Following on from my last post, I’ve been digging further into Broken Hill miners (such as BHP) and Port Pirie smelting (BHAS, basically). Expect a lot of spoil and a small amount of shock and ore.
BHP at Port Pirie and Whyalla
I found this article on Trove from 28th August 1948 (from the BHP AGM the previous day) that I think sheds light on what was going on in Port Pirie and the port at Whyalla (just across the gulf) at the time. The section I found most interesting was this:
In co-operation with the Department of Immigration, we are endeavouring to recruit skilled tradesmen in the United Kingdom. This additional labour will be employed at Whyalla in the shipyard and on home building, and at Port Kembla on plant construction.
Suitable accommodation near to the place of employment is essential in attracting additional employees. Under normal conditions, the building of new homes might reasonably have been expected to have kept pace with the needs of a growing population, but because of the intervention of the war and existing conditions, the acute shortage of accommodation still prevails.
To assist in meeting the situation, hostels are being established at Whyalla, Port Kembla, and Newcastle to house the men who will be recruited from within the Commonwealth and from overseas for employment in our works at those centres. We are co-operating with the Federal and respective State Governments on these projects.
This fits neatly with the situations vacant listed in the Adelaide Advertiser for November 1948 that I listed previously.
History of BHP
I also found a history of mining at Broken Hill that said that BHP had stopped mining there in 1939:
In 1939 BHP ceased all mining operations at Broken Hill. The company planned to concentrate on iron and steel manufacturing at Newcastle and Whyalla. The same year the Sulphide Corporation closed the Central Mine. For the remaining companies on the lode, wartime metal prices again financed development. Much of the central lode remained silent, but in 1943 Broken Hill South took over BHP’s Blocks 10-13 and in 1945 re-opened the Kintore shaft. The old South company now owned the centre of the lode, and the Zinc Corporation was the new South.
Hence I think I need to get a better source of information for what the actual situation was in 1948. In fact, it turns out that there’s a book written in 1948 discussing BHP: “Australia’s iron & steel industry : The Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd“. However, this seems just about as rare as hen’s teeth (there’s a copy in the NLA and another in the SLQ). I’d get a copy by Copies Direct but I have no idea what’s actually in it.
“Accounting for Lead Poisoning, the Medical Politics of Occupational Health”
I’ve now received a copy of Richard Gillespie’s fascinating 1990 article on lead poisoning in Port Pirie (thanks Jo!!!!), and – my goodness! – it paints a pretty bleak picture. Lead poisoning itself wasn’t a recognised condition until 1917, by which time the smelting workforce in Port Pirie had been comprehensively poisoned. Any payments before then for (what we would now think of as) lead poisoning were framed as ‘charitable assistance’ by the company, without accepting any actual responsibility. Workers were also terrorized into thinking that reporting any illness would get them instantly laid off, rather than actually helped: unsurprisingly, reporting rates were extremely low.
It was only in the early 1920s that workers were given solid assurances that they could report health issues without being kicked out: but then BHAS moved on to corrupting the medical evaluation process, with in-house doctors (only the most “conservative” were chosen, by which they meant “pro-company” and “anti-worker”) disallowing most claims via one blatant ruse or another.
There was then a Royal Commission: but this process too was quickly controlled by the companies, and the fundamental imbalance favouring the mining companies’ profits over workers’ health remained in place. All that really changed was the “sophisticat[ion]” (p.316) of the managers’ arguments, which by the end were no more than a crafty casserole of victim blaming and outright lying. Basically, the central conceit was to distinguish “between lead absorption and lead poisoning” (p.330), which in my opinion is just a rhetorical device for somehow blaming people for ‘allowing themselves to be poisoned’ (how?).
And before you write all this off as ancient history, the same specious arguments devised by BHAS were eagerly recycled by the gas companies in America in the 1920s to somehow justify why they should be allowed to add lead tetraethyl to petrol. So BHAS didn’t just give its workers lead poisoning, it helped the gasoline giants expose all of us to environmental lead for the century since. Eat lead, suckers.
Anyway, 1925/1926 is essentially where Gillespie’s account stops, though it is easy to see that with (metaphorically) toxic management running a (literally) toxic industry, nothing much was likely to change quickly. So I think we can easily see exactly how much support someone with dangerously high levels of lead exposure would get in 1948 from the Port Pirie managers at BHAS. Which is basically none.
Levels of lead exposure
Gillespie also mentions (p.322) typical levels of worker lead exposure (via inhalation) in the roasting plant, that were released a year after the Royal Commission:
- 2.2 mg of lead at the top of the A section
- 3.6 mg at the top of the mixing bin
- 19.8 mg at the discharge end of the secondary rolls
- 52.8 mg above the conveyors.
This should be compared to Chapman’s estimation that 1—2 mg of lead per day could cause lead poisoning, and that a hygiene standard should be set at 0.2 mg to ensure that no lead poisoning would occur.
Note that after improvements made to the conveyors (from tray to belt) in the couple of years following, “lead levels fell from 37 mg to 1.44 mg”. (p.326) But one of the worst (as far as lead exposure goes) places in the plant was “the baghouse“. Gillespie notes that “workers periodically had to enter the dusty chambers to clean and recondition the bags; cases of lead poisoning continued to occur, and this became one of
the jobs reserved for foreign workers.” (Gillespie’s footnote 51 says: see [Frank A. Green, The Port Pirie Smelters (Melbourne, 1977)], p.110).
[Yes, I’d happily order the copy of Green’s book that’s on sale in Germany, but 40 euros for shipping to the UK? Really? What has gone wrong with bookselling recently?]
All in all, I can’t help but wonder whether what we would now consider catastrophically high levels of lead might simply have been the expected level for someone – a migrant worker, or perhaps even Carl Webb? – working in BHAS’ baghouse in November 1948.
An individual engaged in the motor vehicle trade in the 40s and who regularly handled batteries would almost certainly contract a dose of lead poisoning.
Prove me wrong
The three indicators of older mining activity, at least in Australia are soil-samples that return lead, zinc and arsenic- the level of arsenic in Australia’s ancient soils being in any case higher than in Europe. There is also the fact that use of lead-based paints were only banned, a first, in dairy-pens and weren’t finally banned from use in houses, in Australia, until the 1970s. Last I looked they were still permitted for a few specific uses such as on marine bollards.
Living in an old house, where the luscious-looking lead paints were disintegrating (as they did over time), breathing the dust and in some cases also inhaling arsenic from old (Victorian-era) wall-papers’ arsenical green could create a situation where a miner’s vulnerability was already higher than average before he began work in a mine.
to clarify – some of lead dust inhaled is swallowed. It’s ingestion that causes real damage.
Didn’t stencilling (Carl’s tools) involve the use of lead through the use of lead-based paints (pigments and driers) and, in some cases, the use of thin sheet lead or lead foil for the stencils themselves?
Wouldn’t his work with lathes and drills (at Red Point Tool Co and maybe other places) also involve lead exposure to some extent, particularly through inhaling dust and fumes?
Pat: Port Pirie (along with Port Germein and Whyalla) were extended parts of the same broader mining/smelting/shipyard industrial complex circa 1948. It could easily be that Carl Webb was working in very much the same capacity that we were all thinking about years ago, though on the shipyard side rather than the ship side
During the Christmas shutdown of Port Pirie in December 1944 (by Broken Hill Ltd, not BHP) the “powers that be” installed 4 x Denver Floatation machines, with a further 1 x on standby, to enable 52 bags of yellowcake to be rushed out of the site. All available and redeployed mining equipment and people were diverted to Mt Painter and Port Pirie to allow the last 12 lbs of u235 to be supplied to the US via Uk (and most likely Rhydymwyn Gaseous Diffusion site in Wales) by plane. An Australian with the Bickford surname was onboard the US Bomber when it departed Edinburgh Airforce base and received a chaperoned tour of several US production and test sites.
Someone involved in any part of this event would be exposed to the lead sites, although hair growth many expel some over time.
Pat,
Bingo. Yes! “. . . his work with lathes and drills (at Red Point Tool co and maybe other places) also involve[s] lead exposure . . . through inhaling dust and fumes.” Thank you for pointing that out!
I’ve been looking at multiple businesses that placed ads in Melbourne for employment similar to the kind Charlie was doing at Red Point and there are dozens of possibilities right there in Melbourne. I’ll try and post some of them soon, but from memory, many of them involve grinding and lathes, just as you say. Some of them were located in Brunswick near the Keane’s house.
Why would Charlie also give up a good salary after having worked hard to achieve a relatively high degree of proficiency in his profession and chuck it all unnecessarily for a lower paying job that didn’t allow him to use the skills he’d learned and to do what he was best at? If he was afraid of being found by D in Melbourne, he could have simply changed his name and continued working there, tho’ he may not have even felt that was necessary, as Melbourne is a big city and I now think he may have thought he could easily hide from her even if he’d remained there, particularly if he changed jobs and was living w/ a family member whose address D didn’t have.
Since you brought up the subject of D’s affidavit in a recent post, I also found it interesting that in one of her divorce documents, it says that her attorneys believed Charlie was still in Melbourne at the time she was filing for divorce. Did they know something we don’t know? I’ve often wondered if D or her father could have enlisted the help of private detectives and/or attorneys to try and track Charlie down in order to force him to make those maintenance payments she was owed. I’ve even wondered if one of those PIs could have discovered Charlie at a shop in Melbourne and if that could have prompted his exit to Adelaide to try and escape. He did say, according to D, “You’ll never get another penny out of me ever” or something to that effect.
Could the reason he didn’t board the train to Henley Beach be that he was being followed by a PI who had discovered him in Melbourne? Is that why he boarded a bus instead to Glenelg? Who was the man in the navy blue suit looking down on him from the boardwalk above as he lay dying on the beach? He was described as being stout and about 50 years old. Why was he staring at Charlie for a good five minutes? Who was the man in the trench coat walking up towards Glenelg on the beach the morning Charlie was found? Were these men one and the same? Could it have been a PI who’d followed him to Adelaide? Was it Dorothy’s father? He was stout and about that age.
And I’ve pointed this out before: The laundry marks on Charlie’s clothes were believed to have come from Melbourne cleaners. No other locations were ever mentioned as a possibility for their source except, possibly, England, but I think that may have been ruled out early on.
In addition, Charlie was thought to have died from having taken Strophanthin. A good three or four of his family members may have been taking that medication: Leslie Scott, who had had a heart condition since WW1; Russell, who had been likely been newly-diagnosed with the heart ailment that killed him 7 mos. after Charlie died; Gladys Scott, who may have been suffering from a heart condition, as she, too, died about 8 years later of heart trouble; and, as David Morgan pointed out some time ago, he may have even gotten it from the Keane household where his mother had been, and also could have been prescribed it, tho’ I doubt he would have held onto it since her death two years earlier. I think the first two possibilities are the strongest.
If he didn’t get the Strophanthin from family members in Melbourne, how and where did he get it?
It could be Charlie found a bag of drugs in the chemist’s car and he swapped it for the poetry book.
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/260817101?searchTerm=%22Strophanthin%22