Armley asbestos disaster
On 20 July 1982, Yorkshire Television broadcast the documentary "Alice - A Fight For Life", predominantly the story of Alice Jefferson, who had worked at the Acre Mill asbestos factory in Hebden Bridge for just nine months when she was 17 years old. Thirty years later she was diagnosed with mesothelioma and given only six months to live. The documentary was also an "exposé on the workings of the asbestos industry." Its broadcast resulted in £60 million being knocked off T&N's share price overnight, headlines in the national newspapers, and the setting up of a government enquiry. Within ten days the government had halved the legal limit for asbestos dust in the workplace. In 1988 Yorkshire Television picked up the "Yorkshire Evening Post" story and produced a second critical investigation focusing on the pattern of deaths in Armley, and contradicting the government's reasons for refusing an inquiry. Called "Too Close to Home", it was broadcast as part of the "First Tuesday" documentary series on 6 December 1988.
Armley asbestos disaster
The bank's Vice President Michael O'Connor, himself a senior lawyer, recognised the value of the documents, which dated back as far as the 1920s, and, as no protective order had been placed on them which would have prevented their disclosure to third parties, "began sending large bundles of key T&N documents to the media, lawyers, doctors, victims' support groups and historians." As well as forming the basis for two BBC documentaries, "Deadly Legacy" (broadcast 14 April 1993) and "An Acceptable Level of Death" (14 April 1994) and two BBC Radio 4 programmes, "The Shocking Story of Asbestos" (6 October 1993) and "Asbestos and the Third World" (13 October 1993), the documents provided crucial information to lawyers in the U.K. who had previously been told that such information was no longer kept, and also revealed how early the company had known about the real risks of asbestos. Other documents included a 1964 T&N memorandum describing the growing public awareness that asbestos caused cancer as a "sinister development" and a document about new safety regulations which said: "If, however, we demonstrate by a token effort only an ostensible intention to comply with the regulations, it is conceivable that we can ward off the evil day when asbestos cannot be economically applied."