Roger Ratcliffe: Our battle to banish the poison in petrol that wrecked children’s lives

After all lead is a heavy, dullish-grey metal best known for making roofs watertight and for once being the basic material of domestic pipes. It is the stuff of gun pellets and bullets, too, as well as a shield against radiation and component of car batteries. However, for decades the metal was also used to boost the performance of car engines.

As it happens, back in the 19th century Yorkshire was synonymous with the lead industry. It is said that ore extracted from beneath the wilds of Grassington Moor was smelted down to keep rain out of the Vatican, while lead mined in Swaledale ended up on the roofs of Europe’s great cathedrals.

By the 1970s, Yorkshire was again linked with lead. The Yorkshire Post – which has long been a radical voice in the provinces – was at the forefront of the crusade to force the oil and car industries to stop relying on the use of lead, a campaign which resulted in that word “unleaded” appearing at petrol pumps.

How did lead get into petrol? In the early days of motoring a US engineer, Thomas Midgley, discovered that if oil companies added minute quantities of an organic compound form of the metal called tetraethyl lead, then motorists got more miles to the gallon. At the same time it managed to solve a famous engine problem called “knocking”. This greater fuel efficiency, plus the discovery that cars suffered less engine wear and so lasted longer, resulted in lead being hailed as the archetypal miracle ingredient.

It was such a highly complex subject that few people thought through the possible consequences of this technological marvel. And those consequences, as things turned out, were quite terrifying.

Lead is one of the most toxic poisons on earth. It attacks the brain, and just one drop of tetraethyl lead on the skin would be enough to drive you totally insane. It seems inconceivable that we once added this poison to petrol knowing that it would be pumped through car exhausts into our streets and roads and breathed in, or ingested through food, by millions of people. But by 1977, when the Yorkshire Post first took up the issue, very few people were raising concerns, largely because the oil industry – with the support of the then-Labour government and a handful of academics – reassured the nation that lead pollution levels were too low to have any effect on our health.

The newspaper campaign kicked off with three long articles outlining the then-unpublished findings of a research project in the United States. New York psychiatrist Dr Oliver David had just finished a five-year study in Brooklyn which revealed that children were being harmed by low level lead pollution, even though they exhibited none of the classic signs of lead poisoning.

Dr David found that children who were diagnosed as being hyperactive – they had low concentration, were fidgety, slow to learn and experienced bouts of aggression – had higher levels of lead in their bodies than children from similar backgrounds who were not diagnosed as hyperactive.

The Yorkshire Post articles were quoted at length in a parliamentary debate, but the Environment Minister of the day, Denis Howell, turned out to be a staunch defender of the oil companies.

As months passed, more and more articles were published by the newspaper. Howell’s argument that the amount of lead being absorbed from the air in Britain’s streets was too low to be a risk was demolished when we revealed details of a secret report showing that up to three times more lead was being breathed in than acknowledged by official statistics.

Howell tied himself up in knots trying to dismiss this leaked report. He stuck to his rigid defence of leaded petrol, despite being accosted by half a dozen MPs quoting the Yorkshire Post articles during another lengthy Commons debate.

It soon became clear that Howell wasn’t the only immovable mind. A study in Boston, Massachusetts, by psychiatrist and paediatrician Dr Herbert Needleman, showed that urban children demonstrated reduced IQ levels as a result of low-level lead intake, but was immediately rubbished by a group of doctors acting for the Department of Health, even though they hadn’t read Needleman’s full findings.

When the Government finally bowed to pressure and set up a lead pollution committee it seemed this was also an attempt to kill off the campaign. Several of its members had staked their reputations on saying that low level lead pollution was not a problem.

It was only when two members finally broke ranks to acknowledge that the IQ of children was in peril, and that the work of Dr David and Dr Needleman was actually hard to refute, that the Government decided to phase in unleaded petrol. But over the years when the argument for removing lead from petrol was resisted, who knows how many British children had their intellects stunted by this most pernicious of poisons?