I FIRST KNEW John Merritt when we were both on the Daily Mirror and he was in his twenties. I remember overhearing an argument John was having with a clutch of editorial executives; he was objecting to a special ‘drugs issue’ of the paper, which, by highlighting the victims of heroin rather than those who controlled the trade, came close to voyeurism. He had just returned from Pakistan and knew that the untold story lay with powerful international forces. He put his case with passion and fluency. As a serious popular journalist, he loved his craft and loathed its trivialisation.
This is not to suggest that John was without a sense of fun. The mystery remains, for example, as to who planted the plastic turd that greeted Robert Maxwell and James Callaghan as they stepped out of the Mirror’s executive lift, causing Maxwell to boom, ‘Who did this?’ A corporate inquiry, though inconclusive, produced only one suspect.
Certainly the Mirror was at its best when it published a John Merritt investigation, whether it was about homelessness or the links between the Tories and the British National Party and other groups on the extreme right. When I was helping to start up News on Sunday, I tried to poach him as chief reporter; but he was then on his way to the Observer, which became his journalistic home and where he was distinguished as, in my view, the finest reporter of his generation.
His exposé in 1989 of the horrific psychiatric colony on the Greek island of Leros – a political prison during the years of the Greek junta that became a dumping ground for theseriously ill and inadequate alike – was a classic of its kind. For this, John took the expected fire; he was denounced in the Greek Parliament as ‘a tool of the CIA wanting to keep Greece out of the EC’. After European Community grants to Greece were frozen as a consequence, the worst units were closed down.44 In this business such triumphs are too infrequent.
John then reported on the suffering of refugees seeking asylum in Britain, who were routinely bundled back to places of great danger, sometimes to torture and even death.45 They were Kurds and people from the Horn of Africa and Latin America. Almost all the refugees he wrote about were eventually allowed in. That the Home Office was an accessory to the crimes of their tormentors angered him greatly; it was this edge to his humanity that was reflected in so much of his work.
Take John’s piece written from his hospital bed.46 Those who read it will not, I believe, easily forget it. In a sense, it was a typical Merritt investigation, in which he rooted out truths about two areas of medical care in Britain: the Bristol Cancer Help Centre, where complementary methods of cancer treatment have been pioneered; and a general medical ward at Hammersmith Hospital in London, with its overworked nurses and junior doctors, its drug addicts with collapsed veins, its alcoholics from the streets and its cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy.
John was one of the latter group. He had leukaemia: and the quotations from his diary written in a Hammersmith ward last autumn – written, I hasten to say, with none of the self-indulgence he accused himself of – ought to be read by every member of the government directly responsible for dismantling the NHS. Here are a few extracts:
Wednesday, 7 November: ‘Hooked up’ to chemo and antibiotics for 18 hours. Shaky, emaciated old lunatic, Mr Moody, in bed opposite takes his pyjamas off and pees over floor, hobbles towards me and tries to climb in my bed . . . Night-time: Mr Moody is swearing and yelling, ‘They are trying to kill me.’ Man in bed behind is being sick. Old man in next bed is sitting on his bed, covered in excrement. The smell is appalling. This is a madhouse . . .
Wednesday, 14 November: 2am: My curtains are torn apart and semi-clad lunatic, like King Lear, crashes on my bed, yelling, ‘Why won’t you help me? I haven’t done anything wrong.’ Nurse takes him away. 2.30am: Old man tries to get in my bed, says I’m his father. 3am: Old man who has dirtied himself comes through my curtains; he is going to urinate on my bed; he pulls my chemotherapy stand over. I grab him by the throat and tell him I will kill him if he comes back. He starts to cry.
John described in the piece how he was first told that he would develop leukaemia ‘sooner or later . . . A professor called Goldstone told me, “Don’t torture yourself with any ideas of self-help; it will only make things worse.” He was not only arrogant, he was dead wrong.’ John turned to the Bristol Cancer Help Centre where cancer patients are treated very differently and where he found decency, calm and hope. Much of his Observer article was devoted to answering distorted criticism of the centre, whose existence has been threatened by falsehoods recycled in the media.
John was 33. When we met for lunch the other day we talked about the swimming and sunshine that are balm to us both. He told me he had decided to stop chemotherapy and take a more holistic approach to fighting his cancer. His wife, Lindsay, supports him in all of this. Leukaemia sufferers become anaemic and vulnerable to infections and the risk of bleeding. In many cases this can be stopped by chemotherapy, but John is one of those for whom a bone marrow transplant is the only hope. Chemotherapy can force the leukaemia into remission, but side-effects are often extremely unpleasant and can undermine the quality of everyday life.
John described his decision to stop chemotherapy as no more than realistic. It was typical of the man that he asked that anything I write about him had a wider focus. John was one of a little-known group of people who go about their lives as normally as they can while awaiting a life-saving bone marrow transplant. For many, the odds are against them finding a perfect tissue-type match. This was especially true of John, whose tissue-type was extremely rare. However, someone, somewhere, had John’s tissue-type; and the search for that person, and for people with all the other combinations of tissue-types, was made by the Anthony Nolan Research Centre, based at London’s Royal Free Hospital, which has the second largest register of potential bone marrow donors in the world.
The centre was established in 1974 and named after Anthony Nolan, then aged two, who was born in Australia and whose parents brought him to Britain in search of a bone marrow transplant. No tissue-type match was found; and Anthony died at the age of seven. The centre gets no support from the government; in 1989, a grant of £11,000 – one technician’s wages – was abolished. In the age of cutbacks, resources in this field of medicine are severely limited. One transplant costs an estimated £80,000. Last year, 341 transplants were carried out in Britain, compared with 537 in France, where the government takes all responsibility for funding. There is a smaller NHS-funded donor scheme, which is tied to the National Blood Transfusion Service; unlike the Anthony Nolan Centre, its ‘search’ for tissue-types does not extend abroad.
Linda Hartwell, manager of the Anthony Nolan Centre’s operations department told me,
We are linked to registers in the United States, Australia, France and Germany; and this will soon be conducted by computer. Owing to the hundreds of thousands of combinations of tissue-types, we constantly need to add donors to our register. At present, we urgently need new donors. We are able to tissue-type 500 new donors every week. In spite of the publicity from time to time, many people are still unaware of the form of treatment. Some believe only the dead can donate. But that’s not so. You can live and give life to someone else. It’s wonderful.
Andy Burgess, an engineer from Redhill in Surrey, literally saved the life of Lloyd Scott, an Essex fireman. Bank manager Neil Singleton gave bone marrow tissue that matched with a patient in Denmark. Sarah Furber did the same for an American girl. The centre has a large file of such stories; in the haystack there are many needles that are found.
No more than a drop of blood can start the process of saving a life; a routine blood test is enough to indicate the bone marrow type of a potential donor. If a match is found, the donor undergoes a straightforward surgical procedure lasting about an hour and a half. There is no incision, no stitching: the marrow is taken from the hip bone using hollow needles. Apart from the temporary effects of a general anaesthetic, a healthy person should suffer no after-effects. I recommend it, for the sake of those like John, for whom a ‘match’ was not found in time.fn1
July 29, 1991
fn1 As a potential donor you need to be between 18 and 40 (unless you are already on the list). By writing to, or phoning, the Anthony Nolan Centre, you will receive an information pack. After you have completed the registration form and returned it, you will be sent a simple blood sample kit. You take this to your GP, give a sample and post it back. This is where you write or phone: The Anthony Nolan Research Centre, PO Box 1767, London NW3 4YR. Telephone: (071) 284 1234.