by Alan Rimmer
The judge was fulsome in his praise of McGinley:
He was an engagingly frank and open witness who had lost none of the combative instincts that had obviously led to him becoming the champion of those he felt had been short-changed by various Governments over the years. He was an older, wiser and more restrained man than the man seen on some of the video clips I saw and as quoted in some of the newspaper cuttings that were put to him relating to things said some 20 years or more ago. There will be many who, over the years, have achieved some of the highest offices in countries throughout the world about whom the same story could be told.
It was a glowing endorsement of the achievements of the former sapper from Johnstone. Judge Foskett urged the two parties to get together “in the hope that serious efforts toward a settlement will take place at an appropriate time.” Like most observers he clearly felt that both protagonists had fought themselves to standstill and the time for reconciliation had arrived.
But as the champagne corks popped outside the Royal Courts of Justice, the horse trading between the Ministry of Defence and Rosenblatts over settlement issues was not going well.
The exact details of these negotiations are unclear. According to the MoD, a proposal for a substantial cash payment was on the table, but was rejected. According to the veteran’s legal team no formal offer was ever made, so there was nothing to reject.
There were angry exchanges on both sides which spilled over into parliament with one MP describing the “Oh yes we did; oh no we didn’t” antics as a “pantomime.” In the end in a fit of pique the MoD announced its intention to appeal the Foskett judgement. With unlimited resources from the public purse it could afford to do so.
In January 2011, the case came up in the Appeal Court and it was a fiasco for the veterans. The three presiding judges were not as accommodating as Judge Foskett and they allowed the MoD’s appeal.
The frustrating see-saw legal system of British justice catapulted the veterans back into limbo. It was a bitter blow for the veterans, and with little choice left, the decision was made to take the battle to the Supreme Court.
March 14, 2012. 9.59 GMT.
The end when it came was swift.
Lord Wilson of the Supreme Court, the highest court in the United Kingdom, stepped up to the rostrum and delivered the coup de grace: “I consider that each of the appeals should be dismissed,” he intoned, like a priest reading the last rites. “I consider that the actions have no real prospect of success.”
The veterans had lost by 4-3 he said, adding: "Putting aside the law for one moment, all seven members of the court would wish to record their personal sympathy for the veterans. It must be bad enough for the nine veterans, and the other claimants, to learn that they have lost this final round, but to learn that they have lost by the narrowest possible margin must make it even worse."
The judgment was received in silence by the small band of nuclear veterans and widows outside the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand. Most had had enough of sympathetic words. There had been many disappointments, but this latest really did feel like the end. There were no champagne corks popping that day as the routed army of cold war warriors quietly dispersed and melted away.
The Ministry of Defence relished the moment. Jubilant Andrew Robathan MP, the latest in a long line of defence ministers for Veterans Affairs, immediately fired off a gleeful letter to all members of parliament informing them of the decision.
The Supreme Court ruled by a majority decision that all nine lead cases were statute barred and declined to allow the claims to proceed. Perhaps of greater significance is that ALL (his emphasis) the Justices recognised that the veterans would face great difficulty proving a causal link between the illnesses suffered and attendance at the tests. The Supreme Court described the claims as having no reasonable prospect of success and that they were doomed to fail.
The triumphal tone of the letter was the final kick in the teeth for the veterans. Their legal team struggled to put a brave face on the disastrous result. There was talk of regrouping and taking the fight to the European courts. But just getting to Strasbourg to fight the battle normally took at least three years, and time was not on the side of the veterans. It was their darkest hour.
The verdict came as no surprise to Ken McGinley. He rightly guessed that his triumph before Judge Foskett was a false dawn. Despite the celebrations, he knew in his bones that it had not been enough.
After 30 years of struggle he had still not found the ‘smoking gun’, the knock-out punch…the one piece of crucial evidence that would finally nail all the lies. And he also knew the British people had wearied and grown tired of the nuclear veterans.
He had noted the empty press benches (the various proceedings had engendered little interest from Fleet Street’s finest); the heady and intoxicating oxygen of publicity had evaporated. After the Supreme Court ruling he had few words left to say and he slipped quietly away, anxious only to return home to his wife in Johnstone.
THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME
There is a famous Sherlock Holmes short story, "Silver Blaze", which focuses on the disappearance of a racehorse and on the apparent murder of its trainer by an intruder. The tale is distinguished by Holmes deducing that the mystery hinged on what he called: “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."
In the story a puzzled Inspector Gregory of Scotland Yard points out that the dog did nothing in the night-time, to which Holmes replies: “That is the curious incident.” The point being made of course is that the dog didn’t bark because it knew who the intruder was.
Sherlock Holmes doubtless would have found the “curious incident of Grapple Y” just as intriguing. For like the dog, the lack of fanfare or fuss when this most important of bombs was detonated, was notable to say the least.
This, after all, was Britain’s ever biggest bomb. If ever there was a case where the dog should have been barking loudly and urgently, this was it. But the government of the day treated it as a matter of little importance. In fact the silence was deafening.
The press, was also uncharacteristically subdued. Instead of trumpeting it to the heavens, the following anodyne article that appeared in the Times (The government’s traditional mouthpiece) on April 30, 1958 was typical of the way the incident was reported at the time:-
A British nuclear device was successfully exploded at a high altitude over the central Pacific yesterday. It was announced last night that Mr Aubrey Jones, the Minister of Supply, had received a report from Air Vice-Marshal Grandy, task force commander, Christmas Island. It was stated scientific measurements were being collected for accurate evaluation, and that early indications were that fall-out would be negligible.
Considering that Grapple Y was the culmination of Britain’s H-bomb tests which the year before had been afforded banner headlines and spread across acres of newsprint as a “dress rehearsal for the death of the world”, this was a remarkably muted response.
The official record of the event was also notable for a complete lack of drama. Group Captain William Edmund Townsend of the Royal Australian Air Force, one of several official observers specially flown to Christmas Island for the Grapple Y test, reported:-
After breakfast, we were taken to witness the shot. It was learned this was a “clean” hydrogen bomb. The air burst precluded any water or dust being drawn up from the surface which may give possible radioactive fall-out and it was not anticipated that any fall-out from this bomb would occur.
He makes his glimpse of Armageddon sound like a stroll in the park. It is interesting to note, however, that Townsend reports he “learned” that it was a clean bomb; in other words he was acting on information received rather than what he observed.
There is no mention anywhere of the storm clouds that gathered after the burst, much less about any ensuing rain. Like the dog in the night-time, Townsend, a dyed-in-the-wool establishment figure later awarded the CBE, was curiously silent on that score.
In the absence of
an inquisitive Sherlock Holmes, Grapple Y faded unheralded into history; an event of little consequence.
It was 50 years before it was brought blinking back into the daylight when John Large, a consultant nuclear engineer internationally respected for his work in assessing the risks posed by nuclear explosions, identified Grapple Y as a possible cause of contamination on Christmas Island.
His interest was aroused after one of the few photographs of the bomb was published in a scientific journal. It was a classic picture of a nuclear explosion complete with majestic mushroom cloud. But what made it unusual was the stem of the cloud which was oddly striated with a series of tooth-like ridges round the edges.
Large was convinced this was caused by the explosion sucking up large amounts of sand and sea water into the stem. This, of course, was contrary to the accepted wisdom that the bomb was exploded too high in the air to cause fallout. Large made a study of all the available photographs of Grapple Y together with rare video footage and reached the conclusion that the bomb exploded much lower than had been admitted by the Ministry of Defence.
He calculated, from a series of “timed, sequential photographs of Grapple Y” that the detonation height was 1,500 metres, and not the official height of 2353 metres. Large suggested that the troops could have been contaminated by the resulting fallout.
It was a convincing argument that was given a cameo role in the various court hearings. Unfortunately its importance was overshadowed by the Rowland Report which usually received star billing.
It was only after the debacle of the Supreme Court hearing that Grapple Y was re-examined as part of a general review of all the evidence to see what could be salvaged from the wreckage.
The review was undertaken on an ad hoc basis by Ken McGinley and a small group of researchers from the Open University who were looking for evidence which might be useful to nuclear veterans fighting for pensions through the notoriously slow Pensions Tribunals system.
The Australian tests, the so-called “dirty bombs” that had grabbed all the headlines in the 1980s, were once again examined, but there was little fresh evidence about these tests: it had all been said before, so it was decided to put the Christmas Island tests, of which little was known, under the microscope.
These tests had made only sporadic appearances in the headlines, and Grapple Y had made the least impression of all. Even in Lorna Arnold’s seminal work on the hydrogen bomb tests Britain and the H-Bomb published in 2001, Grapple Y is given the least billing. But she did make one very interesting observation: buried away in her account of the bomb is a passage about the task force commander Air Vice Marshal Grandy reporting to his political masters in Whitehall:-
Immediately after the shot the weather had deteriorated and had there been any further delay the operation could not have taken place during the rest of that week. As it was, cloud conditions reduced the number and quality of the photographs obtained.
She doesn’t say precisely what the “deteriorating weather” was but, Penney’s deputy, Bill Cook, reveals another strong clue in an interview he gave to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists published not long after he returned from Christmas Island. The magazine’s correspondent notes:-
When the test took place Cook showed no sign of excitement. On one crucial occasion when the weather was highly doubtful he carried on seemingly unworried...when it was over, his characteristic smile broke, but only later did he admit that he had been concerned.
Does the weather being “highly doubtful” mean that it rained? And if it didn’t why had he been “concerned?” But these clues were slim pickings and too obscure for the nuclear veterans to make anything of.
Much more was needed. It was decided to probe deeper, and further signs of “suspicious behaviour” by Grapple Y were soon forthcoming.
A trawl of Hansard, the official parliamentary record, revealed that Grapple Y had been the subject of a fierce debate back in 1991. This followed allegations that something had gone wrong with the April 28, 1958 explosion, and that troops had apparently been caught in a deluge of heavy rain.
This had been denied by the Ministry of Defence, but Sapper Arthur Thomas told in an interview for a TV programme: “Suddenly over the loud-speaker system came the order to get under cover quickly and to clear the open ground. Apparently the wind had changed and the fallout cloud was heading back to Christmas Island. I dashed to my motor vehicle and sat in the cab compartment, closed the doors and windows and remained there for half an hour. Shortly afterwards, however, the wind direction reversed and the men were ordered back to their positions.”
Another soldier’s account of what happened is even more dramatic. Tom Birch told the Dispatches programme: “The explosion and the enormity of the cloud left me speechless. I thought, my God what the hell’s going on? We were all quite amazed, you were frightened; all sorts of emotions came out.
“As I walked back to the Port Camp I suddenly became aware of a very thick black cloud approaching inland from the sea. It was as black as pitch. The cloud came over part of the island then retreated back out to sea again. By that time we had all been showered in rain which was as big as ten-pence pieces.
“We all ran like mad to get away from the rain. Lots of men were caught out in the open though. Immediately after the detonation there was panic among the boffins. From the way they were acting it was clear that something had gone far wrong. The whole thing appeared abnormal, unusual.”
The importance of whether or not it rained after the blast was not lost on Labour MP Jack Ashley who went on to ask specific questions in Parliament about the height the bomb exploded, protective clothing worn by the men, and the allegations of rainfall. His questions obviously hit a raw nerve judging by the tetchy reply from Defence Minister Archie Hamilton:-
I must say at the outset that the irresponsible and sometimes misleading allegations made by the “Dispatches” television programme, from which the right hon. Gentleman drew many of his points, were based on a series of factual inaccuracies. The unfounded allegations made by the programme can only add unnecessarily to the concern and anxiety of those who participated in the nuclear test programme and their relatives.
After brushing aside doubts concerning the height the bomb exploded, the protective clothing worn by the servicemen and the distance they were from the blast, Hamilton really gets into his stride. In a high dudgeon he professes to being “mystified” by the allegations about whether or not it rained after the blast:-
The Dispatches programme alleges that there was heavy rain off Christmas Island on 28 April 1958 which substantially increased the amount of radioactive fallout. All that I can say is that shortly after the test extensive environmental monitoring did not measure any deposition of radioactive materials from the detonation. On the basis of that evidence therefore there could have been no exposure to internal contamination as a result of inhalation.
It is interesting that Hamilton does not actually say that it didn’t rain, just that there was no radioactive fallout. He goes to great lengths, over six pages, to rubbish the points raised by veterans over the years, but the crucial question of whether or not it rained is dodged.
The same pugnacious stance (and evasiveness) was evident in the reaction of another defence minister called upon to answer similar allegations nearly 15 years later.
Labour MP Dr Lewis Moonie was in combative mood when he replied to a letter sent to his department in 2003 by Labour MP Siobahn McDonagh. She had written to Moonie demanding answers to questions raised by her constituent Shirley Denson, whose husband had piloted one of the sampling aircraft that flew through the mushroom cloud created by Grapple Y.
In a seven-page reply Dr Mooney insisted that Mrs Denson’s late husband had never been placed in any danger while carrying out his duties:
The Canberra aircraft used for sampling had pressurised cabins which prevented the ingress of air…and no significant levels of contamination were ever detected…
But when the question
of rainfall is raised Dr Mooney is as indignant as Hamilton:
Some of the assertions made by Mrs Denson have been raised by members of the British Nuclear Tests Veterans’ Association before on many occasions over the years. The Ministry of Defence has addressed these points time and again but the BNTVA chooses to lend credence to certain misapprehensions.
When he finally gets round to answering the question, Mooney shows he is every bit as nimble-footed as Hamilton. The following passage quoted verbatim from his letter is a master-class in dissembling:-
Environmental recordings for Main Camp on Christmas Island for the date of the trial and subsequent days showed that sticky paper and air samples were below the level of detection for contamination, and also that there was no rainfall. The first measurable rainfall at the Main Camp following the detonation occurred on 2 May 1958. There is a meteorology report giving observations of precipitation 5km from station 2057Z, which was a surface wind monitoring position, two hours after the detonation. However, environmental testing on Christmas Island during and after the Grapple operations showed no measurable fallout on the island. AWE Aldermaston has no evidence to show that water contaminated with radiation was precipitated out over the island.
This is a murky statement. In the first sentence we have Dr Mooney stating quite clearly that there was “no rainfall.” In the second sentence he states “measurable rainfall” was recorded four days after the blast. Then in the third sentence he blurs the issue further by stating there was “precipitation” two hours after the detonation.