You can’t keep a bad smell down- especially if it involves Albright and Wilson and their polluting phosphorus fun factory. 
In this archive piece from The Birmingham post from 28th May 1968 via The British newspaper archive, we learn from the then Labour MP for the area of Oldbury and Halesowen, John Horner, that it continued long after Mrs Gunn and co had raised previous issues some 11 years previous and also after their PR spin stink guru S.T Melsom had left Oldbury Council. By then they had no doubt found his suitable “fixer” replacement. Of course they had been assured then that Albright and Wilson would deal with it- but obviously not as time tells.
The piece reveals that the MP had written to the company about a local community “outcry” about Albright’s dirty odours. This concerned the direct fundamental chemical at this site and its production- toxic white phosphorus and the poisoner of birds at their satellite rattlechain dump.
“Mr Horner said he had been assured by the firm in January that the plant would be closed before the summer.”
It’s odd the way in which several posts and pages that I have written on this website now link together. The closure threat at Albright and Wilson’s disastrous Newfoundland Longharbour factory– as a direct result of their massive contamination of this area meant that production at Oldbury would be delayed being scaled back. So therefore because of one “phos” up in a foreign country, pollution in this one would continue.
It was obviously so serious that the MP raised it in The House of commons- as the Hansard record shows on December 2nd 1968 .
“Oldbury bears the scars of the Industrial Revolution. Much of it is dirty and overcrowded. It has smells, smells that have been there for a long time…………..We have the largest phosphorus plant in Western Europe; they do not talk about clean air in that part of Oldbury.”
“Shhhhhhh” -pussy
We know from the announcement in Albright World issue dated February 1970 that “old smokey” as they called it closed finally in this year. Though the pollution content of white phosphorus may have reduced in terms of what they were dumping in waste at Rattlechain, the amount they had previously tipped and continued to tip in “hazardous waste” meant that pollution was far from over in the Oldbury area- even if the smell had subsided, the stink of poison beneath the water had not.