1. At the High Court
I was wondering how it would begin, when the judge pierced the sombre silence of the court, in an imperiously indignant tone, with “Who is David Powell?!” The echo of his words in the voluminous but near-empty edifice seemed to convey some disappointment that, today; Mr Justice Otton had nobody more important than this David Powell before him. I listened attentively whilst seated between my children, Nikki and Christian, who were familiar with the Canadian toxic waste, the Russian ships and the BBC broadcast that had paved my way to the High Court. They also knew that the writ hanging over me threatened everything we owned. We sat very still.
I wasn’t sure who needed to answer the judge, but I delicately raised a hand and looked towards him in the distance. I soon suspected that he thought my self-identification was facetious, as he patronisingly revealed that he already knew who I was and added that he was addressing not me, but my legal opponents. Nevertheless, perplexed about the point of his question, I couldn’t help hearing it as an expression of surprise that it was just me, and not somebody more illustrious, who had been sent before him on that fateful day.Then I thought, “Perhaps he’s on my side” and that his bemusement might not be an expression of disdain towards me, but a sarcastic rebuke for the people who had put me in that position. I’ll never know the real motivation for the judge’s opening exclamation, though any idea that I had been an unnecessary victim of Britain’s libel laws would have matched the feeling that had consumed me during the past four years.
Nikki was 16, Christian 15, and it wasn’t the first time they had accompanied me on a toxic waste trip. That particular morning, May 17th 1993, we had travelled to London slowly along the M4 from South Wales in our faded-red Volkswagen Polo. My wife, Denise, would have been with us too, but for her job in a special needs school in Pontypool. Since the summer of 1989 I’d been battling top legal firm Nabarro Nathanson, who staunchly represented hazardous waste company ReChem International Limited. Throughout those four years the passing of each day had been a victory in itself, as I sustained my challenge to the legal action whilst more prosperous targets of the toxic waste company crumbled and the company accrued more prowess.Now it was the day of reckoning for me, having being sued in 1989 over a BBC Radio 4 broadcast and an article in the London Evening Standard, both of which related to my part in combating the importation of toxic waste from Canada. The legal action against me had been initiated at the time that shipments of PCB waste from Montreal were heading towards Liverpool Docks. The ultimate destination of the dioxin-contaminated material was to be a smoky, smelly incinerator in Pontypool. The plant processed poisons from all over the world and spread its fumes through the Pontypool neighbourhood of New Inn. Local loathing of the incineration plant had escalated when the media’s attention to the toxic shipments was repelled by a salvo of legal actions from the waste firm, which created panic in the press and which petrified broadcasters. The power exuded by ReChem’s unblemished record of libel court conquests was complemented by the company’s skill in fending off legal threats about its own behaviour. The combined characteristics of an invincible attack and an impenetrable defence meant that the ReChem was doubly despised in the local community for the way it rode the law. Amongst the widespread, but legally unspeakable thoughts about Rechem, was the possibility that the plant was contaminating its surroundings with PCBs and dioxins. However, the company could repudiate any idea of wrongdoing by using its mass of monitoring data, with its authority supported by the scientific community.
Despite the tendency for the name “ReChem” to be a cue for caution when turning thoughts into words, in the years before my fateful BBC broadcast I had accumulated a degree of equity as a spokesman on the toxic waste controversy. I was trusted throughout the media to comment accurately on the complex subject and before my intervention in Canadian toxic waste in 1989 there were strong signs that the company disliked my increasing influence. And it wasn’t just the company. I also jarred with some pillars of establishment and, what’s more, by calling for controls on toxic waste movement, I was interfering with the politically idolised free market in Britain. Therefore, when I began my four-year journey to London’s High Court it was with the knowledge that I was on the wrong side of the British government, the regulatory authorities, some leading scientists, the chemical industry and some bastions of the broadsheet press.
Before arriving in London on that May morning, towards the end of our journey from Wales we had been stuck in traffic with the car’s engine overheating. When we eventually parked in Hammersmith, being late for The Strand seemed likely but we three were good runners and our sprints to and from underground stations meant that my solicitor, Sally Moore, came into sight under the High Court’s famous arch a few seconds before the ten-thirty time on the court summons. The tight timing was typical for me, since time had been in short supply over the whole nine years that I’d been on the toxic waste trail and especially during the period spent combating the writ. When gathering my breath on the steps of the iconic building, and taking in the size and splendour of the façade, I was relieved that the car hadn’t broken down, delighted by arriving on time and overjoyed at seeing Sally on the steps. When I crossed the threshold of the building, on a path frequently trodden by the famous, wealthy and powerful, I felt a further lift as the ambience of the building took me back to some special moments way back in my schooldays. The feeling lightened my step along the corridor. As the court assembled, the gravity of the occasion did begin to get to me, but only until the judge asked that opening question “Who is David Powell?” and from which my own curiosity was also triggered. When I peered into Judge Otton’s mind to pry into the reason for that question, the intonation in his “Who?” echoed in my head and I sought a deep explanation for my being where I was at that time. With a soothing sense of fate, it was in a flash that a window on my forty-five years of life opened and I glimpsed what may have predetermined that momentous morning in May 1993.
In my art lessons at Newport High School for Boys, one of my chosen topics was the history of architecture. For we pupils, who had been selected for academia through the eleven-plus tests, those lessons consisted mainly of copying illustrations from a book. Church doorways, windows, buttresses, roof structures and decorative features were our focus as we depicted their development through the ages. The book of churches was my sanctuary and the freedom I found in drawing from it was an escape from the crushing conformity of my school. I’d come from quite a poor background, though it took my entry to Newport High to make me recognise that. When I was approaching seven, my mother, father and I had moved from two rooms in a crumbling Victorian house in the docks area of Newport to the comparative luxury of a new 1950’s Council flat on the opposite end of the town. I liked my first school, the old stone-built St Michaels, despite the absence of vegetation around it, but when I saw the grass, trees, brick and glass of Malpas Court primary I didn’t look back. Unfortunately, my next step to a prestigious Victorian grammar school was retrograde, and not just in appearance. I’d flourished in primary school but my joy in passing the Eleven-Plus results lasted only until I found out where I would be going next. My beloved Malpas Court primary had been built to serve the children of three Council estates plus a nearby group of Nissen hut families. Those estates were the steel houses, the four-bedroomed flatroof houses and the flats where I lived. At the age of eleven, without most of my friends from Malpas and feeling out of place at Newport High, the only ambition I acquired in the obtrusively ambitious school was to leave it.
Before I attended grammar school I’d not known children from other social backgrounds. Then I came face-to-face with elevated social classes, amongst both staff and pupils, in an ethos that was entirely alien to me.It wasn’t just a clash of ideologies. The cultural differences stood out in attitude, mannerisms and in the spoken language.For a start I didn’t sound my ‘H’s. Well, I could pronounce them properly but only with intense concentration. I recall the stress of being asked to take turns in the reading of novels, poetry and plays in class. When I spoke naturally, with the lazy Newport dialect, the letter H was silent. Vowels tended to be cut short or even eliminated and the g at the end of words such as going would be silent. In my own speech, all tenses tended to merge into the third person singular of the present and the word year doubled as the spoken form of both ear and hear.In my first English lesson at Newport High, one of the less haughty teachers, Mr. Lawrence, gave us some amusing examples of the wrongs in pronunciation.I remember seeing his chalk writing of grofim on the blackboard, instantly recognising it as how I would say “get off him”. Mr. Lawrence said adding a verb to it could give grofim fore I itsew, containing the h-less third person singular of the verb “to hit”, with the y missing from you to make it into a nasal ew and the beginning of “before” discarded. Again, he was demonstrating my language. Unable to compete in oral eloquence or even in the written form, I came to discover that the subject of Art was a great leveller, if only a fleeting distraction from my darker feelings about the school. Soon resigned to simply seeing-out my time for the sake of my parents’ pride, I resolved to be immune to the scholarly ethos of the school and I counted the days going by as you would a prison sentence.
Despite my differences with Newport High, for most of the time I was not a conspicuously challenging pupil. Teachers would have thought me well-behaved and as someone who wouldn’t talk out of turn in lessons, but they would have been wrong to consider my behaviour to be a sign of respect. It was simply that I’d decided where to draw the line on disobedience. I could suffer the stick or dapper in silence even though when such a thrashing occurred it usually did so because a few classmates had got us all into trouble, not because I had been difficult. Some teachers could strike forty bottoms in a couple of minutes and whilst I saw the injustice in that, I didn’t complain. In fact, I probably helped the staff by occasionally exerting pressure on the misbehaving kids who brought those beatings on us all. It wasn’t until there were fewer days left of my ordeal, than had passed, and when I was still conscious of the gulf between me and the school, that I eventually found something to narrow the gap. It was competitive athletics that provided a lifeline, though not soon enough to stop shoots of subversive, secret protest emerging from an otherwise compliant individual.
In contradiction to the common ground I found in athletics, and without ever vocalising dissent, my boycott of school rugby was my first and most enduring achievement in school. From beginning to end, I played a calculated game of avoiding participation in the school’s venerated alternative to soccer. It wasn’t that I didn’t like rugby, but because of the game’s importance to the ethos of the school, I felt good about continually getting out of it. After leaving school it was another decade before I separated rugby from the bad vibrations of grammar school and I suppose I signed a mental truce when I then switched from the round to the oval ball and played rugby for twenty enjoyable years.Another protest that began further into my five years at the school, and which was even more significant in my survival, was my betting on horse racing at the bookmaker’s. As well as being another comforting act of non-conformity, my calculations with gambling odds provided a wonderful distraction during lessons. There were a number of us who, at lunchtime, with our caps and jackets removed and school ties in our pockets, looked old enough to get into Eddie Lyon’s betting shop in a cobbled Newport back-alley, I would bet in tiny amounts, purely for interest and never expecting to get rich. Anyway, by the time I was betting I’d actually come into money, as the highest paid paper-boy in Malpas. In that job, whilst delivering papers in the morning before school, I devoured the horse-racing form, the betting odds and the recommendations of every tipster. During the morning, in lessons, my head would be full of horses, courses, jockeys and trainers. Many heavy hours were enlightened by mental calculations of potential income from doubles, trebles, accumulators and Yankees and a great sense of liberation came from knowing that my mind wasn’t doing what the school wanted it to.
The old, imposing school building, set on a hill behind the town’s train station, was late Victorian but it lacked any of the mock-gothic attractions of the High Court. I found the architecture foreboding on the outside and far worse on the inside. It was dark and depressing with it’s windows above head height to match the austerity of the whole interior. However, as bad as life was inside the school, even that was better than the thought of the school extending its hold on me with homework. I quickly made up my mind to cut my connection with education as soon as the bell went at the end of the day and I achieved this by doing my homework between lessons and in any scraps of time I could find. I wasn’t concerned about the standard of the work, only about being able to say it was done. My success in eliminating homework from home was marred on only one occasion when I was caught doing it during morning break – and I was told that I was cheating. It was the only time I ever vocally questioned punishment - before typically taking it politely on the backside. The incident only reinforced my view that doing the work at home was a sanction that I would not self-administer. That meant I could always run the fastest down into town to catch the bus home, because my satchel was never burdened with books.
In my rugby boycott, then through my anti-homework tactics and also in the betting, my conspiracies remained unnoticed. However, towards the slowing end of those long five years at Newport High, a more conspicuous, but still silent, form of protesting became part of my daily life. Blazers, caps, grey shirts, grey trousers and sensible black shoes were compulsory, with instant punishment for transgressions. In my mid-teens I somehow beat the system, by creeping up on it gradually until my tie was the only remnant of school uniform left. One day when parading out of assembly with shoulder length hair, in a blue mohair suit, white shirt, brown winkle pickers and brightly coloured socks, the headmaster summoned me to his office at the top of the dark, stone stairway. I thought this could spell the end of my run. Dr. David Parry-Michael possibly wouldn’t have known my name and he didn’t ask for it. Instead, he just looked me up and down purposefully before casually remarking “Not quite what we expect is it?” I quietly agreed with his comment and with that he seemed to be satisfied. He sent me away without further admonishment. The encounter didn’t change my style of dress, or the other dissenting positions I had adopted, but the unexpected empathy I felt running in both directions was probably the making of me, as, after going back down the stairs, I began to take an interest in what was left of my school education.
After breaking my tradition of secrecy with that challenge to uniform, the next protest was both visually and audibly noticeable. Approaching sixteen and being a highly paid paper-boy, I’d saved enough money for the deposit on a top-class motor bike. With hopes of a life in professional football fading, motor cycle racing appeared to be an exciting alternative, so I sent off to Kings of Oxford for a raceable Ducati Elite.On my way to school, I twice-daily checked the platform at the station until I saw it wrapped in corrugated cardboard and leaning against a cast iron pillar. The cardboard came off to reveal a blaze of Italian racing red. I wouldn’t read school books at home, but before I decided on the Ducati I had devoured all the books on car and motor-cycle engineering that I could find in Newport library.
Even in today’s more liberal times I can’t imagine a pupil doing what I did with that bike. There were no rules for motorbikes in school because there weren’t any motorbikes, so I rode it in through the gate, along the footpath past the gym and the full length of the rugby pitch, down into the play area near the entrance to the main building and then, with the galvanised roof resonating, into the cycle shed adjacent to the toilets. When shutting the throttle from high revs, the sound of the Ducati was music to my ears and I played tunes on the engine under the corrugated canopy. The noise must have been noticed by the staff in their nearby room, but nobody ever complained.My dress and the Ducati were both protests, but not wholly so, as they were manifestations of personal taste that also happened to serve my anti-school attitude. My ultimate school protest had quite a different character. It was far more symbolic, pre-meditated and even coordinated.As a last-ditch dig at the school, I targeted the subject of English Literature because I felt that there was a social class bias in the material we studied. To release my frustration I instigated an action in which I teamed up with two other boys prior to the subject’s GCE examination. I proposed a threepenny bit from each of us to form a kitty payable to the one who could last longest before putting pen to paper during the exam.
In the school’s Gym, which doubled as a theatre, we three were seated on the stage amongst a small group, in view of all those down on the floor of the gym. It was a perfect platform. My own aims were measured and I set out to answer questions only on Thomas Hardy and Shakespeare, as they offended me less than the set novels or the more contemporary plays. It meant I would need less than half of the time provided for the exam. With invigilators walking the boards with increasingly irate mannerisms, Fred Smith cracked and started to write after 50 minutes. It was an hour into the exam before I began writing and I was very happy with beating Fred and coming second in the competition, in which Ian Thomas coasted to victory and took the money. The protest meant that I was bound to fail English Literature, but I reckoned that I would have failed anyway and the way I failed was my form of success. The refusal to write was a well planned and successfully executed protest which, again, achieved nothing more than personal satisfaction, since nobody of importance got to know the motive behind it. Beforehand, it had occurred to me that it would be useful to communicate the reason for my action, but I doubted that I was capable of doing that. A five year decline in my expressive abilities had meant that not only English literature was dislikeable but that I had difficulties with the English language. After my final fling, I promised myself that if I was ever to protest again then words would be as important as deeds. That was to be a life-changing decision.
Teacher “Arty” Evans had once suggested that a monastery was my destiny because of my work on church architecture and manuscript lettering.He explained that the tall, slender features of Gothic buildings were intended to evoke a proximity to heaven. I did find something sublime about elongated windows, arched doorways and pinnacles on high but I was equally interested in the science and engineering employed in the structures, so I ended up in industry rather than theology. Yet, when at the High Court thirty years after leaving school, the spirituality of my Art lessons returned amidst the mock Gothic splendour of George Edmund Street’s 19th Century design. Familiar with the building’s much photographed façade through TV and newspapers, and always knowing it as “The High Court”, I was puzzled just before setting off for London, as I checked the time and place. For the first time, I spotted that the address I due to be at was “The Royal Courts of Justice”.Not knowing then what I know now, I had anxious moments about my true destination before I concluded that “The Royal Courts of Justice” was indeed the name on the building, whilst the title I was familiar with was a collective term for both the High Court and the Court of Appeal. Ostensibly, my journey began when the writ was served on me four years earlier in 1985, but the real road to that writ was possibly pencilled-in during my industrial alternative to the monastic mission predicted by my Art teacher. My un-communicated protest about English literature in school had taught me that protest without persuasion is pointless, so after my miss-spent schooldays, I grabbed every opportunity to bring my communication skills up from basement level and I acquired plenty of experience in persuasion along the road toward the ultimate war of words that awaited me.
The legal action against me arose from Radio 4’s “The World Tonight” broadcast on 9th August 1989, in which I was interviewed by the BBC’s Michael Woodhead when I led a campaigning network known as the “Stop Toxic Emissions Action Movement” (STEAM). The campaign was centred on the local incinerator, on my side of Pontypool, which imported the most detested chemical waste from all over the world - and notably from Canada.The media often called upon me to comment on events and I was kept busy on the day of my Radio 4 interview following action by Greenpeace at Tilbury docks. The Khudozhnik Saryan was carrying a small consignment of six tonnes of Canadian PCB waste in a freight container and the docks management had already intimated that the container would not be offloaded, but Greenpeace set out to ensure that the official position was maintained. Breakfast TV pictured the dawn raid where the environmental activists, in one of their high speed inflatable dinghies, buzzed the incoming Balt-Orient Lines ship and draped a skull and crossbones on the side of the container vessel. The toxic waste duly remained on board.
Before that waste container encountered Greenpeace, Canadian waste was already in the public eye, with a 1500 tonne stockpile poised for the Pontypool incinerator via Liverpool docks. I’d been working closely with Greenpeace, keeping them in touch with our own efforts to thwart the arrival of the 1500 tonnes, whose origin was independent of the Tilbury cargo. Greenpeace’s action aimed to draw attention to our larger target, which was scheduled to come across the Atlantic in a series of 15 weekly shipments. With Pontypool as the planned destination, there was uproar in the local community and when Tilbury’s forerunner sailed into the news it sparked the emergence of a new Pontypool campaigning group that refreshed the opposition to the shipments. The group arose out of the concerns of local mothers and their command of the issue provided a new focus for the media and a headache for the regulatory authorities. They soon gathered the support of many generations of families, conveying an image that helped embed the protest intravenously in our region of South Wales. Greenpeace’s action at Tilbury would ensure considerable media coverage of the forthcoming clash between the Pontypool protestors and the formidable forces in favour of the imports. Six tonnes at Tilbury was a skirmish. Fifteen hundred tonnes on an Atlantic shuttle service could amount to a large and lengthy battle. With an aim of changing the course of events, my comments on BBC radio, on the night of the Khudozhnik Saryan’s fanfare in Tilbury, were important opening shots in that battle and unsurprisingly resulted in the writ from Rechem
In what I saw of the waste trade at the time, I often needed to do a reality check of my perceptions. What went on seemed too silly to be true. After leaving Newport High School, at the earliest opportunity I embarked on a long programme of alternative education, beginning with ‘A’-levels at night school and eventually a couple of university degrees. In parallel with becoming better-educated, along the way I accrued experience of chemical process control, furnace management, international commerce and the regulation of industry. I believed I could justify my criticisms of Rechem’s hazardous chemical waste incinerator in Pontypool and of the global business it was in. One of my first night-school classes was in Economics, at the former Bell-Vue primary school down towards the docks district in Newport and near my early home in Price Street. The school had become a centre for further education and although my own primary school had been St. Michaels, I got to know Bell Vue through my Liverpudlian mother, who worked in that school as a cleaner in the evenings. In one classroom, whose floor we had once swept and polished, I went on to learn about international trade organisations and their purposes. When, in 1984, almost two decades after that phase of education, I discovered foreign toxic waste arriving on my doorstep, I was suspicious about the rules governing the trade. When I thought about where waste fitted into theories of value, commercial principles and international regulation, I wasn’t impressed. With its negative value I wondered why waste had ever become something for trading under normal rules. There seemed to have been an oversight and I suspected that toxic waste disguised in euphemistic terminology was taking advantage of it. It was haemorrhaging from places that had plenty but didn’t want it, to places that couldn’t stop it coming in. Relative affluence was part of that, as were national differences in environmental awareness. That’s how I saw it when I first got involved; naively believing that it was just a matter of regulation needing to catch up with modern materials and processes. However, I soon found other forces that acted as deterrents to progress, by working to conserve confusion so as to smooth the passage of waste along linguistically lubricated, legally defensible trails that defied logic.
Amongst the illogical idiosyncrasies of waste was an undeveloped idea of ownership. With normal goods, suppliers retain ownership until the goods are securely delivered to their destination. If goods can’t be delivered they go back to the supplier and because most goods have some value, there’s no incentive for ownership to be relinquished. It’s more likely that normal goods would attract theft rather than become lost. With waste the incentives are reversed. Toxic waste is a large liability, with no incentives for it to be stolen whilst the loss of ownership can be very lucrative. In another quirk, just as waste had the potential to change its description as it passed over borders, toxic waste had a tendency to change its toxicity when moving from one country to another. I would joke that we hardy Brits should be proud of our ability to officially withstand concentrations of chemicals that would cause the people of weaker nations to fall ill.
Ironically, this slippery business was proudly defended by some great powers because the trade was said to be an indicator of economic progress and an essential feature of a free market. My expectations of strange goings on in the waste trade meant it was not entirely surprising for me to learn, in 1987, of the undeclared toxic waste that had hindered recovery operations in the Herald of Free Enterprise ferry disaster, or in 1988, of toxic waste consignments for Pontypool travelling legally on passenger planes from Canada to Heathrow.These were natural consequences of a system which could take advantage of varying national standards and irregular regulation. Some advanced countries were delighted to export toxic waste but hypocritically stifled imports. Ironically, many less developed countries with no home-made chemicals to export, didn’t want imports but they lacked the power to prevent the unwelcome entry of waste.
Under the spell of free market ideologues, the British government strongly supported the global trade in waste and Britain’s stance meant that the world’s worst waste came to Pontypool, a relatively poor and powerless victim. Renowned for its role in the industrial revolution, a role that brought mixed blessings, and for its Chartist politics, the Eastern Valley of Gwent was no longer an economic or political stronghold. Perhaps those were the fertile conditions needed for the region’s return to prominence, in the late 20th century, as an international toxic waste centre. Viewing it like this, on the receiving end of the waste and with the local incinerator’s filthy emissions providing frequent reminders of the fallacious concept of waste disposal, I was highly motivated during the BBC interview on 9th August 1989. The coming of Canadian waste was a great opportunity for me to tell the world about Britain’s so-called “solution” to the problems of other countries, even if it was difficult to do that legally. The difficulties became increasingly apparent as I later ran out of fingers, counting newspapers and broadcasters who yielded to the same chemical company, the same solicitors and the same legal processes that wanted me to submit in the same way.