Widower claims oven gloves caused wife’s untimely death

A tired horde of black faced miners pours out of the pithead at Bentley Colliery near Doncaster in the late 1960s.

Maureen Woodward died of mesothilioma in 2011 aged just 66 - over three decades after she worked as a cook at Bentley Colliery, near Doncaster.

Now her husband, John, 75, of Dunscroft, has launched a claim against the Department of Energy and Climate Change, which took over the National Coal Board’s liabilities.

His lawyers claim Mrs Woodward was exposed to hazardous asbestos dust while working in the colliery canteen in the 1970s, with the mittens leading to the “escape of levels of asbestos dust and fibres which were foreseeably harmful.”

On top of that, she breathed in potentially lethal dust while “sweeping and cleaning” in the canteen, her husband’s barrister, Stephen Glynn, claimed.

And the onetime professional singer was also exposed after fitters, who had been “dry stripping” asbestos from pipes and boilers, used the canteen in dusty overalls.

However, the Department is denying liability, and Government QC, Andrew Hogarth, said the evidence supporting exposure at the colliery was “very sparse and patchy”.

Although a “single asbestos fibre” had been discovered in a tissue sample from Mrs Woodward this proved nothing, he added.

Asbestos was present in much of the environment during her lifetime, and even if she had been exposed it could have happened in many different places. The hearing is set to last three days.