Cape: the background

CAPE PLC (formerly “The Cape Asbestos Company Ltd”)

Cape mined and milled asbestos in South Africa for nearly a hundred years. The company operated under the apartheid regime and benefited from cheap labour, including women and young children who handled asbestos with their bare hands. The company was incorporated in Britain in 1893 to mine blue asbestos in the Northern Cape, South Africa and to manufacture asbestos products in Turin, Italy. In the early 1900s Cape opened British asbestos manufacturing factories. However whilst the main British factory, at Barking, closed down in 1968, following the high incidence of asbestos disease, Cape’s South African operations continued until 1979. Until 1948 Cape operated the mines in the Northern Cape directly. Thereafter they were ostensibly operated through wholly owned subsidiaries. In 1979 Cape sold its mining and milling operations and has had no connection with South Africa for over twenty years. There were British regulations controlling the use of asbestos from 1931. However long after the hazards of asbestos were known to it, Cape exploited lax standards of health and safety regulation in apartheid South Africa. Not only Cape workers but also those who lived in the communities, which were built around the Cape mines, were exposed to high levels of asbestos, sometimes thirty times the legal limit in Britain. One of Cape’s mills at Prieska (in the Northern Cape where blue asbestos was mined by Cape) was in the middle of the town, close to the church and school. In and around Prieska the incidence of asbestos-related disease (including many victims whose exposure was purely environmental) is very high, with whole families being affected by the tragedy. One doctor alone said he diagnosed 900 mesothelioma victims, including his own son. In 1962, a Dr Walter Smither, Cape’s Group Medical Officer, based at Barking, visited South Africa and reported: “at Prieska the conditions around and about the mill are not good. The crusher is out of doors – it was obvious that quite a cloud of dust was being produced and blown away by a fairly strong wind towards the town”. At Cape’s Penge mine (named after Penge in Kent) in the Northern Province, the conditions were also bad, with asbestos dust levels during the 1970s being many times higher than the UK limit. A government health inspector, Dr Gerritt Schepers observed: “exposures were crude and unchecked. I found young children completely included within large shipping bags, trampling down fluffy amosite asbestos, which all day long came cascading down over their heads. They were kept stepping down lively by a burly supervisor with a hefty whip. I believe these children to have had the ultimate of asbestos exposure. X-ray revealed several to have asbestosis with cor pulmonale before the age of 12”. When Cape withdrew from South Africa, in 1979, it left behind a legacy of death and disease. Thousands of people who lived and worked in the Cape mining communities are now suffering, or have died from fatal asbestos diseases, asbestosis and mesothelioma (cancer of the lung and stomach lining), which can take up to forty years to develop. The asbestos mined by Cape has caused a chain of injuries world-wide to: asbestos miners and millers asbestos transporters stevedores loading/unloading ships ship workers workers at factories, and people living in the vicinity of these operations. Whereas Cape’s British victims have been compensated, to the tune of £30 million, South African victims have not had a penny.