Children in Armley used the dust to mark out hopscotch squares. They scooped it into snowballs and threw it at each other. It lay half an inch thick on window sills by mid-morning, blue-white and feather-light, drifting down from the ventilation outlets of the J.W. Roberts asbestos factory on Canal Road. The factory operated from 1906 until 1959. It was one of only two places in the world that processed blue asbestos, the deadliest variety. The disease takes thirty to fifty years to surface, which meant the consequences of those hopscotch squares did not arrive until the 1980s.
J.W. Roberts Ltd. had begun in 1855 as a textile firm working cotton, hemp and jute. By 1906 it was making asbestos insulation mattresses for steam locomotive boilers from its Midland Works on Canal Road in Armley, a tight working-class neighbourhood in west Leeds. In 1920 it merged into Turner and Newall, the asbestos giant. T&N's biggest commercial success came from a product invented in the Armley works in 1931: Sprayed Limpet Asbestos, raw fibre mixed with cement and applied as a spray. It was cheap, soundproof and fire resistant. It went to sixty countries, onto schools, theatres, churches and the London Underground. It made enormous profits. It also required vast quantities of raw asbestos to be processed in Armley, with the dust vented straight into the streets of the surrounding terraces.
The court testimony from former neighbours is what makes the story unbearable. One man recalled his wife wiping down the window sills at 9.30 each morning, and finding the dust back to half an inch by 10.30 whenever the machines were running. A woman remembered: 'It used to be blue-white. We used to sweep this blue dust up. It was blue fluffy stuff.' At the school next to the factory, residents said the dust lay on walls and ledges like snowfall. In summer, factory doors and windows were left open for ventilation; in winter, children huddled around the ground-level outlets for warmth. None of them knew what they were breathing. The factory's own workers had been issued protective equipment for decades. The people who lived next door had not.
Arthur Margereson had grown up playing near the factory in the 1930s and 1940s, exposed to the dust as a child; by the time of the legal case he had died and was represented by his widow Evelyn. June Hancock had lived on the same streets. By the late 1980s both women were dying of mesothelioma, the cancer that asbestos causes and almost nothing else does. Mesothelioma can take half a century to appear after exposure, and they had been children when the dust was thickest. In 1988 Yorkshire Television aired a documentary on the pattern of Armley deaths; the government refused a public inquiry. Margereson sued. The case dragged on for years, with T&N resisting access to internal documents that showed the company had known the dangers since 1933. Hancock's case was joined. In 1995 Mr Justice Holland found for the plaintiffs, awarding Margereson 50,000 pounds and Hancock 65,000. It was a landmark decision: it extended a factory's duty of care beyond its own employees to the people living around it. T&N's appeal was dismissed the following year.
June Hancock died on 19 July 1997. After her death the June Hancock Mesothelioma Research Fund was established to support victims and research. Around her case, hundreds more Armley residents came forward. T&N accepted liability for sixty additional claimants and then, in 1998, was bought by Federal-Mogul, a Michigan auto-parts conglomerate. In October 2001 Federal-Mogul filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, ring-fencing its US assets from asbestos litigation. Leeds City Council surveyed 364 houses next to the factory site and found residual asbestos in 363. Decontamination of those and hundreds more cost over nine million pounds. In November 2004 the first fifty Armley claimants finally received payment: twenty-four pence in the pound. All fifty had already died. The injustice was given a name in 2009, when Kenneth Yates's play Dust, based on Hancock's story, was performed at the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. The June Hancock Fund continues.
Armley sits at 53.80 N, 1.58 W in west Leeds, on the north bank of the River Aire about a mile and a half west of the city centre. The closest airport is Leeds Bradford (EGNM), seven miles to the north. Manchester (EGCC) is thirty-eight miles south-southwest. From altitude, look for the curve of the River Aire and the parallel Leeds and Liverpool Canal; Canal Road runs along the canal, and the Aviary Estate housing where the worst contamination occurred sits between them. Best viewed from 3,500 to 5,500 feet in clear weather. The factory itself has been demolished, but the dense Victorian street grid of Armley remains a distinctive landmark.