made life very difficult for the company, the Inspectorate, the chemical Industry and the government. Furthermore, I’d brought the historic dimension into the BBC interview by saying that imported waste was, “. . . coming to an incinerator in Pontypool which smells and smokes and has done for the last 15 years.”, so I needed evidence over that time scale. From her Council flat Mrs. Williams looked down on the plant and made this entry in May 1983:
These past few years I have not entered so many complaints, not because things have improved with the nuisance from ReChem - they haven’t. Sometimes the smell is appalling but I’m just recording some of the worst times, so that perhaps what I’ve written and described, someone somewhere might want to read it. I just want to say that things have not improved after all the years. Our poor lungs have taken a bashing.
That was seven years after she started recording, when the diary first said:
The entries in this book have been made when conditions (especially in the lower part of New Inn) have been extremely unpleasant. When it has been impossible to sit out of doors, even on the nicest day, because of foul smells and driving smoke (not always at the same time): Friday 30th. April 1976 6.15 p.m.: Dark grey smoke.
As time went by the entries became more graphic, such as:
Sunday 13th June 12.20pm 1976: Huge cloud of black smoke, which made people hurry indoors to close all windows. Very frightening!Wednesday 16th June 1976 11.30 a.m.: Clouds of multi-colour smoke erupting from the stack. Tuesday 26th July 1977 7.15 a.m. Pouring from Stack like ink, ever so low, over houses and flats. Tuesday 6th June 1978 8.45 p.m. Stinking, vile smelling, multicoloured smoke pouring from stack, towards Lower New Inn. Walking home, made my head spin.Thursday 5th October 1978: All afternoon, smoke unable to lift. Stinking all through housing estate and village.Tuesday 23rd October 3.15.pm. : Smoke billowing through housing estate. Unable to see houses across road. Absolutely stinking, have to close all windows. Fine, breezy day.Friday 3rd November 1978: All morning foul ether-like smell and since Monday morning something in air which makes my head and face itch, something which also affects some neighbours. Friday 16th February 1979 7.45 p.m.A new colour coming from stack a pinky, pale-violet colour. Thursday 8th March 1979: All afternoon lots of smoke almost at ground level. After being out of doors for a few minutes eyes are smarting.May 27th 1981 : A strong smell of oranges in the air. Quite sickening. Had to shut all windows.Tuesday 29th March 1983I thought a thick fog had come down but when I walked into my kitchen where I had a window open, I knew it was from ReChem. The smell was appalling and the fog filled the village for a long time.May 1983: These past few years I have not entered so many complaints, not because things have improved with the nuisance from ReChem, but just recording some of the worst times, so that perhaps what I’ve written and described, someone somewhere might want to read it. I just want to say that things have not improved after all these years. Our poor lungs have taken a bashing.August 1st 1986 : What a lot of rusty coloured smoke we have these days. Could this be the contaminated soil they are burning at ReChem? This colour only used to emerge occasionally.
That was her last entry. Long after Mrs Williams died I hoped I was the someone she had wanted to read her diary.When working on my defence of the Writ I kept the diary close at hand, always visible. I read it frequently to motivate me and whenever I touched the small book I became more determined to export Mrs William’s view of life with ReChem to the many countries sending their chemical waste to Pontypool. Of course, I recognised that possessing such evidence is not the same as being able to use it in court. Firstly, to be able to use the diary of a dead woman in my defence I needed to be able to prove that it was her work and not something I’d just made it up. When I located her husband, I was naturally anxious about the stark formality of the agreement he would need to make. It said:
Call Llewellyn Williams of 50 Monmouth Close, New Inn, Pontypool Gwent, who will say as follows: I am a retired Police Sergeant. I am 73 years of age. I have been residing at the above address since September 1972. My wife, Margaret Doreen Williams who died on 18/12/1986 kept a diary from April 1976 until August 1986. In it she recorded the smoke and Smells emanating from the ReChem plant at the relevant time of the day.
I’d already experienced the reluctance of people to stand up and be counted when it came to simply telling the truth and I had been concerned that Mr. Williams would find the commitment daunting.I didn’t doubt that his former occupation as a policeman allowed him to appreciate the importance of a witness and I sighed with relief when he readily agreed to sign the testimony for me.
To my defence, I added other accounts of emissions, including those recorded by the press and T.V. I also extended the range of observational evidence to encompass ReChem’s other plants. I knew that spreading the dirt more widely was legally spurious, but I thought that it would have been tactical suicide for the company to have condemned their other incinerators by claiming that the Pontypool plant was somehow better.
Collecting and collating hard evidence of emissions was always time consuming, with accuracy and the reliability of the source being so important. In this respect, the four hundred and four systematic observations from the two periods of STEAM’s “Toxic Watch” on ReChem now found an unanticipated use, as did the extensive survey of local residents that was previously conducted by P.E.P.A. I included many more recent observations, always remembering that people needed to be aware that they could be called as witnesses and I believed I was well on the way to penetrating the official smokescreen covering smell and smoke.