Mesothelioma (Amendment) Bill [HL]

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Friday 20th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak briefly in the gap. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Murphy, I have personal experience of this issue. My father at the age of 19 turned down the opportunity to study marine engineering at Royal Holloway College to join the Merchant Navy. He joined in 1939 and, by 1943, according to the South Wales press, he was the youngest chief engineer on merchantmen crossing the Atlantic, carrying oil, primarily, I understand, from Galveston to various parts of the world, including ports in the United Kingdom. He died in 1989, having being diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1984. He spent five years being treated, I think in the Brompton Hospital. He had repeated operations on his pleura to try to alleviate all the pain and the difficulty he was experiencing. He left many letters and diaries, in which he explained why he had insisted on working on lagging in the boiler rooms of the SS “Penhale” and the SS “Duke of Sparta”, the two tankers on which he spent much of the war. He explained that he insisted on doing the lagging work himself—of course, he paid the price for it—because he was always uneasy about the use of asbestos but could not quite define it.

In the correspondence that he left behind, he expressed his shock over the lack of research that was being conducted in the whole area of cancer treatment. I have read the letters that he wrote to various authorities requesting that additional resources be allocated to that area, not particularly for himself—I will come to that in a minute—but for others. He also complained extensively about the lack of support that was given to those people—in his case it was not so much of a problem—who found it very hard to establish who was commercially liable for compensation given that they were suffering from this disease. His concerns about the research were in part motivated by his regard for the many Chinese crew members on the ships who worked under him when he was chief engineer. It is clear that he worried that they would never receive treatment and, in many cases, would never know what they were suffering from. This was not necessarily the case on the ships on which he served, as he was doing the lagging work, but he was not to know what would happen to the Chinese crew members on other ships in the Merchant Navy, where they were doing a lot of this work. He worried about what was happening to those people. There must have been tens of thousands of Chinese crewmen who served in the Merchant Navy who never knew to the day they died what they had suffered from. They were probably said to have died from something coming under a general cancer heading.

I say to those who have gone, and to their relatives, wherever they are in the world, that at least we in the United Kingdom are now treating these matters very seriously. Indeed, the speech of my noble friend Lord Winston was absolutely fascinating. It contained information that many of us had never heard before. I am sure that my father would have been fascinated to hear this debate today. As I say, I hope that additional resources can be found, if only in memory of those who have died in the service of their country.