diamond geezer

This monument popped up in the middle of Barking recently.
I thought it was very recently but it was actually unveiled in April 2022 and I’m just not very observant.

It says “In Memory of those who lost their lives because of exposure to asbestos”.

And it’s here because Barking has one of the highest rates of asbestos-related deaths in the country.

In 1913 the Cape Asbestos Company built a huge asbestos factory beside the River Roding in Barking. The company mined asbestos-bearing rock at several sites in South Africa, then shipped them in sacks to a private quay in Barking for processing. Hundreds of people were employed to mill the ore into usable fibres and then process these into lagging, packaging, pipes, resins, boards and all forms of insulation widely used in the building trade. They worked without masks or other protection, the dangers of asbestos either unknown or not thought worth bothering about. And hundreds of workers died, often many years later, of insidious chronic respiratory disease.

I found a 32-page booklet published by Cape Asbestos in the days before blue asbestos was recognised as dangerous and banned, which was as late as 1985. It shows workers with rolled-up sleeves and women leaning over unshielded machines, all potentially inhaling enough fibres to ultimately kill them. I read reports about the local school in Barking, barely 100 metres away, saying that the playground was often covered in fine dust which children rolled up and played with as if it were snow. I read that mesothelioma was so common in the area it was known as the ‘Barking Cough’. These were different times, but times that linger on.

Cape Asbestos’s plant eventually closed in 1968 and in its place was built the Harts Lane council estate, which is still not the loveliest corner of Barking. It included two tall tower blocks called Colne House and Mersey House, both of which Barking & Dagenham council would now like to demolish. This is chiefly because they’re old and covered in combustible cladding, but the additional complications of potentially disturbing polluted land puts any remediation out of financial reach. It’s always the insulation you have to watch out for.

The memorial in Barking Town Square comprises a polished chunk of blue pearl granite and was unveiled on Workers’ Memorial Day 2022 in a ceremony attended by several trade unionists and representatives of the London Asbestos Support Awareness Group. The emphasis is partly on remembrance and partly on the importance of standing up for workers’ rights to make conditions better for all. As the inscription says, “Remember the Dead and Fight for the Living”.

My grandfather worked for another Cape Asbestos plant on Tolpits Lane in Watford. Originally it had been run by Universal Asbestos Manufacturing but in 1967 the factory was acquired by Cape as part of a diversification into cement-based products. They made corrugated roofing, flat sheets, decorated sheets, slates, soil pipes, decking for flat roofs and reinforced troughing – that kind of thing – the asbestos moulded into a multiplicity of shapes for the benefit of the building trade.

To him Cape Universal was just a convenient place to work, a short walk across the moor for a day’s shift and then home again for tea. He worked there for many years, from the 1930s to the 1960s, rising through the ranks from a labourer to a machine operator on the factory floor. On his death certificate his occupation was listed as ‘Asbestos Moulder’, and it was very much a premature death because this didn’t end well.

I don’t remember very much about my grandfather because he died when I was 8. I know he was there when I took my first steps in his back garden and I can remember sitting at his dining room table and hoping nobody would force me to eat the celery. My final memory is being led up to his bedroom, I suspect not long before his death, to see an ill old man laid out in bed and struggling to breathe. I don’t know what was said, nor how short a time I stayed in his presence, indeed my strongest recollection is of the room itself with its austere cupboards and the curtains drawn. And then at the age of 67 he was gone.

My family fought for asbestosis to be recognised as his cause of death but were not successful. I’ve read recently of fellow workers working at the Tolpits Lane factory now getting six figure payouts in compensation, indeed it’s hard to research this topic without ending up on legal websites with popups urging you to make a claim. Even four decades after the factory’s closure there are still employees severely affected, and many more already passed, as the toxic legacy endures. The factory site is now a rather cleaner industrial estate and business park, indeed it’s where the National Lottery’s been based for the last 30 years because risk and loss are still in play.

Today my Dad reaches the grand old age of 87, a full 20 years more than his father lived. Science has moved on a long way since the 1970s, also educational opportunities and also workers’ rights. Health and safety is sometimes much derided but it can genuinely save lives, even much extend them, rather than everyone continually moaning about additional costs and annoying procedures. If someone had shouted earlier and louder about the dangers of asbestos I might have known my grandfather better, my grandmother could have had many more years of married life and my father could have had a father for much longer.

My Dad lost his Dad at the age of 34, which is no age at all in the grand scheme of things. By contrast I still have my Dad at the age of 60, which has meant an extra quarter century of guidance, support, advice, love and always being there. How lucky am I? Every day we overlap with our parents is a blessing and I’ve had 22,000 of them, for all of which I’m truly grateful. We’re off out later to celebrate with a slap-up dinner, or as slap-up as an 87-year-old stomach requires, which the wider family are greatly looking forward to. What Barking’s memorial reminded me is that many families have not been so fortunate, and sometimes that loss can be very close to home.