Mother and Child

I was not at the dentist’s when I saw that picture of the boy. I have a book of pictures by a professional photographer, Alex Masi, who spent time in Bhopal photographing families affected by the toxic legacy left to their city, in particular by the contaminated water. The book is called Bhopal: the Second Disaster and the boy, whose sad face sparked the writing of this story, appears on the cover. You can see the photograph on my website: www.anniemurray.co.uk.

A number of times over the years while I have been writing about Birmingham’s history, I have come across a story that goes something like this: ‘My father worked at so-and-so. He was a—[insert skilled or semi-skilled manufacturing job]. But then something happened.’ An accident causing burns from molten ferrous or non-ferrous metals, an item of clothing or hair being caught in machinery, a fall from a great height while maintaining equipment . . . If things were really bad, the man’s working life was over. ‘He lived with constant pain. He was no longer the man he’d been before. He could no longer work to feed his family.’

Sometimes this became so unbearable, or the damage was so great, that the father of the family had seen no other way out than to end it all.

Not to mention the countless stories of working with substances either in factories or in the house, having taken ‘outwork’ to do at home, that affected eyes, made you cough or perhaps had longer-term effects not obvious at the time.

I based the story of Tom Stefani on a reported incident that took place almost thirty years later than it happens to Tom in the story. In 1988, a man called Tara Singh was tending to a machine in a metal-rolling mill in the Black Country when a red-hot steel billet broke loose. Tara Singh died there and then in the factory. This ‘accident’ was written up in a report published in 1994 by the West Midlands Health and Safety Advice Centre. The report is titled The Perfect Crime? How companies get away with manslaughter in the workplace.

Though the last major Health and Safety at Work Act was passed in 1974, this by no means changed everything overnight. Of course, there had been a number of Factory Acts before that as trades unions drove the campaign to safeguard industrial and other workers. And over time, since the 1974 Act, there has been an estimated 85 per cent reduction in workplace deaths (though that figure does not include public services such as the police). Those figures speak for themselves.

But industry is, and has always been, a dangerous business, as Tara Singh’s story shows. In that particular case, there had been clear, previous near misses and apparently unheeded warnings that something was wrong in that factory. There was also, by 1988, an expectation enshrined in the law of 1974, that employers must ensure, so far as possible, the safety of everyone in their employ.

There are human errors, unseen flaws, mistakes. And then there is just plain negligence.

What does it mean for something to be an ‘accident’? I looked up some definitions.

Accident: An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.

Oxford Living Dictionary

An accident waiting to happen: A very dangerous situation in which an accident is very likely.

Cambridge Dictionary

Negligence: Failure to give enough care or attention to something or someone that you are responsible for.

Cambridge Dictionary

Manslaughter (UK), Culpable homicide (US): The crime of killing a human being without malice aforethought, or in circumstances not amounting to murder.

Oxford Living Dictionary

In Britain, in 2007, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act was passed – a landmark Act. For the first time, companies and organizations can now be found guilty of corporate manslaughter as a result of management failures resulting in a gross breach of a duty of care.

It is not too hard to find a definition from this list. What is so difficult to understand about Bhopal is not that ‘accidents happen’. They do at times, even with the best of safeguards. What is harder to get your head around is the lack of safeguards right from the beginning and especially in the time immediately preceding the leak of gas, when the skilled engineers who had once taken more pride in the plant had all left and only a reduced and less skilled workforce remained.

This appears to us like complete contempt for other human beings when the only bottom line is shareholder profit and, as a consequence of this, like the behaviour of a company that would apparently do anything at all to protect itself, with dire consequences for some of the poorest on the planet.

In writing this story I wanted above all to portray the empathy between women and children everywhere, even if we do not share the same land or language. For all the elements of the story, there seemed no better title to choose than the simple one, Mother and Child.

It was only later that I found out about the Mother and Child statue, which stands at the gates of the old Union Carbide factory. In 1986, a Dutch sculptor called Ruth Waterman-Kupferschmidt created a statue of a woman with her children trying to escape the gas, as a memorial to the night of 2–3 December 1984 in Bhopal.

Ruth Waterman clearly identified with the women and children of Bhopal who had suffered this horrific experience. Ruth’s own parents were gassed at Auschwitz, a system of murder that had nothing accidental about it whatsoever, but which gave her a strong feeling of connection to what happened in Bhopal.

In early 2018, I went to Bhopal with my husband, Martin, in order to get a real feel for a place I have been reading about for many years. Some of what we experienced appears in the story. We met some unforgettable people, including Rashida Bi and Champa Devi Shukla, who won the International Goldman Environmental Prize in 2004 and devoted all the prize money to setting up Chingari, the clinic for women and children. A few of their stories and more photographs can be found on my website.

The Boy