Furious nuclear test veterans still waiting for medals threaten Cenotaph protest
Britain’s nuclear heroes are furious the medal Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised them may not be delivered before Remembrance Sunday.
Survivors of the Cold War radiation experiments – who have an average age of 85 – are threatening to make the betrayal public when they march past the Cenotaph.
John Morris, 85, of Rochdale, said: “For 70 years we’ve had no medal, and if we don’t have one this year we’re going to kick up a fuss. It’s imperative, or it means every promise they made us is worthless. If Sunak can’t even sort out a gong inside 12 months, what hope has he got of fixing anything else.”
Veterans of the nuclear tests waged a long fight for official recognition, at the same time as battling a horrific legacy of cancers, rare blood disorders, miscarriages and birth defects for their families.
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Reach Commissioned)
Medal was too late for Donald
Whenever the medal comes will be too late for Donald Baker, from Lincoln.
He was delighted to hear he would get a medal last year, but died in March, aged 85, from a cancer his family blame on the bomb tests.
His daughter Morag said the family were devastated that he would not be able to collect the medal himself.
“He was so proud to know that finally he was to receive one,” she said. “We will be helping mum to apply for it now. We are so sad he never saw it. He was a proud navy man. These loyal men were put in front of a hydrogen bomb and have not been acknowledged since.”
Don served in the engine room of HMS Scarborough at the Operation Grapple Z tests in 1958, when he was just 21. It was providing data for meteorologists, and crew had to drink desalinated seawater.
In an account of his experiences, he told how they were mustered on deck to watch the bombs, wearing standard-issue boiler suits, long white gloves, and a cotton ‘flash’ hood. He described seeing “a great swirling mass, boiling like hell itself”, and said that as the shockwave reached the ship they had to hang on the guard rails to prevent being blown overboard.
He developed stomach problems aged 25, and within eight years had been diagnosed with severe duodenal ulcers. He needed a stomach bypass in 1979, in his 40s. He later developed rectal cancer, which finally killed him.
If fallout gets into the digestive system, it can cause the cells lining the gut lining to stop working properly.
In 2019, he told the Mirror: “I can only attribute my problems to our initial arrival at Christmas Island, with a ton of coconuts from the island dumped on our quarterdeck as fresh stores on arrival. The fibrous outer of the nut would probably have contained much contaminated dust which we ingested, plus we observed one bomb from an excessively close range by mistake.”
A friend played a CD of military music as Don was dying, and he took his last breaths as the Last Post played. His coffin was draped in the standard of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association.
The Mirror took campaigners to meet Prime Minister Boris Johnson in June last year, and Sunak asked the King to approve the gong within a month of taking office last autumn.
Applications did not open until March, and since then 1,528 people have logged a claim for a medal – more than 1,000 of them surviving veterans. They have all received letters promising them it will be delivered by “late summer”.
The Office of Veterans’ Affairs has now said the design has not been approved, and the date has been pushed back to “the second half of the year” with production not starting until after the summer break. A Cabinet Office source said the King had yet to sign off on the medal, while a Buckingham Palace spokesman said it was “a matter for the MoD”.
Campaigner Alan Owen said: “The government has taken its foot off the gas, and don’t seem to realise that we’re losing veterans every day. Any delay is a betrayal of all the promises they’ve made.” Veterans Minister Johnny Mercer said on Twitter: “I’m determined they will see their medals as soon as we possibly can, but look, we keep going.”
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Andrew Parsons / No10 Downing Street)
A government spokesman refused to commit to a date for the medal, but added: “We are firmly committed to recognising their service by awarding the Nuclear Test Medal as soon as possible.”
The gong can be claimed posthumously by relatives of civilians, scientists, servicemen, or local employees under UK command at the nuclear tests held between 1952 and 1967 at Monte Bello, Emu Field, or Maralinga in Australia, or at Christmas Island or Malden Island in Kiribati.
High Commissioners in those places have been informed, but no public information campaigns have been launched to let locals know they have a right to the medal.
* For a medal form, contact campaign group LABRATS on 020 3286 3988
