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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 77.3 (2003) 739-740



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Peter W. J. Bartrip. The Way from Dusty Death: Turner and Newall and the Regulation of Occupational Health in the British Asbestos Industry, 1890s-1970. London: Athlone, 2001. xiii + 386 pp. Tables. $65.00, £55.00 (0-485-11578-6).

In July 2002 I visited the now-closed Havelock asbestos mine at Piggs Peak in Swaziland. The mine was operated by the British company Turner & Newall (T&N) from 1939 to 1991. We know from internal company correspondence that during T&N's tenure, conditions at Havelock were such that people who lived at Piggs Peak developed asbestosis, an occupational disease, from environmental exposure. Today the waste dumps from the mine, which encircle the town, blow asbestos fiber over the primary school, which is less than one hundred meters away. In 1997 T&N was taken over by the U.S. company Federal Mogul; four years later Federal Mogul went into voluntary bankrupcy to avoid litigation, thereby saving T&N from being forced to clean up Havelock and to compensate former miners and their families suffering from asbestos-related disease.

The Way from Dusty Death is not a history of T&N, the largest of the British asbestos companies, nor of the asbestos issue in the United Kingdom. Instead, the book is written around four or five key points from which the flood of litigation against T&N has arisen. Bartrip gives detailed accounts of the asbestos regulations from 1931 until 1970 in which he explores the roles played by industry, trade unions, physicians, and the state. A great deal of careful research has gone into this book, and Bartrip provides a comprehensive defense of T&N's conduct. He concludes that the company was an exemplary employer that not only complied with the regulatory process but did more than required to protect its employees. Parts of the text are exhaustively detailed, and the asides on minute issues are so prolonged that they would be more suited to a lawyer's brief than to a historian's narrative.

Bartrip's book is part of a growing literature on the asbestos industry which includes Geoffrey Tweedale's history of T&N, From Magic Mineral to Killer Dust, and Ronald Johnston and Arthur McIvors's Lethal Work, a history of the industry in Scotland. It is an important literature because the asbestos industry is important. Tweedale's work is based on the same sources as Bartrip's. In Magic Mineral Tweedale identifies the numerous ways in which T&N and its subsidiaries failed to comply with occupational health regulations, failed to warn employees of the dangers they faced, fought hard to frustrate legitimate claims for compensation, suppressed medical evidence of risk, and sought to corrupt the research process through the Asbestos Research Council. His conclusions could not be more different from Bartrip's.

Writing history always involves making moral choices, but few historians have placed themselves in such an ambiguous position as Peter Bartrip. Bartrip acknowledges that his research was financed by T&N and that he was given full access to internal company documents. He also stresses that his conclusions are his own and that he is objective, unlike those who, over the past twenty years, have written critically of T&N and the asbestos industry in general. Bartrip's main problem is that having argued for 270 pages that T&N was an exemplary employer he is left to explain how it is that the company has been deluged by so [End Page 739] much litigation that in 1996 it set aside 600 million pounds to cover future claims. His explanation is that it has all been the doing of sociologists and legal historians who dislike capitalism, and of rapacious lawyers determined to make money. That argument will carry little weight with the people of Piggs Peak—nor will it much impress the Swazi government, which is facing a massive clean-up bill...

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