MUTINY IN OLDBURY!
Back in the summer of ’69, the hard pressed , toxic assaulted residents of Langley had had enough of the international chemical giant on their doorsteps poisoning them with their chemicals in the air, and threatening their safety with ever dangerous health and safety failures.
Plans to use explosive substances at a site engulfed in chemical spills, fires and “accidents” were the final straw and the threat of not paying rates was the only option left to make a stand against the Albright and Wilson evil empire. This article from The Birmingham Daily Post April 24th 1969 sets the scene.
Station Road resident Genevieve Goule spoke out against the not so society friendly Quaker giants.
“We are already on a knife edge after alarming incidents in the area. If the firm is granted this licence tensions will increase. “
The “alarming incidents” referred to were by no means housewife fanciful fiction. The chemical factory had killed its own workers in dubious circumstances. Fellow station Road resident Alice Whittleton recalled the death of Thomas Gough at the factory two years earlier, following an explosion in a plant reactor.
“Our lives would become unbearable” she said. “We have never been the same since a man was killed in an explosion at the firm two years ago”
The article also mentions another incident involving acid fumes at another nearby site, as well as the phosphine leak at the Albright and Wilson site that was still fresh in the mind. It also mentions mothers’ fears about their children at The Langley primary school just yards away from the danger blast zone.
The story itself and the explosives were actually part of Albright and Wilson’s planning application made the year earlier under the cover of W2450– “construction of a small pyrotechnics filling factory.”
Albright and Wilson had a long dubious homoerotic fascination for Naval matters and the senior service, and this factory plant application was to supply signalling devices of an explosive nature.
The explosives licence is referred to in this Albright and Wilson letter.
The explosives concerned were Nitroguinadine and pentolite.
The claims by the Albright and Wilson spokesman that there was no reason for alarm and that “we make sure that there is no danger” were hollow in the extreme, especially given their earlier mentioned public demonstrable failures to stop fires, leaks and explosions.
This was certainly a dangerous time in this part of the world- perhaps the biggest danger that those in power and positions of responsibility were all under the grip of insidious and academically institutionalised old boy secret societies- but no need to worry ratepayers of Oldbury, all the nice girls love an able seaman. 😆
