McGinley introduced a royal angle by revealing the Duke of Edinburgh had visited Christmas Island in 1959 on board Britannia. (The Queen’s consort apparently hopped off the boat for an hour or two to have a look at the troops and watch a native dance. But he was careful not to eat or drink anything until he was safely back on board.)
But although these activities garnered some publicity, they had little impact. The Conservative government, the Ministry of Defence and the British public were unmoved.
Happily a revival of fortunes seemed on the cards when Tony Blair’s Labour Party swept to power in 1997.
Blair and most of his government had all pledged their undying support for the nuclear veterans during the long, lonely years in Opposition. Sitting Labour MPs and prospective candidates had ruthlessly used the nuclear veterans to embarrass the Tories.
They had all joined Blair in supporting a Private Member’s Bill in 1990 which would have handed justice to the veterans and their families. The Bill, championed by Labour MP Bob Clay, was “talked out” by Tory backbenches to howls of protest from Labour MPs
Unfortunately the Labour Party wasn’t so well disposed toward the veterans once in power. A letter of congratulation from McGinley, and a gentle reminder of Labour’s earnest promises in Opposition, was sent to Tony Blair as soon as he had his feet under the table at 10 Downing Street.
There was no response.
A follow-up letter several weeks later again was ignored. It was only after several more letters had been sent that Blair replied; the news was not good. Tony Blair said that although he was “sympathetic” toward the veterans, he wrote: “Unfortunately independent scientific studies do not support the payment of general compensation.”
The veterans were outraged, but the Blair administration was as intractable as the Tories had ever been. Veteran campaigner Jack Ashley, a Labour Peer and long-time supporter of the veterans, pleaded: “Most of the Cabinet supported the veterans in opposition. The least they can do is to support them now when they have the power to do something about it…”
But Tony Blair was unmoved, and his equanimity was still unruffled even when an extraordinary story emerged about his own involvement in nuclear bomb testing. Apparently when he was a little boy, he was exposed to radiation from an A-bomb test in Australia.
The story begins on October 11, 1956 when young Tony, aged three and big brother Bill, six, were at home in suburban Adelaide with their mother Hazel. She was a 33-year-old housewife, married to husband Leo who was a lecturer in law at the University of Adelaide.
Mrs Blair was a shy, introverted woman who wasn’t keen on the social side of life in this far-flung corner of the Empire. According to Bill Blair his mother missed her home in the UK and felt lonely and isolated.
In the absence of any real friends, she devoted herself entirely to the well-being of her young family. She stayed home most days, and was watching Tony and Bill playing on their tricycles in the garden (an activity the two Blair boys enjoyed doing most), when a large, reddish-brown cloud stretching from horizon to horizon moved toward Adelaide.
It transpired later the cloud enveloped much of the Blair’s neighbourhood as well as large parts of the city. A radio report said it was a sand-storm. What it didn’t say was that mixed in with the sand was a deadly seeding of radioactive isotopes.
Unexpected wind changes had apparently blown the dust from Maralinga, 350 miles to the north east of Adelaide, where the British government had detonated an atomic device.
Experts at the local Giles Weather Station, run by the British, had calculated that prevailing winds would gently sweep the radioactive cloud across the less populous desert regions of the northern territories. But things had gone wrong.
According to Hedley Marston, one of Australia’s foremost scientists, unforeseen wind shift blew part of the radioactive mushroom cloud across Adelaide, contaminating much of the city and the eastern seaboard.
Using a home-made filtering device and Geiger counter set up on the roof of a laboratory, Marston recorded huge levels of radioactive Iodine, Caesium and Strontium-90 in the air over the city.
He was furious when these measurements were officially denied, and accused the British government and William Penney (who was in personal charge at Maralinga at the time) of covering-up the incident.
Marston claimed he had measured radioactive iodine levels up to 5000 times higher than normal in the thyroids of sheep at two locations near Adelaide, enough to contaminate the food chain.
According to Marston, strontium-90, linked to bone cancer, and leukaemia was being ingested by children, via cows' milk; government policies at the time guaranteed a half pint of milk daily to every Australian schoolchild.
In papers published after his death, he complained to his friend, the nuclear physicist Sir Mark Oliphant: "I am more worried than I can convey about the expensive quasi-scientific pantomime that's being enacted at Maralinga under the cloak of secrecy. And even more so about the evasive lying that is being indulged in by public authorities about the hazard of fallout. Apparently Whitehall and Canberra consider that the people of northern Australia are expendable."
Marston later accused the Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee and the British and Australian governments of lying. The presence of iodine-131 in animals, he warned, would result in increased cases of human cancer of the thyroid gland.
His outspoken criticisms meant he was ostracised by both Australian and British scientists who accused him of scaremongering. He had his equipment confiscated, and his research grants evaporated over-night.
Marston, who died in 1965, was posthumously vindicated in 1985 by the Australian Royal Commission who found that most of his calculations were correct.
When the Blair’s returned to the UK, health problems beset the family. Tony Blair was just 11, when a stroke deprived his father of speech for many years, and soon after his sister Sarah was hospitalised for two years with rheumatoid arthritis. His mother contracted thyroid cancer and was dead at the age of 52, after a long battle. It is well known that Tony Blair later suffered heart problems.
British medical researcher and toxicologist Dick Van Steenis who had access to much of Marston’s papers wasn’t surprised. "Adelaide was plastered with radioactive fallout from 11 to 16 October 1956 comprising plutonium-239, americium-241, iodine-131, strontium-90 and caesium-137," said Van Steenis. “Tony Blair’s mother died of thyroid cancer following that exposure.”
Dr Van Steenis, who studied medicine in Adelaide, further claimed: "All the medical conditions could have been triggered by exposure to radioactivity. And, as a youngster in Adelaide, drinking local milk Tony Blair is very likely to be at risk of bone cancer himself, almost certainly with a residue of strontium-90 in his bones and bone marrow. It is a hell of a catch-22 for the British prime minister. He has never denied the impact of the Maralinga tests on his family. He has never denied that radioactive fallout was ultimately the cause of his mother’s death. But he would not acknowledge it, because to do so would strengthen the legal case against his government for the compensation entitlements of British and Australian veterans.”
Bill Blair described the impact of the health problems in the family in a newspaper interview. He described his mother as a “very brave woman, adding: “She was in hospital for considerable periods. It was traumatic for all of us. Her death had the effect of ending a particular part of the family story. A year or so before she died, hoping the illness had gone away, she and my father bought a house that they began to renovate. She never got to live there."