Dennis Hayden was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in 1944. His father served in the infantry throughout his early childhood, and the family lived in Hong Kong and Germany before returning to Wiltshire in 1955. Hayden left school at 16 and joined the Royal Air Force on an administrative apprenticeship. He qualified two years later as a Junior Technician Supplier 1 and was posted to RAF Colerne. In 1965 Hayden was posted to Maralinga in Australia, where he worked on air movements and rail supply of goods. He remained in the RAF until 1974. Between 1974 and 1977, Hayden worked in Saudi Arabia for the British Aircraft Corporation and then for the Royal Saudi Air Force at their base in Tabuk. He spent the last 25 years of his career as a sales executive, retiring at 60 to focus on the Combined Veterans’ Forum International, a support group for veterans. He currently lives in Lydney, Gloucestershire.
Interview extracts
Description
Dennis Hayden, an RAF technician who served at Maralinga during the mid-1960s, remembers the origins of British Nuclear Test Veterans Association (BNTVA) in the 1980s. Despite being a member of this new organisation, he recalls needing to focus on his own affairs at the time. Hayden praises the efforts of the BNTVA chair, Ken McGinley, who temporarily succeeded in having governmental responsibility for war pensions shifted to the then Department of Social Security. Not long after this landmark achievement, the pension scheme was taken over by the Ministry of Defence.
In more recent years, Hayden has become a leading historian and voice within the test veteran community. He has published two books about test veterans’ campaigns and struggles, The UK’s Nuclear Scandal (2021) and A Legacy of Inherited Criminality (2023).
This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Dennis Hayden was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. The project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.
Transcript
I was concentrating in the 1980s on my own efforts to try and get back to some sort of normality money-wise. But I did, I was a member of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, but I didn’t get on to any of their committees. But I could see that Ken McGinley was doing a terrific job, because it was his initiative in the early 1990s to get the DSSS, the DS- Department of Social Services, to take control of the War Pension Scheme, which as I say, I got on to. But of course, but after I was granted that, the following year in 1993, the Ministry of Defence created a Minister for Veterans and a Veterans Agency, and the War Pension Scheme came under complete control of the Ministry of Defence. That was a loophole that happened between 1990 and 1993. In the early 1990s a lot of pressure was then being put on Ken McGinley, they had to get rid of him.
[ends at 0:01:11]
The front cover of Dennis Hayden's first book, The UK's Nuclear Scandal (2021).
