Too Close To Home

Twenty-five years ago, on 2 April 1996, a landmark judgment in favour of two Leeds residents, brought up in the shadow of an asbestos factory, was handed down by the Court of Appeal. Repercussions of the Court’s decision in the case of Margereson and Hancock –v- JW Roberts Limited would echo across the UK, and as far afield as South Africa. The two claimants had fought to prove that Turner & Newall (T&N) JW Roberts’ parent company, had failed in their duty of care, not just to their employees but also to those like June Hancock and Arthur Margereson who had lived near to the Defendant’s Armley factory.

June, who was born in 1936, grew up in Armley and attended Armley Park School; her mother, Maie, also had a sweet shop located close to the asbestos factory on Canal Road in Armley. As a child, like so many other children in the neighbourhood, June played with asbestos which was blown out of the factory’s roof vents and ‘swirled like snowflakes’ through the surrounding streets, drifting in piles on windowsills and other surfaces. The factory’s loading bays were ‘like a magnet’ to local children who would regularly gather to play hopscotch and roll marbles and spin tops on the flat surface of the loading bays, as the area was quite hilly. Children would go to the local butcher’s shop and ask for a blown up pig’s bladder which they would use as a football. They would also jump on the bales of asbestos which were placed on the loading bays and only occasionally be shooed away by the foremen. Innocent childhood games; but with a very dangerous legacy.

As part of our legal investigation, we interviewed a great many people who had lived in the area; we wrote to everyone on the electoral roll and also wrote to the playwright, Alan Bennett, and author, Barbara Taylor-Bradford, who had grown up in Armley. We also had to pore over many thousands of documents from Turner & Newall’s own archives, which T&N tried very hard to withhold, and we were assisted by American lawyers acting for Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, whose high-rise building in Manhattan was riddled with asbestos installed by Turner & Newall. It was a mammoth task.

An aerial photograph of Armley Clock School (adjacent to Canal Road and situated slightly higher than the factory) was unearthed by my colleague, Rachel Pairman, and it showed the playground covered in dust like a carpet of snow; the school children would play outside and the younger ones would even take an afternoon nap on little camp beds in the playground, when the weather was fine. Rachel was later congratulated by the trial judge, Mr Justice Holland, for finding it.

During the second half of the last century, hundreds of Armley residents paid a terrible price. The area was found to have the highest UK incidence of mesothelioma; a malignant form of cancer, almost always associated with asbestos exposure, and with a normal latency (incubation) period of several decades. June Hancock’s own mother, Maie Gelder, very sadly died of mesothelioma in 1982. When June was diagnosed with the illness in late 1993, she vowed to take on the multinational company (T&N) whose negligence she believed had caused her mother’s premature death and would, likewise, rob her of her old age and seeing the births of her grandchildren. “Two in one family is too many”, she said poignantly.

The Armley factory began producing textiles in 1874; some twenty years later, having been acquired by the Turner & Newall group, JW Roberts embraced asbestos technology and it went on to become one of the country’s biggest producers of asbestos insulation and asbestos-containing fireproofing products (in particular sprayed ‘limpet’ asbestos) exporting to some 60 countries worldwide. Tragically, for the residents and their families who were so badly affected, the factory was located in a densely-populated area with back-to-back terraced housing encircling the industrial site. The company would later claim that it could not have known about the dangerous effects of asbestos exposure until after the Leeds factory closed its gates in 1959, well beyond the time when June Hancock and Arthur Margereson played in Armley’s dust-covered streets.

Local doctors who recorded the effects of these industrial processes told a different story. The UK’s first-named asbestos victim was Nellie Kershaw who left school at the age of 12 to work briefly in a cotton mill and then in Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA’s) mill, retiring of ill health in 1922 and dying two years later, at the age of 33, of asbestosis. As a result of Nellie’s death, and others like it, the UK’s first asbestos regulations were introduced in 1931.

It was in order to comply with these regulations that the factory owner (JW Roberts/T&N) said that it pumped asbestos out through the factory’s ventilation system and into the surrounding neighbourhood, with devastating consequences.

T&N’s lawyers argued, at the six week-long trial in Leeds High Court in the summer of 1995, that it did not have specific knowledge of the risks associated with the asbestos cancer, mesothelioma, until the mid-1960s; they also argued that their responsibilities extended only to their workforce, conveniently overlooking the fact that, in the process of sucking dangerous asbestos dust out of the factory in Armley in order to comply with the regulations in force, and as a consequence polluting the whole neighbourhood, they had exposed many hundreds (if not thousands) of people and children to the same deadly threat.

In finding in favour of June Hancock and Arthur Margereson (represented by his widow Evelyn) in October 1995, Mr Justice Holland saw off the company. The trial judge, in his 226 page judgment, concluded that T&N did indeed owe a duty of care to those living in the immediate vicinity of the Canal Road factory and to those former children (like June) who played on the factory’s loading bays, ‘tearing down’ the factory walls.

It was a landmark judgment and the Defendant immediately signalled that it would appeal against Mr Justice Holland’s decision. He had severely criticised T&N saying that it had contested the claims ‘by every means possible, legitimate or otherwise, in order to obstruct the plaintiffs’ road… and to wear the plaintiffs down by attrition’, likening the litigation to a ‘David –v- Goliath’ battle.

It was the first case in the UK where a serious physical injury was found to have been caused by industrial environmental pollution. The implications for the defendant company, which saw its share price fall dramatically, were such that they felt compelled to appeal. The appeal was fast-tracked because June was very unwell. The case was heard at the end of March 1996 in a two day hearing in London (June was present throughout) and the appeal court judges concurred with Mr Justice Holland and stated that the factory owner’s guilty knowledge of asbestos went back before 1925, well before June was born. T&N was refused permission to appeal to the House of Lords. And so it ended.

Thus it was that the Goliath of a British multinational was brought to heel by a personal secretary from Bramley in Leeds. “It proves that no matter how small you are, you can fight”; said June, “and no matter how big you are, you can lose”.

I am very proud, together with a number of my Irwin Mitchell colleagues (particularly Alida Coates and Ian Bailey - who still work with me some 25 years later) to have been able to play a part in making such a significant difference on the part of the Hancock family and many more in the Armley area, and to have helped achieve justice for thousands of victims of asbestos disease in the UK.

June’s family, myself and her treating consultant, Dr Martin Muers, established the June Hancock Mesothelioma Research Fund shortly after June died in 1997; it was the first dedicated mesothelioma research charity to be formed in the UK and its work continues to this day. Dr Kate Hill, a fellow JHMRF trustee, and I will be discussing the importance of research in a podcast during Global Asbestos Awareness Week.