Poisoned Egnep

Penge is a ‘local version of Chernobyl’.

Not, I’m relieved to say, the area of south London which has been my home for about 12 years, but a description of a township in South Africa which has been scarred by decades of asbestos mining.

What began as a bit of fun, discovering that London's Penge has a namesake more than 8,100 miles away – with its own makeshift cable car across a river – became more tragic as it became clear generations of families have suffered from poisoning in the filthy trade.

I’ve tried to find out who named the place but have had no success yet. The area was mapped by a geologist called Hall (again, I'm still struggling to establish his first name) in 1907 and it was he who located the brown asbestos which became the area’s main industry.

Mining began in either 1910 or 1914 by two companies, one called Asbestos Mines of South Africa (AMOSA), from which the word Amosite – the trade name for brown asbestos – derives, and Egnep Limited – obviously Penge spelt backwards. It seems reasonable to assume whoever set up Egnep Ltd had strong links to our area.

By 1925, the companies were incorporated into the Cape Asbestos Company Limited where they proved to be hugely profitable over successive decades.

The chairman of Cape, an L Breitmeyer, visited in 1929 and was clearly stirred by what he saw. At the AGM in Holborn, according to The Times, he said:

£30,000 is the equivalent to about £1.8million in today's money.

In 1959, its annual report found that ‘the successful outcome of our exertions at Penge is clearly of great importance to the Group’.

Even in 1970, the Transvaal Consolidated Land company, to which Cape gradually sold off its asbestos mining interests, reported that its ‘main source of royalty income is the amosite asbestos deposit at Penge in the northern Transvaal, which is expected to provide a satisfactory income for many years’.

On September 30, 1981, The Times reported that South African mining company Gencor had offered to buy the asbestos interests of Transvaal Consolidated Land in a deal worth about £12million noting that TCL had earned about £1.5m from the Penge mines and another site.

The mine finally closed in 1992, 24 years after Cape’s notorious Barking factory in London sealed its doors due to the levels of asbestos disease suffered by its workers.

Regulations on working with asbestos began in Britain in 1931 but workers Penge, South Africa, did not see any benefits and were sometimes were exposed to ‘up to thirty times the legal limit’ of asbestos in Britain.

A site visit in 1949 by the Silicosis Medical Bureau reported that:

‘Exposures were crude and unchecked. I found young children... in large shipping bags, trampling down fluffy amosite asbestos which all day long came cascading down over their heads. They were kept stepping lively by a burly supervisor with a hefty whip’. 

Several of these children later developed asbestosis before the age of 12.

A 1999 story in The Guardian said that by 1960 South African surveys ‘showed a link between asbestos exposure and mesothelioma, but circulation was restricted, seemingly with the connivance of the industry.

In 2007, Laurie Kazan-Allen, who has spent decades campaigning for those affected by asbestos poisoning noted:

'Before it was closed in 1992, the world's largest amosite asbestos mine had operated for over 90 years in Penge. When the mine was shut, thousands of local people occupied the mine's buildings and 250 houses previously inhabited by former workers'.

And she went on to quote Steven Donohue, the acting head of the Department of Community Health:

'Gross asbestos contamination is clearly not confined to the mine dumps. Penge is an ongoing environmental health disaster and should be deemed permanently uninhabitable... Asbestos waste is widespread around the village and is still detectable in water from the Olifants River, which flows past the village.'

But people still live there. Other forms of mining continue nearby and I'm very grateful to live in our lovely, friendly, neighbourhood, as, in comparison, its problems pale into insignificance.