In April 1976, journalist Gloria Stewart wrote in the Daily Mail that she was wondering whether to send her two young sons back to school after the Easter holidays. After a recent Ombudsman’s report into asbestos-related disease around the Acre Mill factory in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, and reports of damaged asbestos forcing families to leave their homes in Deptford, East London, she was worried about the safety of her boys’ school. Stewart spoke to a heating engineer who had recently woken up in a cold sweat thinking about the hundreds of schools in which he had installed blue asbestos (crocidolite). “I know schools where dust is to two to three inches deep in the ducts,” he said. “A mouse running along stirs it up. Then the convection currents take it into the classrooms.” To demonstrate the scale of the problem she quoted the Department of Education, who told her that asbestos could have been used in about 8,700 of the 13,000 schools built between 1945 and 1975. “We are now told,” she noted, that asbestos “can cause cancer up to 15 years after someone has had the slightest exposure to it—in some cases less than one day.” The report was headlined “Is this killer dust swept under the mat?” and was illustrated with a photograph of children lining up in a playground above the caption “Their school could be a death trap: but who is checking?”Footnote 1
Stewart’s article reflected two key developments in this period. First, the growing public understanding that asbestos was the primary cause of mesothelioma, a virulent cancer only identified in the 1950s, which can result from a short or “transient” exposure to asbestos and often only becomes apparent twenty or more years later.Footnote 2 Second, that this potentially deadly material was widely present outside of industrial sites and could be found in the ordinary buildings and spaces of everyday life, including schools. There remained, however, uncertainty about what action, if any, should be taken. This ambiguity was reflected in the Health and Safety Executive who assured Stewart that “blue asbestos is safe as long as it does not deteriorate,” yet acknowledged that “if it does, it is very dangerous.” This seemed incongruous to Stewart, who cited an example of a primary school in Cardiff that had been closed when children were exposed to blue asbestos after “prodding a lavatory roof with a stick.” Birds had also been releasing fibers when taking the asbestos as nesting material. She asked rhetorically, “what about other schools? They have children with sticks too. And birds.” After testing dust found in four schools and discovering all of them to contain blue asbestos, she called for action, saying “let us not have one child in Britain exposed to this awesome danger any longer.” This was a call that would be repeated frequently in the decade that followed and became a key point of contestation between parents, school workers, and local and national officials.Footnote 3
The response to the 1980s campaigns continues to shape official approaches to asbestos in schools. The campaigners called for phased removal of asbestos and the creation of a national record of all asbestos in buildings but were told that this was too expensive and potentially more dangerous than leaving asbestos in place. This was reiterated by government in 1997, 2012, and most recently in 2022.Footnote 4 As a result, and despite the use of asbestos being banned in the UK in 1999, asbestos remains in around 80 percent of schools. There is still no national register of asbestos in schools (or other buildings), and while research suggests that between 1980 and 2017 up to 10,000 people died from asbestos in schools, the majority of them from exposures as pupils, there is no official government record of these deaths.Footnote 5
As Rob Nixon has shown, the “slow violence” of environmental and health disasters often occurs “gradually and out of sight,” its toll only visible at key moments of disaster. Asbestos-related disease is emblematic of this “delayed destruction” that has no obvious event, action, or image, like a stricken oil tanker or burning nuclear power plant, to capture political and public attention.Footnote 6 Instead, the asbestos disaster had to be “made” and made “perceptible.”Footnote 7 In the case of asbestos in schools this was done primarily by local and national media, teachers, school caretakers, parents, trade unions, and anti-asbestos charities and campaigners. These groups, their actions, and the media coverage they provoked made the dangers of asbestos in schools into a major political issue.
Politics of Risk in Everyday Environments
The growing concern about asbestos speaks to intersecting themes in the history of late twentieth-century Britain. Stephen Brooke, Daisy Payling, and others have highlighted the diversity of political interventions in this period, which is increasingly understood by looking beyond the central Thatcherite project.Footnote 8 This has involved attention both to the complex roots and manifestations of market liberalism (or neoliberalism) in Britain, as well as the development of new forms of social democracy led by grassroots activists, whose interventions often centered on race, gender, class, and sexuality.Footnote 9 This article builds on this work and wider histories of voluntary action and non-governmental organizations, but shifts the focus from the more familiar protagonists of the “urban new left” and the larger campaigning charities to make connections with work on environmental contamination, health, and governance.Footnote 10 The campaigns discussed here are not focused on the protection or preservation of nature and are not environmental protests in the way that this is commonly understood. Nevertheless, they highlight an anxiety about exposure to toxic substances in the built environments of everyday life and can serve as an example of the “everyday environmentalism” identified by Alex Loftus, in which the environment is understood as “something lived.”Footnote 11 As groundbreaking histories of asbestos and occupational health have shown, anti-asbestos campaigns originated in industrial communities where asbestos’s effects first became apparent.Footnote 12 This article follows the killer dust outside of the factories and into very different sites of exposure.Footnote 13
It is significant that these conflicts were centered on schools—material manifestations of the welfare state and its promise to “future citizens” that now appeared to be crumbling and even endangering those who used them.Footnote 14 Like schools, asbestos was central to postwar reconstruction, with the so-called “magic mineral” long cast as a symbol of modernity.Footnote 15 It was, as Arthur Rose (following Bruno Latour) describes it, a “modernist object” that embodied ideas of development, progress, technology, and even utopia in the twentieth century.Footnote 16 The material deterioration of schools and the asbestos within them illustrate a wider deterioration of the idea of a social democratic future that these schools represented.Footnote 17 A focus on asbestos in schools offers a counterpoint to the discourses of postwar school buildings that centers on their contribution to what Roy Kozlovsky calls “the welfare state’s project of enriching and harmonizing everyday life.”Footnote 18 While the architectural imaginaries of postwar schools may have been informed by ideas of individual and social development through the creation of positive healthy environments, when these “interactions and spaces” broke down and became dysfunctional in the late twentieth century, a new kind of everyday politics emerged.Footnote 19 An analysis of these unimagined futures reveals growing uncertainty about the relationship between citizens and the state in the 1980s and a profound distrust of authority figures, a key theme in the growth of non-party political actors in postwar Britain.Footnote 20
This growing distrust was centered around the contrasting ways in which the risks of asbestos were understood and communicated. Historians have shown that risks have been “shaped as much by evolving material infrastructures and social conditions as by evolving cultural norms, economic interests and forms of expertise” and that their regulation depends on “struggles to define what is legitimate and illegitimate.”Footnote 21 The case of asbestos in schools shows this struggle in action as government sought to displace the fearful idea that a fatal disease could result from the inhalation of a single fiber or an exposure that lasted “less than one day,” as Stewart put it. Official responses followed the outline described by Ulrich Beck in his conception of the “risk society” in which risks are understood as an “incidental problem of modernization” that must be either “eliminated, or denied and reinterpreted.”Footnote 22 By the end of the decade asbestos was being consistently presented as a ubiquitous “background” exposure, which posed no statistically meaningful danger. Interrogating the problem of asbestos in schools reveals how these ideas about risk were developed, communicated, and contested. This case study highlights how a “knowledge regime,” based on what Felix Römer calls “hierarchies of authority,” worked to dismiss public and campaigner concerns but in doing so fueled distrust in officials responsible for safety in schools.Footnote 23
Concern about asbestos in schools was evident across the UK in the 1980s, with newspapers reporting incidents from the Shetland Isles in the north to Portsmouth in the south.Footnote 24 While this was a national issue, calls for the safe removal of asbestos from schools were most often directed at Local Education Authorities (LEAs) and local councils, who had responsibility for maintaining school buildings. This article will combine local case studies with a broader understanding of the national context. Its local focus is on London and the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA), which, during the 1980s, responded to public pressure by implementing a landmark program to survey and safely remove asbestos from all schools within its twelve Inner London Boroughs.
Protests and Policy in London Schools
The Daneford School in Bethnal Green, London was originally built in 1900 before a second building was added in 1963. Like many thousands of schools, both buildings contained asbestos. Blue asbestos was built into wall board and coated structural columns in the new building, and white asbestos (chrysotile) cement paneling had been used to cover brickwork below the dado level in the interior of classrooms in the old building. Brown asbestos (amosite) was concentrated in the boiler room but was reported to be present throughout the school. The white asbestos in the classrooms was frequently damaged in the course of the daily life of a school, and in November 1982 staff asked Alan Dalton to conduct an inspection. Dalton had trained as a chemist before becoming an environmental and workplace health and safety campaigner, who had published Asbestos: Killer Dust, a “worker/community guide” to asbestos, in 1979. He helped to found Hazards Bulletin and was a leading figure in the radical British Society for Social Responsibility in Science, a group that addressed the role of science and scientists in issues ranging from workplace health and safety, to race and gender discrimination, and chemical weapons. He also worked at the Labour Research Department and later the Transport and General Workers’ Union. He led campaigns on asbestos throughout the 1970s and 1980s and became a prominent national and international activist.Footnote 25 Dalton’s report on the school noted apparently broken and damaged asbestos-containing panels in classrooms, and that school caretakers had been instructed to use wire wool to clean graffiti from these panels and then sweep the resulting dusty debris with a broom. He had “no doubt that these actions have led to considerable levels of deadly asbestos dust.”Footnote 26 The school leadership agreed to remove the white asbestos, but said work would not begin until March the following year. This was rejected by the National Union of Teachers (NUT) and the National Union of Public Employees (NUPE) and a formal dispute developed. By January 1983 staff were refusing to work in certain areas while four hundred pupils were being taken by bus to different schools.Footnote 27 The Daneford dispute was the immediate catalyst for a major campaign to remove asbestos from all schools in the ILEA. This campaign became policy for the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC), part of the municipal “urban new left coalition” against Thatcherism, and over the next decade tens of millions of pounds were spent on asbestos surveys, labeling, and removal.Footnote 28 This work had real and tangible achievements but fell far short of its original ambitions.
The Daneford dispute reached a peak in 1983, but concerns about asbestos in the school had first been raised by pottery teacher Sue Lang in 1975.Footnote 29 This teacher’s account was recorded by Nancy Tait when she was contacted by other teachers at the school in 1983.Footnote 30 Like Dalton, Tait was a prominent anti-asbestos campaigner. She published Asbestos Kills in 1976 and founded the Society for the Prevention of Asbestosis and Industrial Diseases (SPAID) in 1978.Footnote 31 Both Dalton and Tait had given evidence to the government’s Advisory Committee on Asbestos (ACA) in writing and in public hearings in 1977.Footnote 32 Lang told Tait that the head of Daneford School had initially responded by referring her to a psychiatrist to determine if she was “fit to be a teacher.” Despite this, she persisted, and after a visit from a factory inspector and ILEA safety officer, her classroom was “condemned” and she was moved.Footnote 33 After being told that her new room was lined with blue asbestos, which had been damaged by contractors, she took some samples of the dust in her classroom and sent them to be tested independently. The results, included in the correspondence with Tait, showed that the dust contained both brown and blue asbestos.Footnote 34 After a further visit from the factory inspector, Lang was seconded to a different school. When she returned to Daneford she saw broken asbestos panels in a corridor used by hundreds of boys every day and she told Tait that in 1979/80 a woodwork teacher had paid a pupil £1 or £2 to remove asbestos panels without providing any safety equipment. In May 1980, the school caretakers refused to clean her pottery room and eventually an air test was planned. The night before the test was carried out, the asbestos was surreptitiously painted to seal it and, as she pointedly wrote, the amount of asbestos in the air in the classroom was “found to be below the legal permitted quantity for asbestos factories.” Again, a formal complaint was made against Lang by the school authorities, and once more she had to defend her fitness to teach in front of a panel at County Hall, after which she chose to leave the profession.Footnote 35 The dismissal of her concerns reflects how women have been largely excluded from occupational health and safety debates and regulations, and points to a wider lack of knowledge and apparent disinterest in the potential health risks of asbestos.Footnote 36
When the issue of asbestos in the school returned in the autumn of 1982, however, there was a markedly different reaction. Public concern about asbestos had been growing from the mid-1970s and reached a new level following the July 1982 broadcast of the Yorkshire Television documentary Alice: A Fight for Life. The film, which repeatedly emphasized the presence of asbestos in everyday domestic spaces, told the story of Alice Jefferson, a 47-year-old woman who was suffering from mesothelioma and died before the program was aired.Footnote 37 It was frequently cited by officials and activists as initiating demands for action. Dalton described it as “without doubt the catalyst” for the major increase in anti-asbestos activity in the early 1980s.Footnote 38 Its impact was noted by delegates at a Westminster conference on asbestos in October 1982, organized by Tait, and in parliamentary debates.Footnote 39 In one debate, just days after the original broadcast, the Labour MP for Keighley, Bob Cryer, unfavorably compared the amount of money Turner Brothers Asbestos donated to the Conservative Party to the amount of compensation offered to Alice Jefferson.Footnote 40
The impact of Alice on the debate about asbestos in schools became evident when pupils and staff returned from the summer holidays in September 1982. The program was discussed by local officials in London and the heightened attention it brought can be read in the number of newspaper stories about asbestos in schools appearing that autumn.Footnote 41 In September 1982, for example, there were demands for all schools in Liverpool to be subject to air-testing for asbestos after a parent-led boycott followed the discovery of bags of brown asbestos in the heating ducts of a school.Footnote 42 In the same month seven hundred pupils were sent home from a school in Rotherham after asbestos dust was discovered in laboratories.Footnote 43 The following month a school in Leeds was challenged after it came to light that students were drilling holes in an “asbestos compound,” reportedly “to give them a taste of factory life.”Footnote 44 Meanwhile, parents in Glasgow were withholding their children and demanding that their school be closed immediately amid concerns about “killer levels of asbestos” in their school.Footnote 45
In London, the situation at Daneford provided a focus for the wider concern provoked by Alice and appears to have inspired a wave of campaigning and action on asbestos in schools. The Hackney branch of the NUT, the Hackney Teachers’ Association (HTA), encouraged members to book a Daneford teacher to speak at their school and a number of public meetings were held.Footnote 46 In April, the HTA organized one such event, which was attended by school workers, ILEA officials, union representatives, and parents. Speakers included a teacher from Daneford, Dalton, and representatives from the NUT and the NUPE. The HTA produced a “Health and Safety Newsletter” for the meeting, which began with a brief history of the “asbestos disaster” and noted that “taboos” were being lifted following media attention focused on Acre Mill in the 1970s and Alice in 1982. It then connected the campaign against asbestos to anti-nuclear protests at Greenham Common, the Campaign Against Lead, and what it called “the large and growing environmentalist lobby.” The pervasive threat of asbestos was compared to that posed by radiation and nuclear weapons, but while the newsletter made connections to wider political issues more typical of the “urban new left,” it was firmly focused on the everyday dangers of asbestos for pupils and staff in schools.Footnote 47
The newsletter’s discussion of asbestos was centered on criticism of what it described as an essentially ambivalent class of politicians, officials, scientists, and managers who used the uncertainties around the risks of asbestos to dismiss the need for action. It described a “cover-up” of the dangers of asbestos by “experts” and managers who were “in the pockets of the asbestos industry,” with stories of incompetence and disinterest among those who were responsible for safety in school buildings alongside careless work by contractors. A section called “Health and Whaaaaat?” used humor to highlight incidents where health and safety regulations had been clearly breached. This included contractors breaking up asbestos during the school day without informing staff and smashing panels with a hammer in an unsealed classroom before sweeping up the dust with a broom. Cartoons satirized the perceived indifference of officials and experts. In one example two men in suits are pictured performing a visual inspection for asbestos. While one looks through binoculars, the other says “but you can’t see asbestos through binoculars.” “Precisely,” is the reply. In another, a man in a suit labelled “expert” looks at fraying asbestos lagging and suggests sealing it with Sellotape or chewing gum. It also mocked how “relative risks” were used to downplay the dangers of asbestos, recounting an ILEA Health and Safety advisor telling school staff that the risk from asbestos was comparable to getting hit by a car or struck by lightning. The newsletter invited readers to “imagine a school full of lightning with cars zooming around at assembly.”Footnote 48
The evening meeting in Hackney Downs was one of two that day and followed one held that afternoon at Rushmore Infant School. Dalton attended both, and his notes from the Rushmore meeting provide a window into the emergence of a grassroots activist campaign. He was excited by the ethnic diversity of the parents present, and how ILEA officials, NUT reps, and the headteacher were “made to fall in line.” He noted down some quotes that reflected the mood in the meeting, such as “it’s our school,” “our children pay your wages,” and “we’re not fools.”Footnote 49 There is evident excitement in Dalton’s writing and the role of emotion in the exchanges is clear. As historian Stephen Brooke has argued, emotions played a central role in “spurring mobilization and shaping ideology” in 1980s London. Brooke’s triad of “everyday experience, emotion, and space” are in evidence here as a school hall became the site of a local protest against officials who were deemed not to be responding sufficiently to concerns about child safety.Footnote 50 Dalton remarked on the “really good feeling” and resolutions passed at the meeting, before repeating that “it was the feeling of people controlling the meeting and officials that was important.” He added, optimistically, that “this is how society could work in the future and how things could be all the time. It’s possible! Great!”Footnote 51
Dalton’s record of this meeting reflects how such campaigns could quickly develop momentum among a local community, and how activists could help generate interest in a topic. It also highlights the difficulty of categorizing such campaigns, which are recorded largely in short notices in local newspapers and brief notes in the archives of key figures like Dalton and Tait. Trade unions played a major role in London and offered an analysis that was focused on the lack of funding for schools and what they perceived as the central government’s lack of interest in providing public services. The HTA emphasized what it saw as official incompetence and deceitfulness when it came to the dangers of asbestos in schools and did at least occasionally connect this to related debates about nuclear weapons, but this was an uneasy comparison. The potential connections with environmental activists did not appear to yield much, and Tait complained that those campaigning about “water pollution, acid rain, lead and global warming” considered asbestos “old hat.”Footnote 52 Parents, quoted in local newspapers, articulated their concerns around the safety of their children, but they did not tend to use a recognizable language of activism or “individualism” (beyond the demand that their concerns be taken seriously and anger at the authorities). Instead, they often combined a general distrust of what they were being told with a rejection of the official understandings of risk and danger that might otherwise have been indicative of a broader “neoliberal sensibility.”Footnote 53 The hostility to the state, local authorities, and “official” expertise has similarities to community and activist campaigns that have been connected to neoliberalism, but here there was no call for individual action and the expectation was still on those same authorities to resolve the problem.Footnote 54
In London, this was focused on the ILEA and the GLC, and in this case the surge of activism and organizing prompted by the Daneford crisis produced a significant policy response. In April 1983 a report on the dispute resulted in a number of emergency short-term measures and the establishment of a Joint Working Group on Asbestos to address the issue of asbestos in public buildings.Footnote 55 The Group first met in July 1983 with “employer-side” representatives from a range of departments and branches of the GLC and ILEA and “staff-side” representatives from relevant trade unions. Its key tasks included the development and implementation of new codes of practice for asbestos work, the coordination and dissemination of information on the dangers of asbestos, and lobbying central government for funding and legislative change. The central objective, however, was to complete asbestos surveys in all ILEA buildings and remove all accessible asbestos. Asbestos that could not be safely removed would be contained.Footnote 56 In September 1983 it was proposed that 1,500 buildings be surveyed over a period of twelve months.Footnote 57 This marked a significant shift in policy, breaking from the national government’s recommendations that asbestos should only be removed when damaged. It was communicated to parents directly, through a booklet titled Your Children and Asbestos that was delivered to all households with children in ILEA schools in November 1983.Footnote 58 The survey was to start in January 1984 and be completed within eighteen months, but it remained unfinished when the GLC was abolished in 1986 and even when the ILEA was abolished in 1990.Footnote 59 By the end of 1989, only 831 out of 1,723 ILEA premises (48 percent) had been surveyed, with samples processed from 819 (47 percent) of these, and reports authorized for 627 (36 percent) of them. Asbestos had been labelled in 255 premises (14 percent), and while thousands of emergency removal jobs had been completed, only around fifty schools had been completely cleared of asbestos.Footnote 60
The issues that dogged the program reflect the limitations for local government, even one as relatively wealthy as the GLC, to conduct such large-scale interventions in the material fabric of the urban environment without central government support. Alongside the most basic problem of funding, one of the most consistent difficulties was the availability of labor to conduct the surveys and then safely remove asbestos from schools. Staff regularly complained about the poor and careless work of private asbestos removal contractors and the lack of a firm and enforceable code of practice. The development of such codes was progressing, but a report presented to the Joint Working Group in February 1984 highlighted the dangers of a loosely regulated asbestos removal industry.
Haverstock School in Camden had been built in 1959 and most of the classrooms and corridors had been sprayed with brown asbestos. The February 1984 report recorded that asbestos in the school had been regularly damaged, with remedial work and painting done to attempt to seal and contain the loose fibers. It was only in the Spring term of 1983, in the context of the Daneford dispute and the widespread concern about asbestos in schools, that the education officer recommended removal. The asbestos was removed in the summer of that year, with the work completed in September and the medical advisor issuing a clearance certificate. It quickly became clear that the building was still contaminated with asbestos dust, which had been left in corridors, classrooms, and behind duct covers. The contractor was called back for more cleaning, but shortly after this was completed brown asbestos dust began to fall from the ceilings and the building was taken out of use. Further decontamination works were still ongoing in February 1984, six months after the clearance certificate was originally issued. The report that followed avoided apportioning blame to council officials, stating that the ILEA survey would help removal work to be carried out more effectively in the future. It pointed to the forthcoming ILEA/GLC codes of practice on removals, air monitoring, and monitoring health and safety as central to improving this work in the future.Footnote 61
The Code of Practice (for removal) was published and circulated in September 1984 and represented a significant achievement for the Joint Working Group.Footnote 62 It went further and was more detailed than the government’s recently passed Asbestos (Licensing) Regulations 1983 and the more general Health and Safety Act 1974 and Control of Pollution Act 1974 that had previously regulated asbestos in buildings.Footnote 63 The Joint Working Group went on to develop detailed rules for measuring fiber concentrations in the air that lowered the acceptable control limits below that set in national policy.Footnote 64 Despite these achievements, the minutes highlight numerous incidents where local and national codes of practice and licensing regulations appeared to have had limited impact on the way work was carried out in schools.
The same asbestos removal firm that was responsible for the contamination at Haverstock School continued to be employed by the GLC and ILEA, and the staff-side of the working group reported alarming stories of incompetence and carelessness. This included allegations that a contractor for this firm had to be sent home from asbestos removal work at one school because he was drunk, and that the workers had effectively broken into the school to gain access to it by climbing over the gates before making a bonfire to burn the asbestos they could not fit into skips. In another incident at a different school, after repeatedly failing air tests following asbestos removal in the boiler room, with fiber concentrations recorded up to eighty times the permitted levels, the firm simply hired a different and unaccredited air testing agency, who passed their work immediately. The firm had been twice prosecuted by the Health and Safety Executive and removed from the Asbestos Removal Contractors Association list of approved firms, but it submitted low bids for tenders and continued to be hired by the ILEA throughout the decade.Footnote 65
The most well-documented instance of a failure to adhere to the agreed standards came at another Camden school a few years later in 1987. This incident prompted the first full inquiry by a local authority into “asbestos pollution” at a school as well as national media attention.Footnote 66 The Observer reported in March 1987 that hundreds of pupils at Camelot School had spent a week at home after a contractor brought in to do electrical work over the weekend had removed sections of asbestos lagging, without the permission or knowledge of those in the school.Footnote 67 This resulted in asbestos dust and debris being strewn throughout the school’s kitchen. When staff returned on Monday they began to clear the dust. Unaware that it was asbestos, they collected up “several pan-fulls” before starting their work. The kitchen was not closed until later that afternoon after meals for 280 pupils and staff had been prepared.Footnote 68 At this point, air tests were showing more than one hundred times the permitted level of dust in the kitchen. The report gave a clear impression of the scale of the problem and its dangers to children, in particular. It described the “millions of tons of asbestos” in schools as “an unexploded time bomb,” before echoing the Daily Mail article from more than a decade earlier by pointing out that still “nobody knows where most of the asbestos is.”Footnote 69
The staff-side of the Joint Working Group called for a full inquiry and in the summer of 1987 a former deputy secretary at the Department of Education and Science, Walter Ulrich, was appointed to investigate.Footnote 70 Ulrich’s report highlights the difficulties of implementing strong policies and codes of practice for work around asbestos in schools, particularly given the uncertainties around where asbestos might be found and the many different people that could be involved. But, like the report on the Haverstock School, Ulrich appeared reluctant to apportion blame and pointed to simple errors by individuals. He listed a number of “might-have-beens,” that, he said, “reflect the ordinary vicissitudes of human judgment and human relations rather than obvious mistakes.”Footnote 71 He did make some recommendations, focused largely on better communication, coordination, and supervision of asbestos work in schools and his report was in many respects a vindication of the ILEA’s survey and removal program. A full survey or even effective labelling might have prevented the contamination at the school. He noted that the ILEA planned to complete this survey work as soon as possible, but by the time Ulrich submitted his report in the autumn of 1987, the ILEA’s scheme was coming under great strain.Footnote 72
The survey and removal program had produced tangible, if limited, results. The codes of practice had provided a framework for safer work with asbestos, but when these standards were breached there appeared to be few consequences. Despite the intense public scrutiny in the first years of the decade, and the work of local authorities to tackle the issue of asbestos in buildings, progress slowed dramatically in the second half of the 1980s. The working group and the survey program persisted as part of the ILEA after the Thatcher administration abolished the GLC in 1986, but its budget was placed “under the supervision” of the Department of Education and Science (DoES) and faced real term cuts year after year.Footnote 73 The number of schools surveyed dropped from an average of around three hundred per year in 1984 and 1985, to just fifty per year between 1986 and 1990.Footnote 74 These limitations were well-understood by the staff-side of the Joint Working Group, who consistently argued that one of its key purposes was raising public awareness and pushing central government to provide dedicated funding. Despite the establishment of a Department of Environment Central and Local Government Working Party on Asbestos in 1984, organized at the insistence of local authorities, central funding and support for asbestos removal was repeatedly denied by officials.
Redefining Risk and the Limits of Local Politics
The decline of the ILEA’s survey and removal program was partly a consequence of a lack of funding and the transfer of power away from local authorities in the second half of the decade. But it was also part of a wider shift in governmental approaches to regulation, and health and safety regulation in particular, which was increasingly seen as a burdensome brake on innovation, enterprise, and even freedom.Footnote 75 This is not to say that such regulations were simply abandoned, but as Paul Almond and Mike Esbester have shown, there was a move away from the existing tripartite system to one characterized by self-regulation, political responses to public concern following specific disasters, and new approaches based on quantifications of risk.Footnote 76 The displacement of trade unions from this system mirrors the wider political attacks on left-wing councils and radical teaching unions.Footnote 77 The hostility to leftist councils and unions certainly colored government responses to campaigns against asbestos in schools, but it was new calculations of risk that proved decisive in the development of policy and the decision-making of officials at both the local and national levels. While in July 1983 a government minister could tell the Commons that “we must assume that a single fibre could do real damage which may not be seen for 20 years or more,” by the end of the decade asbestos in schools had been downgraded to a “potential risk” that did not require remediation.Footnote 78 This change in the understanding of risk was largely the consequence of work by consultant scientists, whose findings were eagerly adopted by officials in local and national government. The articulation of risk, and judgments about what constituted evidence of risk, highlight how a particular kind of expert knowledge, or a “knowledge regime,” was cited to resist calls for greater regulation, while evidence that countered this was delegitimized or ignored.
The most important and influential intervention was the 1985 Health and Safety Executive (HSE) report, authored by Professor Sir Richard Doll and Professor Julian Peto, two prominent epidemiologists and cancer experts. Doll and Peto were asked to produce their report in September 1982, shortly after the broadcast of Alice when public attention was high.Footnote 79 Despite public concern being largely focused on environmental exposures, the HSE report, much like the ACA report it followed, was centered on occupational exposures in asbestos factories. The section on asbestos in buildings took up just one page out of fifty-three. This reflected what the researchers considered the lack of data on such exposures, which they described in the introduction as either “too insubstantial to justify review” or “unquantifiable” (citing as “insubstantial” and “unquantifiable” known cases of mesothelioma among women exposed to dust on their husband’s work clothes).Footnote 80
The section on asbestos in buildings began by stressing how difficult it was to estimate the effects of environmental exposures. It stated that it “requires extrapolation over several more orders of magnitude, with all the biological uncertainties that that involves” than calculations for occupational exposures. After discussing these difficulties, it nevertheless proceeded to give clear quantifications of risk from asbestos exposures in buildings. By drawing on other studies and Department of the Environment (DoE) measurements of asbestos in buildings, it calculated that exposure to the assumed level of airborne fibers for forty hours a week for twenty years “would produce a life-time risk of approximately one per 100,000.” After comparing this to risks from driving and smoking, Doll and Peto attempted to translate this one in 100,000 risk into an actual number of deaths. Given that there was no available data on who was exposed to asbestos in buildings, they used hypothetical figures to calculate that (at the assumed level of airborne asbestos), ten years of exposure in a school, or twenty years in an office, would cause “approximately one death per year in the whole country.”Footnote 81 Despite all the evident uncertainties in these calculations, the figures assured officials that the risk was negligible and not commensurate with the level of public anxiety and the claims made by campaigners.
The report was hugely influential in local and national government, and in the wider debate about the dangers of asbestos. In 1987 the DoE Joint Central and Local Government Working Group on Asbestos reported that no further action on asbestos was necessary. The crucial section of this report on “risks to health from exposure to asbestos in buildings” was a simple reiteration of Doll and Peto’s arguments. The DoE now felt able to declare that “there remains considerable public anxiety over the risk to health from asbestos. Much of this anxiety is misplaced and arises from ignorance of the true extent and nature these risks.”Footnote 82 This is unsurprising given that the Joint Working Group was only embarked upon reluctantly as, in the words of one DoE official, it was considered something “difficult, for both political and practical reasons, not to agree” to.Footnote 83 Indeed, a few months before the Group first met, Secretary of State for the Environment Patrick Jenkin had asserted that the asbestos problem “had been exaggerated.”Footnote 84 While these may have been the beliefs of officials and ministers, the HSE report provided the apparent scientific clarity that had been missing. The 1987 DoE report acknowledged that there had been limited available data on environmental exposures in the past but said that “this information is now available and is reassuring.”Footnote 85 The qualifications about the difficulties of calculating environmental risks that were discussed in Doll and Peto’s report were not repeated here.
The official response to the report was reiterated in the press, where it was understood by some as a welcome end to the asbestos crisis. An article in the Sunday Times headlined “Asbestos: Panic can stop, says top cancer expert,” began by claiming that Doll and Peto had proven that “there is almost nothing to fear from asbestos in the environment.” It highlighted “popular anxiety” about asbestos in buildings, but countered this by citing Doll and Peto’s figure of one in 100,000 (described as one excess death per year), alongside a comparison with the risks of cancer from second-hand smoke, which it said was “90 times more likely to kill,” a figure also drawn from the report.Footnote 86 This coverage echoed the HSE’s own message at its press launch when it claimed these findings would help people to “continue to live with asbestos.”Footnote 87 In response to the report the HSE even cancelled a planned safety poster campaign that would have required all construction sites to display a poster warning that “Asbestos Dust Can Kill.”Footnote 88
Critiques of the report came from campaigners like Tait but also other scientists in the UK and abroad. The criticisms focused on the assumptions made by the researchers in their calculations of risk and their lack of engagement with evidence of environmental exposures. These included an exchange of letters between Tait and Doll in The Times and a review of the report by the US Environmental Protection Agency, but these challenges received much less coverage.Footnote 89 Officials interpreted the report as confirming what they had long suspected about anti-asbestos campaigners. Dalton had been sued for libel after his evidence to the 1977 Advisory Committee on Asbestos, and Tait was often patronized and dismissed. As the most prominent public campaigner, Tait was often in contact with government officials and politicians, but in private correspondence within departments she was described as “emotional” and “misinformed and misguided.” Officials complained about her “nit-picking” letters and characterized her as a one-woman campaign group on a “crusade.”Footnote 90 While Dalton was enthused by the emotion expressed at meetings, the perception of Tait as “emotional” functioned to at least partially disqualify her work on asbestos from serious consideration. Instead, it was the more traditionally “expert” report from Doll and Peto that gave officials the evidence they needed for the policy they preferred and conformed to the “knowledge regime” of the time.
These national developments were felt at the local level in the second half of the 1980s. In London in Spring 1988 arrangements were being made to discuss a major review of ILEA policy on asbestos.Footnote 91 This marked five years of work on the issue, during which just a quarter of the ILEA premises had been surveyed. A five-year review by staff-side coordinator Eddie Rowe claimed that if the survey and removal program continued at its current rate, it would take another fifty years and hundreds of millions of pounds to complete, far beyond the original estimate of ten years and £50 million. This reflected how complex the work had turned out to be as well as the sheer amount of asbestos in schools. Rowe acknowledged the obvious difficulties this presented, and the many evident failings in the program, but insisted that the costs in lives of not doing anything needed to be considered just as seriously as the financial cost.Footnote 92
The weighing of costs and risks was the central element to the ILEA’s 1988 policy review, which marked the end of the commitment to remove all asbestos from ILEA schools. This was informed by the pending abolition of the ILEA, something promised in the 1987 Conservative Manifesto and enacted in the 1988 Education Act.Footnote 93 According to the revised ILEA policy, asbestos would only be removed when there was considered to be “an immediate health and safety risk.” The idea of an “immediate” risk was explained in more detail in a section on “the control of risk,” which delineated the dangers of asbestos into two categories: “actual risks” and “potential risks.” “Actual risks” referred to people entering known contaminated areas without protective equipment. The “potential risks” were identified as the more general and chronic risks that “may be said to exist wherever asbestos exists in our buildings.” This could be variable, but with the limited resources available it was declared “impossible to achieve a significant reduction of any potential asbestos risk by removal” and the focus should instead be placed on the “actual risks.”Footnote 94
The revised policy was framed by a new appraisal of the dangers to health, in which the hazards posed by the so-called “potential risks” of everyday exposures were considered statistically so small that they did not require more serious or immediate intervention.Footnote 95 When the discussion around asbestos was focused on the idea that the health risk was distinctly unpredictable, and that a single fiber could kill, it was difficult to rationalize this into a policy other than controlled removal. The more rigid quantification of risk that followed the HSE report made it possible for the hazard to be presented as fixed and legible. For officials it enabled a clear line to be drawn between “safe” and “dangerous” and in doing so made asbestos in buildings amendable to wider variety of regulatory responses.Footnote 96 If it could be said that the risk was one in 100,000 or would result in one death per year, despite however many caveats there may be about how such figures were reached, this would enable officials to make a judgment on what level of health risks were acceptable when tallied against other costs. It framed the presence of asbestos in buildings as a knowable risk while at the same time saying that the elimination of this risk was both unnecessary and effectively impossible, due to the resources that would be required.Footnote 97
The understanding of risk that developed in the late 1980s was based on what Phil Brown calls a “scientization of decision making” in which experts act as “brokers of information” who “work to ensure that battles over policymaking remain scientific, ‘objective,’ and effectively separated from their social context.”Footnote 98 This process of scientization was understood, or at least presented by officials, as providing an indisputable evidence base on which to make political decisions. It is also an example of the “knowledge politics” practiced more widely by the Thatcher governments that sought to change the knowledge around particularly politically sensitive issues.Footnote 99 Critics of the ILEA’s risk analysis, much like critics of the HSE’s 1985 report, argued that it relied on a number of questionable assumptions, including that levels of airborne fibers would be essentially static. This seemed to take no account of the specificities of a school environment. The staff-side even requested that the term “expert” only be applied to those whose knowledge was respected by both school staff and the ILEA. It stressed that “paper qualifications” were not sufficient and that specific knowledge of issues pertaining to asbestos in schools was required.Footnote 100 A key point of contestation was the policy review’s lack of acknowledgment of so-called “peak exposures,” incidents when dust levels were greatly elevated for a short period following something as mundane as a child kicking a wall, a door being slammed, or a teacher pinning work on a classroom wall.Footnote 101 This had been discussed in detail in a report produced by the staff-side of the working party with the London Hazards Centre and the London Asbestos Action Campaign in 1987.
The report cited examples of incidents in schools where everyday events had resulted in the release of fibers far beyond permitted levels. It noted a school in Camden where asbestos boards, described as “safe” in surveys, had been “gnawed by rodents” and fiber levels were recorded fifty times above the HSE’s maximum environmental limit and more than a thousand times the government’s estimated “background level.” A boy in one London school was caught telling an asbestos contractor that for a fiver he would “kick through some more panels.” Quoting correspondence with leading US asbestos expert Irving Selikoff, and the rules around peak exposures in the USA, it stressed that “just one peak exposure can give the same dose in one hour as would be inhaled over one year at the usual background level.” The report referred to cases of people dying from mesothelioma after short environmental exposures and noted government research that confirmed that brief elevated exposures did increase the risk of asbestos-related diseases.Footnote 102 These instances did not, however, fit into the statistical regime of risk that was constructed by researchers and then communicated by the national press and officials. This point had been raised directly with Peto in a seminar on risk assessment organized by the GLC/ILEA Joint Working Party in October 1985, six months after the HSE report was published. The notes from the seminar suggest that Peto thought that there was insufficient data on brief periods of high exposure to reach a decision on its dangers. He was challenged by Dalton and Tait, who also attended the seminar, but statistical epidemiology worked precisely by zooming out from the contaminated buildings and such “unquantifiable” or “insubstantial” evidence did not fit within its methodology.Footnote 103 The unpredicted-because-unpredictable everyday use of these buildings, or the “children with sticks” commented on by Stewart in 1976, were removed from the understanding of risk or the “knowledge regime” that was governing policy.
The quantification of risk may have been reassuring for officials, but it provided limited comfort for parents and staff. Notes on phone calls and correspondence in Tait’s files highlight the growing distrust of officials and school leaders during the decade. Most of these accounts involve Tait being asked for advice by someone worried that their children would be endangered by careless asbestos work in a school.Footnote 104 They often noted action taken by parents to collectively withhold children from school when they feared exposure to asbestos.Footnote 105 They also included concerns that children and staff had been exposed and that this was not taken seriously by the local authorities.Footnote 106 One school worker wrote to Tait in May 1986 having recently read about SPAID in an article in Ideal Home magazine. Work had begun on asbestos removal and he and his colleagues were pushing for this to be scheduled for the summer holidays and had been successful in having the work paused. He acknowledged that “we are not supported by legislation” but argued that a “natural concern to reduce environmental risks for pupils and staff” and dissatisfaction with “both the standard of work and its supervision” had pushed them to act. The staff had organized and informed themselves on the dangers of asbestos and common issues with removal works and were writing to Tait for further guidance around specific regulations, “so that we know the right questions to ask and what to do next.” It mentions that staff at the school were considering employing “our own” laboratory to monitor work, and asked how it could be confirmed that the lab would be fully independent and not in some way connected to the removal firm.Footnote 107 Similarly, a correspondent who worked in a college in Ipswich detailed how he had taken samples of suspected asbestos dust himself and had them analyzed independently after his concerns were not taken seriously.Footnote 108 The distrust of authorities and the willingness of individuals to attempt to generate their own scientific evidence of danger highlights how battles over expertise were central to the question of the risk posed by asbestos. Tait was understood by these writers as someone with “expert” knowledge, but who was outside of the official “knowledge regime” and thus could be trusted. But just as central government officials had been dismissive of Tait’s claims to expertise, so too were officials in local authorities.
Tait’s experience at Winchmore Hill Primary in Enfield in 1988 provides a more detailed insight into these kinds of disputes and highlights how the changing understanding and representation of risk disrupted campaigns to remove asbestos from schools. In January 1988 Tait was contacted by George Mitchell, a school governor and parent of a child at Winchmore Hill. He was concerned about asbestos in the school and that school leaders and council officials were “willing to hide information in the name of expedience.”Footnote 109 Tait visited the school later that month and carried out an inspection with the headteacher, a representative of the Borough’s Environmental Health Office, and Mitchell. She produced a lengthy report on potential hazards from damaged asbestos cement roofs and asbestos in the kitchen and the children’s dining room. The report recommended that the cement roofs be replaced and more sampling, survey, and analysis be carried out. It cited relevant sections from government regulations and publications, as well as scientific papers, and supplemented this with details of documented cases of asbestos-related diseases arising from the kind of environmental exposures that were at risk.Footnote 110
In one of the appendices to the report, she noted that of the officially reported 2,654 deaths from mesothelioma between 1968 and 1978, only 684 (25.7 percent) had been associated with well-known uses of asbestos and the remaining 1,970 cases had no known connection to any asbestos occupation. She added that between 1978 and 1983 a further 2,322 mesothelioma deaths had been officially recorded, and highlighted that SPAID found the greatest number of these were not people working in asbestos manufacturing.Footnote 111 To add human stories to these numbers, she included details of twenty-five published cases of mesothelioma after short exposures that occurred outside of an asbestos factory and were thus categorized as “non-occupational” and “environmental.”Footnote 112 Tait expanded on this with a separate appendix that relied on SPAID’s own research and case work. Many of these cases involved people who had been exposed to asbestos through work with, or proximity to, asbestos panels and insulation. They included people as young as thirty-four and thirty-seven who had died of mesothelioma without ever working in the industry.Footnote 113
Enfield Borough Council’s formal response came around a month later and promised action far short of what had been recommended by SPAID. The reasoning given by the Council illustrated the pervasiveness of Doll and Peto’s representations of risk. The environmental health officer, Karen Ottaway, rejected the SPAID report with dismissive language similar to that used to describe Tait’s work in central government. Ottaway insisted the SPAID report was simply “the opinions held by Mrs Taite” [sic] and countered that the Borough must “base its decisions on the recommendations of its expert departments” and “guidance issued by the Health and Safety Executive.” Ottaway then deployed the often-used comparison to road accidents, drawing on statistics from Canada quoted by Doll and Peto that suggested that commuting to a building containing asbestos was more dangerous than being in the building. The implication was that if the risks of being on the road were considered tolerable, then the supposed lesser risk of asbestos in school should also be accepted. The idea that the risks of asbestos should be understood in comparison to traffic accidents had been mocked by the Hackney teachers in 1983, with their image of “cars zooming around assembly,” but the comparison nevertheless remained an important explanatory tool for officials and scientists faced with communicating risk to anxious parents.Footnote 114
Mitchell forwarded this letter to Tait, who was evidently frustrated by the Council’s response. After noting that the appendices attached to the report provided evidence of non-occupational exposures leading to disease, Tait lamented that “those wishing to deny that asbestos in the environment causes disease, claim that information on the environmental effects of asbestos is not available.” But “they are wrong,” she said, “the information exists but is ignored.”Footnote 115 Tait attempted to bring “expertise to expertise,” but the cases of mesothelioma from non-occupational exposure she detailed received no comment from the Council.Footnote 116 Despite Tait’s concerns and the momentum developed by the parent-governors in the first months of 1988, the campaign appears to have petered out in the second half of the year. In January of 1989 Mitchell was writing to Tait to complain about the lack of action from the Council, saying that “inertia is the Authority’s strongest weapon.”Footnote 117
In this example a local government official dismissed the concerns of parents and SPAID by pointedly citing the “expert departments” of local and national government as opposed to the “opinions” of Tait. The method of communicating the risk of asbestos-related disease through comparison to the prevalence of traffic accidents appears to have been an effective way of making complicated hazards and unclear relationships easily manageable for officials, regulators, and scientists, if judged by its frequency of use. In this way the risk of asbestos exposure in schools was disassociated from the everyday spaces of schools, the ordinary activities that take place within them, and the emotional reaction these risks provoked in parents in particular. The concern about “peak exposures” and anecdotal evidence of poor practice provided by the users of such buildings was not accorded significance when weighed against the statistical study provided by the scientists commissioned by the government.
The case in Enfield (which had not been part of the ILEA) reflects how local authorities adopted similar approaches and understandings to national government and relied on the same information to come to their conclusions. Local newspapers across the UK record many examples of local authorities in this period simply rejecting concerns about safety outright, even as parents expressed their uncertainty, anxiety, and distrust.Footnote 118 In London, after the ILEA was dissolved, responsibility for asbestos management was deferred to councils and schools who had to pay for any asbestos work from core budgets for schools. The joint working between LEAs and trade unions that was such a key feature of the asbestos survey and removal program, while at times fractious, was a model of collaboration that required time, expertise, money, and political support. The lack of a centrally organized body, with more financial and organizational power, such as the ILEA and the GLC, meant that asbestos became one problem among many for local authorities and coordination at scale was no longer practical. Arguably the scale of the task proved too great for the GLC, and the further deferring of authority and responsibility to smaller local authorities effectively guaranteed that no substantial removal program was possible. As a result, dealing with asbestos largely meant dealing with emergencies as they arose.Footnote 119 Campaigners in the 1980s had understood this and consistently pushed for government support and funding before the GLC and then ILEA were abolished, but it did not appear and has in fact never materialized.
Conclusion
By the late 1980s the debates around schools and child safety, particularly in London, had taken a dramatic turn. The Conservative government had long expressed its dissatisfaction with education in the capital, and explicitly attacked work done in schools related to race, gender, and sexuality.Footnote 120 The media image of the “loony left” was firmly established and asbestos in schools was now being brought into prominent discourses about “extremist” left-wing teachers endangering schoolchildren.Footnote 121 The change in tone and context is evident in a Daily Mail article from March 1987, which contrasted sharply with Gloria Stewart’s 1976 article in the same newspaper. Written by Dr Gerard Bulger, a member of the City and Hackney Community Health Council and a governor of two Hackney schools, the article criticized “an irrational obsession with asbestos” among teachers, which was, he claimed, putting “children at risk.” The “asbestos scare campaign” was motivated, “not by a concern for the health and safety of our children, but by ideology and politics.” He argued that teachers should concentrate on teaching children “how not to catch AIDS, not to drink too much or to seek solace in drugs” rather than worrying about asbestos.Footnote 122
His description of concerns about asbestos as driven by “ideology and politics” rather than safety chimes with a wider media image of a “radical, excessive Left in power at the local level.”Footnote 123 But criticism of the motives and actions of teachers and unions was not simply a political attack on trade unions or identity politics, it was framed or at least informed by a particular understanding of the risks of asbestos to health. Without naming it, Bulger referred to the HSE report of 1985, citing its claim that passive smoking is significantly more dangerous than being in an asbestos-contaminated building for forty hours a week. He does not expand on why this comparison is instructive for developing policies on asbestos in schools. He makes the commonly repeated arguments about “relative risks,” highlighting that 1,400 children were killed each year in accidents and noting that five hundred of these deaths were the result of traffic accidents, once again recalling the image of “cars zooming around assembly.”Footnote 124 Bulger did not highlight these risks as part of an attempt to reduce them through better traffic management or road infrastructure, but to highlight the inevitability of risk in everyday life in a modern industrial society. In doing so, he repeated one of the arguments made by Turner and Newell’s medical adviser who told the 1977 public hearings of the ACA that “in our industrial society the ‘absolute nil risk’ isn’t on.” Bulger took this idea of the “risk society” and, as Beck says, “denied and reinterpreted” it to stress the importance of young people learning “personal responsibility,” lending it a distinctly Thatcherite character by emphasizing individual behavior rather than social safety nets and government interventions.Footnote 125
The debates in government and in the ILEA show how the representations of risk used in the Doll and Peto report influenced local and national policy and practice, as well as press coverage. Rather than the more headline-friendly “culture war” issues and hostility to trade unions, it was this broader understanding and language of risk that was used by local and national government to explain their approach toward asbestos in schools. The end of asbestos removal programs was no doubt informed by pragmatism in financially imperiled councils, but the case of the ILEA in London and the Winchmore Hill School in Enfield highlights how important quantifications of risk were for the justification and presentation of these policy shifts. Activists, from individual parents to trade unions, continued to push for the removal of asbestos from schools but officials were increasingly able to work around these campaigns by citing the official expert evidence and using it to undermine the “opinions” of campaigners like Tait.
What constituted an acceptable or unacceptable risk to health in schools was shaped by the material conditions of buildings, as well as the social and political circumstances of the time and the expert knowledge that these contexts produced. The successes and failures of anti-asbestos campaigns highlight their contingency, but as Geoffrey Tweedale has written, by the 1990s campaigners and media coverage had “dragged at least one occupational disease into the open.”Footnote 126 The use of asbestos was banned 1999, but the “unexploded time bomb” of asbestos in schools uncovered in the early 1980s has not been defused and the campaign to remove asbestos from schools continues.Footnote 127 The Health and Safety Executive’s advice remains very similar to that quoted by Stewart in 1976: “asbestos that is in good condition and unlikely to be damaged or disturbed is not a significant risk to health as long as it is properly managed.”Footnote 128 The criticism of this contention is also very familiar. As Andrew Lees, who founded the Asbestos in Schools group in the 1990s points out, schools “contain children, a lot of children” and in such environments “systems of asbestos management can fail.”Footnote 129 The reluctance of successive governments to commit to the significant capital spending required to remove asbestos from schools has aligned with an understanding of risk that presents asbestos as a “potential” rather than an immediate hazard. The “slow violence” of asbestos-related disease means that a response can be deferred indefinitely, or at least until a major disaster refocuses public attention as it did in the early 1980s. The ongoing deterioration of schools, hospitals, and other material emblems of the postwar state, however, means that this hazard will not disappear, despite successive administrations’ attempts to sweep this “killer dust” under the mat.
Adam Page is Senior Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Lincoln, UK. I would like to thank the reviewers and editors of this journal for their comments on the article, Christine Grandy for reading an earlier draft, and Rachael Jones for all her help in the archive. Please address any correspondence to: apage@lincoln.ac.uk
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