You have to hand it to Albright and Wilson in that they continued to devise novel ways in which to kill off and maim their employees, as well as offer a string of smelly and toxic assaults on the wider community of Oldbury. If it wasn’t with chemical explosions and gas leaks it was with rotting jaws and asbestos.
But as this article from the Birmingham Post of January 8th 1973 shows, the hapless workforce employed at Trinity Street were not even safe in their own homes from the curse of “The Devil’s element.”
Poor AW employee Gurdev Singh of Old Park Lane had a bloody phosphorus tanker crash through his front door and also wreck the house of his neighbour! The potential consequences of carrying such material could have been catastrophic given the nature of the chemical being carried- literally an incendiary bomb on wheels.
We already have one account of how a lorry load of material containing phosphorus waste caught fire on route to rattlechain lagoon, but a full load of the glowing stuff out of water would have taken out more than just a couple of houses.
A tanker of phosphorus arriving at Trinity Street
Tanked up
I’m not sure how the lorry skidded or what enquiry Albright and Wilson made into this fiasco, but when he signed up to work for this rotten firm , I’m sure that Mr Singh was not looking for this particular form of *Guru spiritual enlightenment! 😆
Gu means Darkness and Ru means Light. Literally translated, “Guru” means ‘The Light that dispels darkness.’