4. Fire and Epiphany
After passing Cwmbran on the left when travelling North on the A4042 from Newport to Pontypool, the rising road then drops down into the riverside hollow that was the incongruous home for the infamous incinerator. Standing prominently beside a major junction commonly known as the “ReChem roundabout”, at 180 feet high, the chimney stack dominated, especially when viewed from one of thousands of homes on the hillsides of the valley. Beneath the stack, a large proportion of ReChem’s site was taken up by the open-air storage of steel drums containing a wide range of hazardous substances. There were also large liquid storage tanks, often complemented by chemicals in road tankers and freight containers.
Activities at the plant were visible through a high wire link fence and the site visually and audibly bustled. Continual clattering came from fork-trucks as they charged up to the open furnace door to launch material into the furnace flames. As a fork-load of waste went in, there might be a belch of thick, swirling black smoke out through the hearth, sometimes accompanied by a tongue of flame. If you looked for long enough you might see synchronised smoking from both the base of the furnace and the top of the stack and occasionally you would hear an accompanying explosion. In the fire there could be an interesting blend of chemicals: liquids pumped from the chemical storage tanks, drummed liquids, solid waste and other shapes and sizes of hazardous materials. The sight of the swirling flames amidst clouds of black smoke conjured up images of ancient alchemy. No scientific spin would alter my opinion that if this was a “State of the art” process, as Rechem would describe it, then it was a black art. My poor impression of the process was reinforced when a fork truck with a long steel prong would now and then poke away at the substances on the hearth. Officially this Pontypool plant was a world leader, with its technology portrayed as a perfect solution to the problems of countries whose ignorance of what I saw excused the transportation of those problems to us. If the Director General of the BBC had stood with me at the fence of the plant and looked into the fire for himself, his apology to ReChem may not have been as forthcoming.Even ignoring the smell, smoke and clumsy incineration hardware, it was disturbing to ponder on the stockpile of so many chemicals with such power to poison.
It wasn’t the only tall chimney stack in the area. There was another one about a mile away, but Rechem’s was more striking because of its broadness and its spiralling strakes. A Rechem spokesman once tried to divert my attention from the incinerator’s emissions towards the not insignificant outpourings of the stack at the neighbouring factory, so I arranged a visit to that factory, which made fibreglass insulation. I had a good look around and my questions received coherent answers from the management. I paid no more attention to the fibreglass plant and it was ReChem’s straked stack rising from the riverside that became the striking campaigning image and a magnet for media cameras.Planned in 1972 and commissioned in 1974, the Pontypool plant was one of three ReChem incinerators. I was told they were the brainchild of the company’s founder Dr. Arthur Coleman and were built to mix highly flammable waste with less flammable waste in mutual annihilation. The idea must have seemed like a winner in 1972 and even more so when the OECD called time-upon PCBs in 1973. ReChem’s propaganda promised total destruction with no smell or smoke, which was backed up by fail-safe systems of operation. In reality the plant did smell and smoke, sometimes failed and didn’t always fail safely. Furthermore, the promise that the toxic chemicals would be totally destroyed was always too good to be true and the claim became an obsession of mine. First established to deal with waste that came only from the border areas of Wales and England, the plant grew global tentacles and when I reflected on its crazy location I found its role to be an insult to a region trying to rise from centuries of exploitation.
In moments of reflection, I often wondered whether the blend of education and work, which together created my curiosity about Rechem, was driving me into danger. My experiences in industry made me uneasy about what I saw at the plant, my suspicions about the degree of “destruction” of its chemicals made me even more concerned and when I discovered that some of the waste was imported and figured-out that foreign chemicals could be contained in the plant’s emissions, I couldn’t rest. So it was that the combination of observation, intuition, destruction efficiency and waste importation eventually led to the radio comments which drew ReChem’s wrath after the BBC broadcast. Having encountered reactions from ReChem previously, I was always braced for a backlash and I knew that annoyance would mean that the pressure was paying-off. Therefore in one sense, opening the letter from ReChem’s solicitors Nabarro Nathanson and reading the threat of heavyweight action from the top legal firm brought me a moment of satisfaction. I’d obviously rattled the company. However, when digesting the contents of the warning letter, my mood changed, my mind went into overdrive and I felt my heart switch to emergency mode. These days, I thought of myself as a placid, philosophical person who was not prone to impulses, but in reading the letter I felt the resentment from my grammar school days welling up again. I already believed that it was our region’s legacy of vulnerability that lured other people’s toxic waste to a plant that would be intolerable to communities with more clout. It was as if the Monmouthshire Chartists uprising of 1839 had been forgotten, that deference dominated decisions and that submission to the powers that be was the norm. Now I was being asked to submit, too.
Living a few miles to the South of the plant, where at home I was normally untroubled by its emissions, I was conscious that my intrusion into the local community’s affairs could be politically problematic. Before 1984 I had very little connection with New Inn on the hillside above the plant and I knew nobody who lived there. After five years of campaigning I’d come to feel at home in the community and I had grown close to people of many generations in many families. From the welcome, the friendship and the support I received from them, I knew that my efforts were appreciated. We met, marched and demonstrated together as a family, from toddlers to octogenarians, meaning that when I went to the local BBC studio for the fateful interview it was with a heavy weight of expectation on my shoulders. Now, in the aftermath of the broadcast, if I buckled as the letter intended me to, then what of the campaign and what of New Inn? My scalp in Rechem’s hands would surely ward off other protestors and avert the gaze of any surviving media critics.
I read the threatening letter after returning late in the evening from Liverpool docks on the very day the leading ship in the series of Soviet vessels had arrived. This was then a full week after The World Tonight broadcast.I double checked my understanding of the solicitor’s demands, which included the requirements for me to stop campaigning and withdraw my objections to the Canadian waste shipments, before I burned with indignation. I saw it as an exhibition of power and privilege and I soon realised that the source of the fire in me was even more subtly seated than in the mark made by my grammar school. On a different day my reaction might have been less emotional but there was something special in the nostalgia that I felt during the glorious afternoon in Liverpool’s docklands. Liverpool was my mother’s hometown, where she met my father as a result of his naval service during the 2nd World War.She was one of nine surviving children when she moved from Liverpool to the Powell family’s less congested home in Newport’s Maesglas district.Soon after I was born we went down the ‘Old road’ from Maesglas to live in the ageing docks district of Pill.I now know that Pill is short for the Welsh word Pillgwenlly, where the ‘Pill’ part means an inlet or harbour. The ‘gwenlly’ is derived from St. Gwynllyw, Newport’s patron saint from the Dark Ages and I believed that a modern dark age had been the backcloth to the day in Liverpool – since I had been continually contending with archaic practices in the trade, technology and regulation of hazardous waste. Yet, the obscurities of the antiquated system I was campaigned against was nothing compared to the mysteries of the libel process that was awaiting me.
First reminding me of my primary school days, when I spent time with my mother’s family in Liverpool, the dockland scenery on the day of the Liverpool protest had diverted my thoughts back to the docks in Newport and my early life there.My original school was St. Michael’s, on the other side of the railway line which led to the docks. Though Pillgwenlly is a Welsh name, I have no recollection of Welsh being spoken there, though I did hear Italian, Polish and Caribbean accents amongst the colourful residents of the docks district. Newport’s docks itself was founded on the coal and iron exports that took-off in the early 19th Century, yet when I lived in Pill it was imported coal that was the source of my father’s pay. He was a ‘coal trimmer’ who shovelled coal from the corners of the ship’s holds where it was out of reach of the dockside crane’s grab.I later came to appreciate what a brilliant shoveller my father was, when much later he helped me around the garden, though his shovelling skills hadn’t compensated for the financial problems that came with his lowly coal trimming status. He was classified as a casual worker, mainly used for intermittent coal cargoes and without the same entitlement to work that was enjoyed by a registered docker. He often returned home in the middle of the morning after waiting, unsuccessfully, to be picked for work. It was good that another common cargo in the dock, iron ore for the South Wales steel-making, did provide my Dad with some extra opportunities, but the most lucrative work only came his way in emergencies where time and tide required all hands below deck. I remember the excitement at home on one exceptional pay-day, which came after he’d been unloading Argentinean cattle against the tidal clock. I still recall my mother’s relief at the money. Financial considerations aside, I was glad of the spare time my father had, during which he could take me around the docks and talk to me about the boats and their cargoes. I found such romance in staring at the huge rusting vessels, in wondering about their journeys and speculating on the kind of people who sailed on them. My interest in the docks at the time was enhanced by my father’s footloose young brother, Freddy Powell, who also worked there. Fred was a daredevil who relished diving off masts and sometimes swam across the murky river Usk for a challenge. Thus I grew up with just enough of a nautical connection to allow me to be comfortably nostalgic when the Canadian toxic waste was at sea, when ports and ships became part of my daily agenda and particularly when I entered Liverpool docks with the warning letter lying on my doormat at home.
Until I was seven, my mother, father and I shared the old, damp, terraced house at 61 Price Street with my father’s uncle, with another family, and with masses of cockroaches. The house is now gone and Pill is no longer the grassless, smoggy, treeless place that I knew, though it still remains colourful and still deprived. To add to the problems of my father’s intermittent employment, my mother was ill with pleurisy for what seemed forever but apart from anxieties about her health I remember being very happy when growing up in Pill. The height of my happiness arrived when I started school at St. Michael’s. With my parents taking it in turns to sit me on their laps and read to me, by the time I began school I could read so well that the school’s head nun fixed it for me to break the age rules and join the public library.Choosing new books was the highlight of my week and my love of reading and learning continued throughout my next primary school after we moved to our heavenly new council flat in Malpas. It was there that my reading changed from fiction to fact.I devoured the set of encyclopaedias my mother bought for me from a door-to-door salesman before finding, in the school’s library, Patrick Moore’s “The Boys Book of Space”. It galvanised my desire for learning. With such good feelings about education, when I went to the grammar school and didn’t take to it, I sort of knew the five years would be only an interruption. At the same time that my early reading had changed from fiction to fact my father went technical, too. By the time he’d departed the docks for a fettling job in a nearby foundry, he’d taken an interest in radio theory and as time went by and I admired his understanding and so I also tried to find satisfaction from investigating complicated things. When I returned to learning after being freed from grammar school, I tried to make up for lost time.Consequently, more than twenty years later, when I first encountered the Pontypool incinerator I was ready to take in the contents of all the related literature on chemicals, toxicology and technology. The material was usually steered in my direction by supportive specialists, particularly from medical fields, who backed what I was doing.Personal computers weren’t prolific at that time, so with yards and yards of shelving made from 10” x 2” planks, I developed a filing system that impressed the many media people and researchers who descended on my home.
When my parents took me on the bus ride from landscapeless Pill to show me our freshly plastered council flat on a new estate bordered by woodland, my first intake of the natural environment was breathtaking.From our windows, the fields rose into mountains and through the floor to ceiling glass of my new school I saw grass, flowers, and trees. I thrived there. Although knowing no dialect other than Newport town’s I was articulate in my own way and confident with it too. Then, after the self-imposed abatement of education, with an accompanying degeneration in confidence, my entry into the world of work was the catalyst for some serious qualifications. By the time I was accused of misleading BBC listeners in 1989, I had great pride in what I’d achieved, as did my parents, and it was possibly this, rather than the specifics of the toxic waste issue, that generated my indignity when affronted by the lawyer’s letter.Having once allowed my attitude towards authority to become a straightjacket, I wasn’t going to succumb silently for a second time. I cherished the thought that my opponents had no idea that their legal threats meant far less to me than did the challenge to my identity, I became energised rather than intimidated.
Against the background of the emotional and memorable day in a Liverpool, as I continued to deconstruct the threats in the letter my seething was soothed. For some minutes I’d been at a tumultuous crossroads but now the fire within me seemed to illuminate the way ahead.As well as having personal pride I was immensely proud of what the campaign had achieved in publicising the problems of toxic waste and beginning to rectify them. I eliminated all thoughts of yielding to any demands in the letter and I felt calmly confident in my future direction. Yes, I would seek some legal advice on the next step, but with the letter still in my hand and after my brief moment of turmoil, I took time to wonder why, in such serious circumstances, I could feel a wave of tranquillity washing my cares away.It was a state of mind I would often return to during the embattled years ahead. One reason for the comfort was my assessment that ReChem had thrown down the gauntlet for a fight in which I had the chance to destroy the company’s desire to take action like this against anyone again. I wasn’t going to approach this as a hapless victim out for sympathy. On the contrary, it was now Rechem who should be worried.The toxic waste campaign was one thing, but from here on in there would be a challenge of a more primitive nature. In my epiphany at that moment, the letter became a blessing, for having once let power and privilege suppress his identity, I now had no doubt that this boy from Pill should make the most of his opportunity to find restitution.