Tower and Town, September 2022 (view the full edition)Porton Down's Dark Past
It took almost 50 years for this clandestine operation to come to light. 1954 was the height of the Cold War and government scientists had been tasked with assessing southern Britain's vulnerability to a Russian biological or chemical attack. Nobody took much notice of the generator, but 30 miles away a ring of sampling machines had been set up between Salisbury and Marlborough to monitor the invisible cloud of particles as it drifted across the county. It was only later that the carcinogenic properties of cadmium were revealed, following claims that the particles had caused birth defects as far away as East Lulworth in Dorset. I came across this and many other examples of Porton Down's sinister activities during the 1950s and 1960s when I was researching my latest thriller, The Man on Hackpen Hill. My lead male character, Jim, is a talented young scientist at Porton Down but turns whistle-blower when he thinks he has discovered a series of unethical experiments. Porton Down today is the model of propriety, of course, its staff working tirelessly and bravely in the hours and weeks after the Novichok attack in Salisbury in March 2018. But it's fair to say that the establishment has a fairly chequered past. In 1953, a 20-year-old RAF engineer called Ronald Maddison died in agony after volunteering to take part in a trial. When they dripped a liquid onto his arm, he thought he was helping government research into the common cold - he had no idea it was sarin, a lethal nerve agent. Maddison is the only volunteer ever to have died at Porton Down, but the generator trundling through the lanes outside Frome was not the first time zinc cadmium sulphide had been dispersed across Wiltshire. In the preceding two months, Porton scientists had released the chemical from an RAF base near Yatesbury, and then again at RAF Hullavington, from where it had drifted eastwards and was detected by a line of sampling machines near Hungerford. Who knows what sort of attacks Porton Down is simulating today, given the tensions between Russia and the West, but best keep those car windows up if you ever find yourself driving behind a generator. JS Monroe |
One afternoon in the summer of 1954, a curious-looking generator was towed for an hour through the leafy back lanes outside Frome in Somerset. Unbeknown to the public, the generator belonged to Porton Down, the government's secretive laboratory outside Salisbury, and was spewing out fluorescent particles of a nasty "marker" chemical called zinc cadmium sulphide.