Well I don’t think theres any doubt that my lung cancer was caused through smoking. I was like many other people, I didn’t smoke as a young lad and I was called up into the services and we were given by the government then one hundred and fifty, we had fifty free issue cigarettes every week and we were given one hundred and fifty at a very cheap price when we were serving abroad. And of course boredom sets in with nothing much to do in the evenings and you just sit and smoke one after the other. That continued of course after I left the service, you get the habit, you carry on smoking.

It was the in thing in those days all through the fifties and sixties for people to smoke, and of course I was one of the people caught up in it. In 1967 I took a public house and of course the atmosphere in a public house didn’t help matters. I did in fact give up smoking in the, in the late seventies, completely myself, and although I gave up smoking because I had read so much about problems, it was obviously too late. And another thing was that my occupation at the time meant that I was taking, although I wasn’t smoking I was taking in other peoples smoke anyway.

But my particular cancer, mesothelioma, is not caused through smoking, it is caused through working with asbestos when I was a young man. I did an apprenticeship in engineering and also welding when I was 16 and I worked for the same company till I was 26 but for the first five years I was there, I was an apprentice, but the factory actually run on steam; everything, we used to make tyres so everything was run on steam.

And in those days, back in 63/64, everything was lagged in asbestos. The boilers that we had was lagged in asbestos, all the pipe-work was lagged in asbestos, even the roof was lagged in asbestos so you just couldn’t avoid it. Any pipe-work leaks we had we had to knock the asbestos off with a hammer, sawed a bit of bad pipe-work out and re-weld a new piece in. The worst, the worst exposure really was every two years, I worked there ten years so if you like five times I was exposed to, when we did insurance testing for the boilers. Because on the outside of the boiler it was, the lagging was six inches thick and it was, because we were young kids, apprentices and that, it was our job to strip all that off. And they’re very large steam boilers and wed spend a week nearly just hacking and pulling all this asbestos off, lagging off the boilers. And then once you get down to the boiler itself you’d be wire brushing the rivets and the seams, and all that, ready for pressuring it for insurance testing.

And I mean as kids we just, we played in it, wed be knee deep in it some days and wed be throwing it at each other and just messing about in general with it. Nobody realised at the time that it was, that it was going to be a problem later on in life. And of course with asbestos the incubation period is between thirty and forty years so you can be quite happy as I was for forty years nearly and then it just changes your life without any warning at all really.

Yeah me feelings on it, I said, talking about, I think cancer does have a stigma attached to it. I know in my own instance, with lung cancer, I think all lung cancer patients are stigmatised because of smoking. Attitudes from other people who are non-smokers as I was, mine was, I was told mine was through passive smoking.

When I went to the, to see an oncologist for further treatments because I’d had an operation and I’d had half of my left lung removed, I asked them what he thought what caused it and he just laughed and said ‘That’s obvious, through smoking. And me wife who was with me at the time, and weve been together since we were 14 and she just said ‘Well hes never smoked.

So right away what I was, annoyed me as well as that, on my, my medical records I’m classed as a smoker and every time I ever went for review after that they would ask me ‘Are you still smoking?’ because that’s down there. And no matter how I told them, I’d say ‘Look I don’t want that on there, I never smoked. but its only my word that can go against that, that says that.

I started smoking when I was 12 years old, back in the 60s, in fact back in the 50s, God am I that old, back in the 50s. It was just one of those things in those days, everybody did it. Like nowadays everybody doesn’t do it, which is a darn good thing. And I walk along here seeing the kids around here who are all smoking and I thought you bloody fools, if only you knew. But trying to talk to them is like talking to a brick wall, they just don’t want to know.

Did you smoke till quite recently?

I smoked up until let’s see now, I think smoked up until three years ago when I actually went, I actually stopped, I went on Nicotinell patches and actually stopped smoking for a year and a half. And then I started smoking, but I was only, I was smoking roll-ups, I wasn’t smoking normal cigarettes I was smoking roll-ups. But I must admit, and I shouldn’t do it, I still have the occasional one now, it’s only the occasional one though. I shouldn’t do it but after 40 odd years it’s a hard habit to break even though you’ve got all the tablets and all the wonderful things in the world to stop you from doing it.

But that’s what they reckoned caused it was smoking. But it couldve been anything basically. I used to work you know with asbestos but I know it’s not that because they wouldve picked that up on the bronchoscopy, they wouldve picked it up on that. I was in the Army so you know fumes, diesel, gasoline, the whole business, the whole schmuck all the way through, it couldve been anything there that done that, something just triggered it. But they reckoned I’d had it for about nine years, but this was, this was just the, this was the top end of it, this was it saying enough is enough do something about it or the body do something about it.

And as I said it was a shortage of breath that May trip. I’d come up those stairs and I thought what is wrong with me? I said “I’ve never been like this before.” Of course I thought I had this viral infection in the throat. Well I put it down to, I put it down a certain amount to smoking, it must be. Smoking, the environment as well, diesel fumes, it’s got to be something there.

Well it were upsetting. I’ve been in hospital quite a few times for different things, nothing as serious as that, and I have never been addressed in a way that I felt uncomfortable about something I’d done and he [the doctor] made me feel that I’d brought it all on myself. Since then being involved with, can I say Roy Castle Lung Foundation, and also my own support group and the Macmillan campaigners that basically lung cancer patients find themselves in the position where they feel that they’ve caused it all themselves. And where you know some cancers, people are very sympathetic towards, like ladies having breast cancer and it’s very highly backed by the normal public you know, when it comes to charities and donations and what have you, lung cancer is like the bridesmaid, never a bride, you know it’s like the poor relations of cancers. They don’t get funding like other cancers get and probably that’s because we feel that it’s our fault. But at the end of the day it’s not our fault it’s the tobacco manufacturers’ fault for putting the carcinogen in, sorry carcinogens in, in the first place.

We [in our support group] all agree that theres other things other than smoking that can cause lung cancer you know like environment, like where I live theres a motorway over the road. Just over the bridge there used to be a chemical factory, all my life you know when I were a child growing up round here, and it were pumping thick yellow smoke out 24 hours a day. And unfortunately in this area there is quite a lot of people do get lung cancer you know, it’s quite common. But you don’t find that out until you’ve actually got it yourself, because nobody wants to talk about it so you know.

So you think the environment is also [to blame]?

Oh certainly yeah and along with everything you put in your mouth like stuff they they’re putting on food to give it a longer shelf life, things that they’re doing to make them all the same size and the same shape, all the chemicals that you get from that you know from that source. So yeah I think theres a lot of other things, why it’s more rampant now than it’s ever been before you know.

Apart from cigarettes have you ever thought about other sort of causes of lung cancer, can you just talk about your thoughts around that?

Yes the surgeon did say to me that cigarette smoking certainly hadn’t helped but he was pretty sure it was cigarette smoking and AN other and he was equally sure that he wouldn’t be able to identify what that AN other was.

AN other?

Another, another area, another causal agent for the cancer. I suspect poor diet will have had some you know part to play. I’m not a great eater of fruit and vegetables and that is, they definitely minimise the likelihood of the development of lung cancer. And I was, and I’m a terrible dairy products man but that’s changing now.