Returning home: veterans and fallout from the past

Nigel Stainforth was a ‘coder educational’ on HMS Warrior. His job involved coding and decoding signals and teaching English and maths to junior sailors. In this clip he describes his peers’ enthusiasm to leave the service and return to ‘civvy street’, only to subsequently find that many had signed up for further service. His testimony speaks to the institutionalising effects of military service, which often gave its participants a sense of meaning and purpose, not to mention an opportunity to travel and engage in exciting missions. For Stainforth the thrill of military service did not last, as he subsequently trained as a chartered accountant and moved to South Africa.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Nigel Stainforth was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

Back to Portsmouth, and then assigned to, from Portsmouth, left the ship… oh, it’s quite interesting, actually, the other thing I made a note on is quite interesting, that all the way back to Portsmouth, a lot of my shipmates were saying they can’t wait to get ashore and sign up to what they call Civvy Street, to get out in the civilian life again, and then we’d see them the following day back on board and they said no, they’ve signed up for another ten years or something. [laughs] So the terror of civilian life, I think, you get quite institutionalised I think, in the Navy, which is fine.

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John Robinson piloted a Canberra aircraft for Bomber Command Main Force. He was involved in multiple test operations, including Operations Buffalo and Antler in South Australia and Operation Grapple in the Pacific. In this clip, he discusses balancing his ongoing service with his personal life after serving on the nuclear testing programme. Robinson continued to play an important role in radiation detection from nuclear explosions, a job that required flexibility and a willingness to move from base to base.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. John Robinson was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

So we moved up to Hemswell, it was there that we got married. So yeah, we were based there and got married down at home, but, yeah. And that’s where we moved, because they then shifted the whole lot from Hemswell down to Upwood, RAF Upwood, near, well, it’s near Huntingdon, yeah. And so we moved the squadron down there. What we were doing was very, very much background sampling of all the real background stuff in the atmosphere that was floating around, because a lot of tests were going on in those days, for a lot of countries. So it was collecting for the scientists, you know, all the information. Not only in the UK, the detachments everywhere. We had trained to Canada, operated from Gibraltar quite a bit. I didn’t on those, but we had detachments in Darwin and Perth… Darwin and, where was it? Oh yes, Melbourne.

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Ken McGinley discusses the controversy over whether it rained on Christmas Island after Grapple Y, Britain’s largest ever nuclear test. McGinley describes experiencing a rainstorm after the detonation as a relief from the humid conditions. He also refers to a conflicting statement from the Ministry of Defence. McGinley and other veterans believe that exposure to the rain was connected to ill-health in later life, including non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Several veterans also believe that the air drop detonation may have gone awry, exploding closer to the ocean and the south-east point of the atoll than was planned.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Ken McGinley was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Christopher R Hill. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

Yeah. During Grapple?

Aye. Grapple Y, aye.

So, I mean it’s all leading up to that first test, because that was Britain’s biggest ever bomb, wasn’t it, Grapple Y?

My analysis on it, that I found that the cases of leukaemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, were mainly attributable to Port London. It did rain that day, and Alan just sent me a, Alan just brought over new information there about Lord Penney telling you how a nuclear bomb can start a thunderstorm. I’ve got the documents here on it. He just brought me that over yesterday.

There are atmospheric physicists at Reading today are looking at weather formations using historical Met data based on rain patterns coinciding with nuclear tests in the fifties and sixties.

That’s right, yeah. Although they say, the Ministry of Defence have always maintained it never rained. But I’m sorry, you’re liars, for the simple reason being, I was there. I walked back – and another thing, which you’ll never hear from a nuclear veteran – when we were walking back to the tent, I told you there was two men standing at the side with their white, all their whites on, with masks on, goggles on, and they shouted ‘Get under cover, get under cover’, that’s when it started to rain. And it was like… and originally, or initially, it was actually like big droplets, and then it just come down, the rain. We were taking off our whites to throw into a big bundle, they told us, put your white gear in that bundle there, so you just took it off and threw it in a bundle. So we took it off, threw it in a bundle, walked back to the tent. These guys were saying, ‘Get under cover, get under cover’. No way, we were standing in that heat for about three hours and that rain was just lovely and cool, you know. Didnae think, radiation or anything like that, or didn’t even know what radiation was. I don’t how we could have spelt it in those days even. But, walking back down to the tent, we were doing… Alan, myself, Billy Pettigrew, I think it was, we got a can of beer each and sat outside the tent drinking it and just, we never spoke, we just kind of looked at each other. What do you think of that, eh? Don’t know.

And you think, looking back on it, that there were more lymphomas for people in Port London as opposed to main camp?

Yes.

Is that because of the rainout from the test?

I would think it was from the rainout, aye. You see, this is what I was leading up to. After we had our beer, it was just about lunchtime, so we went up to the canteen, we were standing in the queue with our mugs, waiting for our – your knife, fork and spoon in your mug – standing in the queue. And this guy’s coming round with a ladle and a bucket. We said, what the hell’s that he’s putting… it was navy rum. Because we served under HMS Resolution, although the camp commander was Major Hubble, lovely big man. So, oh, we’re getting a tot of rum. I’d never tasted rum before, so drank it. Ugh! Drank it all anyway. Then we had our lunch. Says to the guy that was dishing it out, ‘Why are we getting the rum?’ He says, ‘Because it’s traditional in the navy, every time it rains, we issue rum’. So that would have went on HMS Resolution’s manifest, you know. So, you know, so that night, that night it was, oh, the toilet. You couldnae get into the toilet that night. Stomach, and I says, ‘Should never have drunk that rum’. That nausea feeling I had, and diarrhoea. I didn’t know whether to be sick or have diarrhoea. You’re sitting on a pan, making all kind of funny noises. And at the same time, you’re urgh, like that, you know. So, didnae know what to think. [00:04:58] About two days later, I was in a tent, and I woke up, I couldnae open my eyes, God’s sake. I went out of the tent, to the flagpole, and there was a wee mirror there, and I had kind of water blisters under here, down here, on my neck, and just on my chest. And I’m trying to squeeze them out and that, and I couldnae. They weren’t painful either, you know. So I says, I need to go to the doctor, see what’s wrong here. So I went along to the doctor and there was loads of guys there with blisters and, you know, just various types of skin things and that, you know. And he was putting a solution on us and that was it. But it cleared up after a few days. Left me a bit scarred, right enough. And, never thought anything about it at all.

At what point did you think the fact that we were, the fact that it rained after Grapple Y is problematic for us because it could have exposed us to radioactive fallout, when did that occur to you? Presumably once you were back and years later?

Oh aye, years later, you know. Because we always maintained, everybody that took part in the test say that, quite clearly. Oh, it rained that day just after the test, you know. And yet the Ministry of Defence said there was no rain on Christmas Island that day, you know. What? The bloody water was running down the roads. They’ve got it in film, you know.

Yeah. And that’s what the Dispatches programme was about.

Exactly. So, you know, this is what, so there’s lies, you know. At the Ministry of Defence you’ve got, you had good liars and bad liars, you know? That was the problem, you know.

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Eric Waterfield describes returning from service as a Royal Engineer in Operation Hurricane, which led to Britain’s first atomic test in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia. By Christmas 1955, he was suffering from major lung problems. In this clip he discusses his family’s health problems with the interviewer. His wife Barbara gave birth to a stillborn baby, which Waterfield believed could have been a result of his test participation. In his full interview he refers to other health problems experienced by his family members, which he believes were connected to the intergenerational health effects of radiation exposure. Upon returning home, Waterfield and several other troops from Operation Hurricane were recruited onto the streets of London to support the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Eric Waterfield was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Fiona Bowler. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

You mentioned you had your lung problem, was that when you first started to think about potentially the effects of what you’d gone through?

Yeah, oh I did, yeah.

When was that, when did you have your lung…

1955.

Okay, so very soon after you came back?

Yeah. Christmas, pretty close to Christmas 1955, because there was snow on the ground, I remember, yeah.

And you said about your wife had a stillbirth. At the time, did you think that that could be connected?

I didn’t think so at the time, I didn’t think about it at the time, no. But I mean, it probably was, you know…

[ends at 00:00:45]

John Oates was born and raised in Trealaw, a small mining community in South Wales. His recruitment to the testing programme on Christmas Island was one of the first times he had been away from the Welsh Valleys. Upon returning home from his National Service with the RAF, Oates was welcomed by family and friends. He describes how the shock of what he had witnessed on Christmas Island made it difficult for him to get into the spirit of his warm reception. He chose not to remain in the RAF after his experience on Christmas Island, but did join the Territorial Army.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. John Oates was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

What sort of welcome do you get at home?

Oh great, absolutely, but embarrassing. It was terribly embarrassing, they’d put the damn flags out. I know I’m coming back from the war, but oh, it was so embarrassing. But I thought, well, probably I have been in the war. You know, a twenty-year-old boy, and I thought, my goodness, what they done? What they done? The community up in, you know, it’s not only my family done it, the damn street done it! Walking up from Dinas station, then the steps up into Crawshaw Road, I thought oh no, these buntings and flags. Oh, my goodness, what has happened, what could have happened, I thought. My hero, my hero’s come home. Oh no. No, no, no, no, no. That night we went down to the Red Lion pub in Dinas, and that’s when I got started crying.

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Derek Addy was admitted to a psychiatric ward at a hospital in Gosforth, Newcastle, in the 1980s. In this clip he describes the events that led to his admission, and his wife Anne’s impressions at the time. Addy attributes his psychological problems to his service in Operation Mosaic, where the ship on which he served, HMS Diana, was ordered to sail through radioactive plumes during two separate nuclear detonations. He recalls the experience of trying to mop-up contaminated seawater that had washed onto the deck of the ship.

These traumatic experiences were further underlined when HMS Diana engaged in a firefight with the Egyptian frigate, Domiat, during the Suez crisis. Addy vividly remembers looking through the gunner’s sight as burning men jumped from the Domiat into the water. Addy’s personal struggles in the 1980s may have been triggered by a pension tribunal in which he had to recount his experiences during Operation Mosaic. His appeal was ultimately rejected.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. Derek Addy was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Joshua A Bushen. This project was run in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

I was away with it, there’s no doubt about it, and I went into a psychiatric hospital for three days. Salkeld, obviously he was treating me, he was giving me tablets and all this business and everything else, and the guy who ran the psychiatric hospital in Gosforth in Newcastle, he got him to come to the house to see me, it was, you know, a big deal. He was a very, very important man, and Salkeld got him to come to my house to talk to me about it and he agreed I was away with the mixer. And they took me, and I was only in three days, that was all, I was only in three days, and the first day, there was something about the meals. The first day I think you had to have your meals on the ward or something like that, but after that, they said I was okay, I could go to the canteen and everything. I was only in three days, but I was in a psychiatric ward. Well, as I say, I thought I was doing my job alright. Anne said I was really away with it. She said when people used to come to talk to me and everything else they couldn’t believe the stuff I was coming out with. I always put it down to the bomb, I did. It was the bombs and the Domiat and one thing and another. Oh yeah. You know, when you look back at it, I mean the idea of sailing around in the fallout of, as I say, two atom bombs. And that’s all we had, we had sprinklers on deck, we had hoses on deck with holes punched in them, and it was contaminated seawater, was being pumped over the deck. That was what we had to protect us, you know? And then, you know, you read a lot about these things. I mean there were a lot of articles about it later on, the different newspapers and things interviewing people and whatnot, and talking about it and everything else. It had brought it, you know, brought it all back. I went to a tribunal in Middlesbrough, some time in the eighties, because I felt that, you know, that was what had caused my breakdown and everything. And I went to this tribunal, I mean there were a lot of people there, there were a lot of people there, and I got interviewed, you know, I don’t know who the hell they all were, all in civvies, but I had, you know, I had to go up and talk to all these people and everything, describe the experiences and everything else. And at the end of the day I got nothing from it at all. I felt, as I say, I felt that it was the bombs that had got me the way I was.

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John Morris describes the tragic circumstances in which he and his wife Betty lost their baby son, Steven, and the conflicting statements they received regarding the cause of death. The parents were only granted full access to the autopsy report 50 years later. The report stated that Steven’s lungs had not properly formed. Morris and his family believe that Steven’s death and the deaths of other veterans’ children were linked to their involvement in British nuclear weapons tests. Morris has been a leading figure in LABRATS (Legacy of the Atomic Bomb, Recognition for Atomic Test Survivors). In June 2022, he met with Prime Minister Boris Johnson and demanded a medal on behalf of the organisation during its ‘look me in the eye’ campaign.

This is a short extract from an in-depth interview. John Morris was recorded for the Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans project in 2024. The interviewer was Jonathan Hogg. This project was in partnership with National Life Stories and the full interview can be accessed at the British Library.

As I said earlier, I did a seminar in Manchester. There were twelve men, and all of us, I’d lost, I lost a son, a cot death. I was arrested, me and my wife were arrested, saying that we’d possibly killed him. We put him to bed at night, we got up in the morning and he were dead in his cot. Got to hospital, the police came and, okay, they’ve got to do that, they’d no option, you know. Then, three days later, they said oh, we’re not pursuing any charges, it’s a cot death. When we got the death certificate it was bronchial pneumonia, so it started murder, then a cot death, then bronchial pneumonia. And it took me fifty years to get an autopsy report. They wouldn’t release the autopsy report. The autopsy report says that his lungs hadn’t formed correctly. Was that part of the atomic bomb? There are hundreds – and researchers can look it up – there are hundreds of us gone the same way. Lost children, had children with huge problems, some a lot worse than me. I had three children after, all of them are okay, apart from my two daughters. My other daughter had two miscarriages, and the last one they said, we would advise you, Kay, not to have any more children. They wouldn’t tell her why, other than the baby wasn’t, it wasn’t growing as it should, but they wouldn’t go into any detail. Now, is that part of the inheritance that we’ve given? That much I don’t know. But again, when you talk to the veterans, there are hundreds of us gone through the same routine.

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Joshua Bushen contributed to ‘An Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans’ as a Research Assistant and went on to conduct several life story interviews with test veterans. He was recruited to the project after completing an MRes thesis on the role of British servicemen in Operation Dominic, an American-led series of atmospheric nuclear weapon tests in the Pacific. Josh was awarded both his MRes and BA in History from the University of South Wales.

Dr Chris Hill is an Associate Professor in History at the University of South Wales. His research interests span the fields of environmental history, imperial history, and science and technology studies. His recent research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), has explored the role of imperialism across the cycle of nuclear development in Britain, from uranium extraction in Namibia and South Africa to nuclear weapons tests in Australia and the Pacific. Chris is Principal Investigator for the Office for Veterans’ Affairs funded project: ‘An Oral History of British Nuclear Test Veterans’. His next book, Radiant Empire: Namibian Uranium and Nuclear Britain, is contracted to Stanford University Press.