Well he [my son] said that the health and safety procedures were almost nil, and he was being bullied by his general manager into taking huge safety risks, and on the 11^th April 2005, which was in fact my birthday, the last birthday I’ve celebrated, he phoned to say that he had got another job, and he would be handing in his notice. And I never spoke to him again. That was the last time I spoke to him.

 

And on the 12^th April the general manager in that company took a load of 4000 aerosols, gas filled aerosols for processing for scrap, and he loaded them into a baling machine and he told Mark to bale them up. The aerosols were filled with butane gas as I said, Mark was alone in the building, there was a huge explosion, fireball which blew part of the roof off the building, and the windows out, and Mark was set alight. The fire exit was locked from the inside, Mark was screaming for help, there was no fire hose, there was no fire blanket, the staff had never had fire drill, they didn’t know where the extinguishers were, when they found, the extinguishers, they were empty. So he was basically left to burn to death.

When the fire, when the ambulance arrived, Mark was still alive, he actually walked into the ambulance. The first we knew was a phone call from my daughter in law, and she said, “You have to come now, there’s been an explosion, and Mark’s in hospital, and there’s no hope.” So my husband and I just threw a case, threw a case in the car and it took us five hours to get down there, and we arrived at the hospital, oh about midnight, and they took us upstairs to the intensive care and a young doctor, a very nice, that was the last act of kindness I think, that was shown to us, the doctor explained to us what had happened, and said they had thought of taking Mark, moving Mark to a burns unit, but he said he chances of survival are nil, so we thought we would make him comfortable and keep him here till you came. So we went in to the room and he was just burned beyond recognition.

Just a charred body. And we were allowed to see him, excuse me, we were allowed to say goodbye, and while we were sitting there saying goodbye there was a clattering of dishes from the sink, from the kitchen next door, somebody very noisily washing dishes, at midnight, and because it, it, you know it sort of got through to my brain because I thought how come somebody be washing dishes, when some, my son is dying.

 

And when we came out of the room they switched the life support system off, we came out of the room and this woman met us in the corridor and said, “Well I can go home now folks, would anybody like a lift?”, with a dish towel in her hand. And I learned later that that was the Family Liaison Officer. That was my first introduction to the Family Liaison Officer. Not one sorry, no regrets, just “I can go home now” he’s dead. That was the, that was the impression.

 

Ah, well she’d been making coffee and whatever, and you know she’d been waiting there for us coming, and the family were there, my son’s best friend was there, he was the best man at their the wedding. He was there with his wife, and they were supporting my daughter in law. 

 

I think, I mean in that time I would say there’s probably not a day gone by when I haven’t thought of Mark.

 

So, the anger I suppose is under control, lets put it that way, it’s there, but I control it, it’s under control. I think as time’s gone on and I’ve met more people and you know the justice system and the politicians, I think my, my disillusioned by the system has grown. I have no faith, no faith in the system here at all, and I suppose at sometimes I have no faith in my fellow man really, but occasionally you meet someone, there are, there are people out there who are giving their all, you know trying to support someone, or trying to campaign, or trying to battle or whatever.

So in some ways I don’t know, I think possibly my disillusion has deepened, my anger, I wouldn’t say it’s lessened, it’s there, it’s in there, I just keep it bottled up, I keep it under control. Some days I feel life’s not worth living, other days you know I think I’ve got to go on and do something, so its, I take each day at a time really.

I feel I’m talking a foreign language to people now, I don’t have, I can’t relate to people now, you know, people who haven’t been through this, because I get very impatient, you know when people are talking of the golf club, and the cruise and the whatever, and the price of this, or the price of electricity, I get very impatient because I think all these things are going on every day, and this is all you’re worried about, you know I’m so, I don’t have an awful lot of sympathy you know.

 

And they don’t want to know what’s happening in my life either, people back off, you know I’ve lost quite a few friends…

 

Yes. Yes. I’ve lost one in particular that I hadn’t spoken to her since the day I phoned her to say what had happened to Mark, she’s never been in contact, which hurts.

 

I think people, it’s kind of, I think they think it’s some kind of infection, I think its, I don’t know, I think it’s probably they, they don’t know how to cope. Or whether you know you’ve, you’ve become a different person, which you do, you know you start off being a kind of confident, everything’s right with the world and whatever, and you cross over into another parallel universe where everybody has been denied justice, you know, people are losing children for all reasons, everybody is, you know, all these people that are being killed at work, I mean, it gets to a point where you know that people are being killed every day, it’s like you wake up in the morning and think some family is going to start doing what we’re doing today, so its, the true world’s kind of separate really, you know, this world where everybody’s sort of carrying on and talking about buying a new car and all the rest of it, and this world where you know you’re campaigning for people’s basic rights to life and to justice.

We’ve actually been, well again the media not really, on the whole the media are not interested in deaths at work. It’s if you, we have actually tried to get publicity for workers memorial day, and deaths at work and how it’s happening every day and they’re not, we have been told a few times that it doesn’t sell papers, but having said that we actually have, I have some contacts who have actually been very good, some journalists who do feel quite strongly about it who have actually printed some articles, not so much the detail obviously of how Mark died etc, more you know into the campaign, you know our campaign to try and get the law changed so that directors are held accountable when people are killed at work, you know, in order to try and stop it, so that they’re, you know, I’ve had a few articles printed like that.

 

But, we haven’t had any, I mean perfectly honest you know, we’ve probably had less publicity than we would have wanted because you know the more publicity there is, we feel that it brings it to public attention. I think, I think the press is more interested in, I don’t know sleazy murder cases and things like that, you know that might titillate readers rather than the actual issues you know. 

But the Family Liaison Officer, I think, I can’t remember whether it was because we didn’t sleep I mean, you know you don’t know days or whatever, but she called shortly after, and the family were all there. Friends and family of my daughter in law’s were all sitting, as people do, they collect in houses, sit and drink tea, nobody does anything, they just sit and drink tea, and the Family Liaison Officer called and started to tell us in great detail, she said that Marks’ death had been recorded in CCTV, and they had all been watching it back at the station, and that it was quite horrific, his death was quite horrific, and she started to tell us details then, of just what happened, in front of everybody.

 

And my grandson was there. And my daughter had flown over from Italy and she took my grandson out and she said, “You shouldn’t have to hear this. He shouldn’t be listening to this.” And she [the officer] actually enjoyed it, it was like she was describing a good film she’d been to, an exciting film she’d been to, and she seemed to quite actually enjoy the gory details of the whole thing.

 

 

And to cut a long story short the woman was just absolutely horrendous, she added to our agony so much, so we eventually phoned the police and said, “Don’t send that woman back to this house, because she’s not doing us any favours whatsoever.” And with that the police more or less withdrew and didn’t, we didn’t get another Family Liaison Officer and we got no more, no more help from the police at all.

 

 

Yes, yes.

 

 

Well that came much later, I made an official complaint to the Chief Constable of that particular force. And that came much later, that was a lot later. Because you don’t know what, nobody comes forward to help. Nobody says. “This is what you do, this is what happens, this is what should happen.” No, this is a new experience, you don’t know, you really don’t know what you, what should be happening.

When, when my son was killed back in April 2005 the employer purely sent his pay slip and his P45 and he was killed, he died on the 13^th April, so they paid him from the 1^st to the 13^th April. They didn’t even pay the month. So my daughter-in-law was left with two children and no money because she didn’t, she didn’t work. She was left with two children, and no money coming in at all. Just that, just that 13 days pay.

 

So having worked in the civil service and having a sort of idea of you know what was involved, unfortunately I was the one that had to go round with my son’s temporary death certificate, not realising how difficult it was, if, if I hadn’t had the background that I had, and the contacts that I, I was able to have I don’t think my daughter in law would have got the benefit, so I don’t know how people manage now with the… they have made it so difficult, so difficult for people. I mean years ago widow’s benefits were paid out as I said within six working days, we prided ourselves we could get money out to a widow and there was a lump sum paid to tide her over, a widow’s allowance for so many weeks, and then the widowed mother’s allowance if she had children. Now it’s a basic for the well it’s parents, it’s widowed parents, it’s men and women who get it now, but there’s no sort of lump sum, there’s no allowance, they just get a payment for themselves. To get paid for the children you then have to go to the Inland Revenue and make a claim for family tax credit, separately for the children.

 

So you have to go round all these different offices with this death certificate, trying to do it on the phone, oh it just, it was just, that was just a total nightmare, an absolute nightmare. I was able to call on the help of people that I knew in the department and at one point my-daughter- in- law was being under paid, and I knew she was being underpaid, again from my past experience, so I phoned up and spoke to the Customer Complaints Manager, in a particular department, and she told me I was wrong, and I said, “No, I think you’ll find I’m right,” I said, “If you go to a certain court,” I said, “You will find that in there, and I think you will find I am right, and that you are under paying her.” And the next day she phoned back and she said, “I’m really sorry about that, you are right, I didn’t know that.” Now if I hadn’t had that experience.

 

No. No. No, it depends on your National Insurance Contributions.

 

That the person who’s died has paid.

 

No it depends on the National Insurance Contributions that the, that the, the person who’s died has paid into the system. How much, how much they get. I mean if I hadn’t, if I hadn’t had that past work experience, I knew that these things were, you know, that what, what was being paid, and what was being said was wrong, then no-one would have connected it.

 

My daughter in law’s solicitor is dealing with that, he has been dealing with it since 2005. That again, the employer has been really dragging his feet again, you know, every step of the way they have been coming up with arguments and whatever, so she has not received any compensation as yet, which is almost four years. 

Our solicitor applied to the Coroner for the release of the body, for Mark’s body, in order that we could bury him, and the Coroner refused, with the result that we waited eight weeks to get Mark’s body back. I can’t describe how, what that’s like.

 

 

Or to have to wait eight weeks.

 

 

No, they had done a post mortem. He was waiting on; he said he was waiting on the county prosecutor’s decision as to whether there would be any criminal charges, manslaughter charges. Our solicitor actually wrote to him and sent him a home office memo, that said that a second post mortem should be arranged by the Coroner to allow the body to be released to the family for burial. But he said that that only applied to homicide victims, they were the only ones that were warranted early release.

 

Well, he said he was waiting on the crown prosecutor telling him whether there was going to be any, it turned out I mean again this coroner turned out to be, well I don’t know whether we were unlucky, I mean I’ve heard others stories from other people who’ve gone through very similar experiences, he just flatly refused to listen to our solicitor. She sent him this home office memo, saying that, which said he should arrange a second post mortem to allow the body to be released, and he said, as I say, that that only, that only homicide victims warranted early release. Now the definition of homicide in the dictionary is the killing of a human being, so I don’t know what the difference was between manslaughter enquiries with an employer and homicide. I don’t know what the difference is, and to me it’s the same thing. But to him it was different.

 

The funeral was, Mark was very, very proud of his Scottish heritage really, I mean he was, it was a bit of a joke in his house because my daughter in law is English, my grandson was born in Wales, so, you know they always kind of say it’s a you know, a multi cultural family, so it was always a bit of a joke, but he was very proud of being Scottish, so we had a piper playing at the funeral and as I say, they were so many people there, but nobody, nobody from the employer, not even you know the men that he considered friends, attended the funeral.

 

It was a humanist funeral, simply because Mark wasn’t religious, and I, I probably I suppose at that point I was probably, I don’t know, indifferent, I was probably agnostic I suppose. But since then and you know the way that people have behaved since then, I would say I’m probably atheist now, you know I don’t really, I just think if there was a God out there, you know, people wouldn’t behave like that, you know it would just so but so it was a humanist funeral.

 

Again, I went through the telephone directory and phoned up the Samaritans, I phoned up them because I, you know I have friends who are still Samaritans, so I phoned, I phoned them and you know someone phoned someone else, and they came back with this ladies name, and she was wonderful. She was, it was, it was a beautiful ceremony. I didn’t speak, at that time I, I couldn’t have, I couldn’t have spoken, I couldn’t have said anything. Mark’s friend said something, but she talked about Mark’s life and whatever, we didn’t, there were no hymns sung, it was music, it was Mark’s favourite pieces of music that were played.

 

I have.

 

Never, ever. Yes I have never spoken to, I mean the Coroner that we had, the original Coroner that we had, the one who wouldn’t release the body, our solicitor asked him for disclosure of the evidence so that we could prepare for the inquest, and after initially refusing he eventually agreed but he said he would only release it if we paid him £566. The solicitor phoned and said, “You know what do you think?” And I said, “I’ll pay anything, anything, I don’t care, it’s only money. And I just don’t care.” So we paid him, my daughter in law obviously couldn’t pay, so we paid the £566 for the disclosure of evidence.

 

 

Photocopying. He also charged us, there were two other solicitors involved, there was two companies involved, my son’s employer and another company, who were all breaking the law, he also charged them £566 to supply the same photocopies. I was speaking down in London at a conference, a CCA [Centre for Corporate Accountability] conference, and I happened to say this in part of my speech. I said this, and a Coroner that was in the audience came forward and said, “You should never have been charged for that.”

 

 

So I contacted my MP at that point, who wrote to the Minister of Justice, and the Ministry of Justice wrote to the Coroner saying that there was no basis in law for charging for disclosure of evidence and that he should refund us the money.

 

And he refused.

 

 

The Coroner refused. So we then, our solicitor then said that we would raise an action in the small claims court, in my name, to get this money back, which we did. We wrote to the Coroner saying that I was going to take him to the small claims court in his area, to get this money back and at that point he repaid the money and withdrew from our case.

 

 

He’s he repaid the money, but only, only after threatening him with…

 

 

It was paid to him, directly, no the money was paid to him directly, it was his money. And it was, when it was repaid it was repaid from his private bank, from his own bank account.

 

 

And he withdrew from the case. I then wrote to the Office of Judicial Complaints who deal with complaints against Coroners and that was where all the information, the information from my solicitor and all the investigation I had done on the internet, printed off what Coroners should do, how they should behave etc, etc. I sent everything off to them, and they were going to take the complaint up, they had agreed that they would take this complaint forward, and then we discovered that the Coroner was terminally ill.

 

 

Well over a period of yes, yes. I withdrew the complaint on the basis that you know I would show his family you know all the compassion that he never showed to mine.

My family had to look at still photographs and CCTV footage of my son's last moments including the explosion, we had to listen to witnesses, ex-colleagues who we knew were lying and experts who said the man who killed my son so heartlessly must have known of the dangers involved. The Coroner was excellent, thorough, sensitive and extremely intelligent. We had to listen to the man who killed my son shout, rant and bully, even shouting after my family as we had to leave court too upset to listen further.

 

The coroner took the extremely unusual step of offering the jury the option of an unlawful killing, manslaughter verdict and explained his reasons. The jury took only 3 hours to come back with a very weak narrative verdict only for the most paltry of reasons.

 

How do I feel now? I am totally devastated. I have lost my son all over again. I have lost my faith in my fellow citizens who apply double hypocritical standards. Had this man been a driver in which a relative of one of the jury was a passenger, supplied no safety belts, had no driving licence, had been drinking, ignored all road warning signs, drove at 100mph resulting in crashing his car killing their relative, I'm sure the members of that jury would have rightly expected him to be charged and face a prison sentence. But when an employer does the equivalent they say he should walk away without any charge because he put his own life at risk. If I could give up my British passport I would.

 

I feel ashamed of my country, extremely angry and totally bereft. The terrible thing is that this is how all the families of those killed at work are treated in this country.

 

I know this will not help anyone who is facing this terrible experience but I can only say how I feel, there is no point in giving hope where there is none. Shall I continue to fight for justice for others through Families Against Corporate Killers? At the moment I am absolutely exhausted but I suspect I will. It took many years of struggle to abolish slavery, this is the modern equivalent.

I was consumed with rage. In fact so much so that I think possibly at that time I could happily and quite easily have gone out and killed the man who killed my son. It became a kind of overwhelming feeling, and my husband actually was quite worried because he thought I would do it, so I went to a counsellor, a private counsellor, I went to a counsellor then, and she was excellent.

 

Yes, yes,

 

She probably did yes, she probably did, but to tell you the truth I can’t really remember, because you know, you’re brain tends to sort of just shut down, I just knew I needed, I needed to talk to somebody out with the family, you know that I could say all the things that I wanted to say, at that time, because the rage was just taking over.

 

She was listening, yes. She was mainly listening. And she made me kick things, and punch things and you know get it out that way. And eventually I kind of got to the point where I thought well what’s the point of killing him, it would possibly give me some satisfaction, some momentary satisfaction, but it would just bring more grief on the family so..

 

Yes, yes. Uhuh. No, there was no help from the, no help from the NHS at all, and don’t get me wrong, my doctor here  but we were living down, we were living down south, the south of England, but my doctor here is, I mean he’s a very nice, in fact he gave me some diazepam at the beginning, but he said, “I don’t want you to get into the habit of that.” So I had a couple of diazepam, just for the first two or three weeks.

 

I did, I went to the doctor, he sent me to, oh I can’t remember, to a clinic, I saw a psychiatrist, one visit and I explained it all to him, and he said, “You know,” he said, “Really,” he couldn’t help because  he said, “You’re not suffering any kind of mental illness,” he said, “You’re not suffering from a depression” he said, “You’re, you’re suffering from grief”, and he said, “And I can’t really, I can’t really help.” So that was, that was really. I had no counselling with the NHS, again you know, I don’t know because I know other people have had NHS counselling you know where they’ve lost someone you know through cancer or through whatever, so it’s very different, the whole experience of losing someone where it’s a death at work, is totally different.

 

I think I probably had about 10 sessions with her.

 

It was, uhuh. I also went to a hypnotherapist  telling a lie, the hypnotherapist came here, to the house, that was expensive also, it was £60 a session. But that was wonderful, you know. But it was mainly, again it was specific, I was having flashbacks, I couldn’t, you know, when I slept I just saw Mark being consumed by flames, so I couldn’t sleep I would sit up at night drinking coffee or whatever, so that was specifically counselling, it was hypnotherapy and we concentrated on relaxation techniques, and being able to try and get these flashbacks out of my mind, and it was quite successful, and she, you know, she sort of showed me how to relax, partly so that was, that was again it was just specifically for that, for that purpose.

 

Yes. Yes.

 

No, it was, it was mainly the kind of, putting me in a place where I felt comfortable and relaxed and able to feel, not quite happy but peaceful, basically.

 

Again I probably had about 10.

 

It did, it helped with the sleep, and the flashbacks, but then obviously you know the flashbacks have tended to come back, while we were going through the evidence for the, preparing for the inquest, you know, reading it all, I began to get these flashbacks back again during the night.

 

Anyway that’s difficult.  

Compassionate Friends, that was when, that was a few months, that was probably about the end of the year December 2005. I was desperately looking on the internet to see if there was anything, and I came across the website, Compassionate Friends, and that was, that was an amazing help to me because at that point there was a sort of a chat, a chat room as well, and there was always somebody on there because, you know there was members that lived in Australia and Spain and whatever, so even at one o’clock in the morning, there was somebody on you know, and we could, that you could talk to and sort of see how you were feeling at that time. So the Compassionate Friends has been an amazing help to me, I mean I’m still, I still have contact with, I haven’t been, I haven’t been able to go to any of the groups ‘cos there are no groups near at hand here, I’ve been to one, the Scottish gathering. I would like to go this year, but we’ll probably be out of the country then, ah but its, you know it’s an amazing organisation, and its, I think the fact that you can just speak and say how you really are, how you really feel, rather than putting the mask on, I find now your all the time, you’re putting a mask on. 

Yes, I would say don’t think that the police or the health and safety or the Crown Prosecution or whatever, that any of these official departments will be on your side, or will act for you, in your best interest. I think you need to get the strength of your own people around you, a good solicitor, and if it’s an industrial incident, the Centre for Corporate Accountability, and like myself, the Compassionate Friends, where you know, if it’s a son or daughter, are wonderful. And you just have to fight, you have to battle and fight to get justice. It will not come easily.