The Poisoned Isle Transcript (Scotland: A Scottish History Podcast)
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Scotland - A Scottish History Podcast
Episode 57 - The Poisoned Isle
NARR
It is 1982. The waves crash softly over the pebbles just metres away as you take a long drag from a cigarette and enjoy the gentle sea breeze, looking back onto the mainland as the little boat which brought you here is pushed aground just a few feet away.
This is the perfect holiday, the perfect afternoon on this perfect little island with no-one around for miles. Not even a sheep. It’s the most at peace you’ve felt for a long time, thousands of miles from home in a country where you barely speak the language, but who cares?
Everyone has been so welcoming. You even take a moment to wave to the passing boat as you shade yourself from the sun under the sign, the only real indication that humanity has ever been here.
It’s a shame you can’t read it, maybe the people in uniform on that boat - getting ever closer now - could tell you more about it.
FV:
'GRUINARD ISLAND - THIS ISLAND IS GOVERNMENT PROPERTY UNDER EXPERIMENT. THE GROUND IS CONTAMINATED WITH ANTHRAX AND DANGEROUS. LANDING IS PROHIBITED BY ORDER, 1981'
NARR
This is Scotland. A podcast about history and where we made it. I’m Michael Park.
It is 1981. Blackpool has long been home to the conference of the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain. It has alternated years with Bournemouth as the party of power comes to the seaside to convince the people of the nation that they can eat a 99 like the rest of them.
Margaret Thatcher has been in power for two years and if you thought it was in public ownership then boy howdy was Thatcher trying to privatise it.
Thatcher’s poll ratings are at rock bottom and the Tories are desperately trying to stop a split from within their own party as a group of MPs move for open revolt on economic issues.
The conference was taking place amidst an environment of riots and protests against government policy which was seen as being designed to destroy the working class’ ability to provide for their families.
And all the while, there is a little container sitting in a back room of the Winter Gardens where the conference is taking place. Just a tiny little container, no bigger than a jam jar really.
A little box... the size of a jam jar that could kill every single sitting Conservative MP in the building. All they have to do is open it by accident.
But luckily for them no-one does.
And luckily for them it looks suspiciously like another package which was found at a government facility in Porton Down in Wiltshire.
Even more luckily for them, many newspapers had begun reporting, deep in their pages, about something called Operation Dark Harvest. A group who were threatening to send dirt to government facilities all across the UK.
While many people shrugged, the authorities sat up and took notice. This wasn’t just any dirt. The Dark Harvest Commando - as they liked to be known - claimed to have harvested the dirt - 300lbs of it to be precise - from an island that just a year later, two tourists would be picked up from by the police and subjected to rigorous health checks before being released.
They had taken dirt from Gruinard. From Anthrax Island.
It is 1943. There is a small bang. Really no more than a pop to the ears of the people in primitive protective equipment nearby. A US Navy Lieutenant is filming the whole thing in glorious colour ready for a voiceover to be recorded at Porton Down at a later date.
FV: John Morton “X” Base Anthrax Trials, 1942-1943
NARR
Unfortunately the recording has degraded significantly. The bit you can’t hear is about the cloth hood being worn by the personnel to keep their hair clean.
The tube that has just exploded isn’t much thicker than a household drainpipe, but as the smoke dissipates a thick, soupy, brown cloud hangs in the air and begins to drift slowly, oh so slowly, across the heather.
It’s anthrax, everyone on the island knows how dangerous the little spores are. Well, everyone except the 80 sheep that they bought from a local farmer to inhabit the island that they bought for £500.
The sheep, held in their individual little pens, largely unable to move, begin to exhibit signs of high temperatures… shivering… twitching.
They develop a harsh cough, begin to bleed from the nose and… other orifices. They suffer from fits and lose their appetite, becoming completely dejected as the end approaches.
However outwardly, they look mostly normal despite their bright, staring eyes.
Within days the flock of sheep, all 80 animals, are dead.
The calculations have been done - if a bomb of this kind was scaled up and designed to release the gas in a populated area… say for example a German city like Berlin… not only would the death toll be in the millions as people inhaled the gas or ate food from the contaminated ground, the city would uninhabitable for decades, maybe even centuries.
Scorched earth on a grand scale. In the tense mass destruction stalemate in the years before the nuclear bomb was dropped in 1945, biological and chemical agents were the ultimate in mass murder.
That had been proved in the trenches of World War One where mustard gas, chlorine and other chemicals had wrecked the life of many an unprepared soldier and Allied commanders didn’t see any reason why the Nazis wouldn’t use them, despite Germany being signatories to the Geneva Protocol which banned their use in 1925.
After all, spies were everywhere and the Allies knew that Germany was stockpiling huge quantities of poison gas - and who they were testing its effects on. And since spies were everywhere, the Nazis knew that the Allied powers were stockpiling huge quantities of various agents too.
Mutually assured destruction - sound familiar?
And yet the government believed that having the information and data to support the bombing of a German city was vital to the war effort, and so the last of a flock of sheep rasped their last breath just a few agonising days after their exposure.
And then they were dragged up to a cliff overlooking the mainland of Scotland just a few short miles away and pushed over the edge, before thousands of pounds of explosives were used to cover their carcasses up, bringing the cliff down on top of them.
These things don’t happen in a vacuum though, especially not a really strong stone’s throw from the mainland. A Wellington bomber was brought in and once in 1942 and once in 1943, flew low level runs over the island and dropped bombs containing Anthrax onto its targets… more sheep.
But the island’s proximity to the mainland was becoming a problem. Mainly for the residents of the area though. The Chemical Defence Experimental Station at Porton Down, responsible for the site on the island, left a van containing flasks of anthrax being returned for winter storage sitting overnight in a car park in Leeds.
Then a storm dislodged some of the sheep burials and sent contaminated livestock floating over to the mainland, causing an anthrax outbreak in mainland Scotland.
According to declassified documents, the government installed a scientist in a hotel at Aultbea to deal with compensation claims and keep the locals as quiet as possible. After all - careless talk cost lives.
And plus, the Allies had another plan altogether. Since dropping a bomb laden with anthrax onto a civilian population was a bit too much like a thing the enemy might do - ignoring as everyone did the kind of biological warfare used in the British empire by colonial powers - they came up with an alternative.
Using the results of the experiments on the Island they were able to determine that livestock who inhaled anthrax would die and if Germany had no cattle to feed her people then it would fall. And it would take thousands, if not millions, of people with it.
All they had to do was poison hundreds of thousands of linseed cakes, the kind that cattle love to eat, with anthrax and drop them on German fields. The cows eat the cakes, the cows die, it takes the population with them and not only do you get a much wider spread of civilian death - always a boon apparently - you don’t have to drop a bomb on the Reichstag to get the desired effect.
The plan was called Operation Vegetarian and was due to go into effect in the Summer of 1944 but by then the Normandy landings had happened and Allied forces were beginning their push through France and into Germany. Probably best not to poison a potential food source.
Operation Vegetarian was canned and 5 million anthrax laced cattle cakes were incinerated.
By 1945 it was becoming obvious that Hitler was never going to order the use of biological weapons, not least because he didn’t have enough bombers left to order a launch and the project on Gruinard Island was shut down.
Well, kind of.
The agreement with the original landowner had been that they’d be able to buy the island back at the original price the government had paid them for it - a bit rich since they’d dosed the soil with a deadly toxin and rendered it unfit for any habitation but it is what it is.
In an attempt to decontaminate the island they burned the heather to destroy the spores.
Guess what? Didn’t work.
Without any real further consideration the island which was now a burned landscape more reminiscent of Mordor than the Inner Hebrides, was quarantined and left alone, save for once a year when a team from Porton Down would return to take soil samples and change the year on the warning sign.
The same warning sign that a team, calling themselves the Dark Harvest Commando, claiming to be microbiologists representing two universities, ignored when they snuck onto the island and took 300lbs of contaminated soil from under the nose of the… nobody guarding the place.
The same warning sign that two tourists, unable to read English, enjoyed a leisurely day under in 1982 until they were taken away by the police.
The same warning sign that wouldn’t be removed until 1990 when finally the Poisoned Isle was declared fit for habitation after a decontamination operation in 1986 sprayed almost 300 tonnes of a solution of seawater and formaldehyde over the island, before once again, leaving a flock of sheep to graze there.
When they returned, the sheep were alive and well and Gruinard Island was sold back to the descendants of its original owner… for £500.
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You’ve been listening to Scotland, it was written and produced by me, Michael Park and is a production of Be Quiet Media.
Additional voices in this episode were by Chris Moriarty.
The sequence on protective equipment is taken from the declassified film Gruinard Island X-Base Anthrax Trials 1942-43 which is in the collection of the Imperial War Museum and is narrated by John Morton.
The music for every episode of Scotland is by Mitch Bain, you can check out more of his work at mitchbain.bequiet.media.
Jamie Mowat does amazing illustrations for us which you can see in our episode art. See more and buy prints at tidlin.com.
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Thanks for listening. Look after each other, wear a mask, get vaccinated if you can… we’ll see you next time.