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(low rumbling)
If you were to ask people today
what is the worst man-made disaster in peace time,
they'd probably say something like, "Oh, the Titanic."
(indistinct chatter)
1912-- 1,512 lives.
Or they might say, "Oh, Chernobyl."
And maybe a few hundred lives have gone to that.
But they might say, if they're being a bit more knowledgeable,
"When then Union Carbide plant blew up at Bhopal."
And-and the number of people dead or injured
by that may be as high as 10,000.
But thalidomide outstrips all of those,
ten times over and more.
The thalidomide disaster probably destroyed
more than 100,000 babies,
injured a million adults.
And yet it doesn't feature
in-in the list that springs to people's mind.
(indistinct chatter)
Shall we sit down together and have a look...
HAROLD EVANS: The dilemma for The Sunday Times
and thalidomide is this.
We had the information that the compensation was inadequate.
We had more than a suspicion
that the manufacturer of the drug had been negligent.
But the law of contempt
meant that neither of these approaches to the story
of thalidomide could be published.
♪ ♪
By the 1960s, society was much more complex.
Corporations had grown more powerful,
more invasive in-in--
for good and bad-- in people's lives.
But nobody knew how complex.
MPs didn't know. They hadn't got a clue.
Parliament as engine of investigation inquiry
was useless-- nothing to compare with Congress.
So it was like somebody being in a prison cell.
The British press was like this.
Anybody who reached out their arms...
would hit the walls.
The walls of libel,
contempt of court,
Official Secrets Act, confidence.
When we tried to expose the plight
of thalidomide children who were born
without their arms and legs...
They'd lain without compensation,
being born as trunks for ten years!
Why wasn't there a huge
national scandal about it?
Why?
Because the law of contempt said you were not allowed
to comment on a case before the courts.
That was the situation.
How could anybody stand for that?
♪ ♪
(typewriters clicking)
ALAN RUSBRIDGER: You-you look back on that-that Sunday Times,
uh, and you admire the courage of a man.
He-he took on big vested interests,
uh, in the face of very difficult legal circumstances.
And he blasted open some of the,
some of the, um, legal challenges
to journalism, uh,
in ways from which we've all benefited.
(birds chirping)
My real interest in journalism begins,
actually, when I was 12.
The war was on.
My father was driving steam trains.
Occasionally, once every two years, we got a chance
to go on a family vacation.
(kids screaming playfully)
And we went to Rhyll.
We were walking along the beach,
and there were a group of people lying down in the distance.
And my dad stopped,
which really exasperated me,
on knees, and started talking to them.
And they were survivors of Dunkirk.
MALE REPORTER: Out from the hell
that is Dunkirk, back from the steel thrust
of the German war machine comes the B.E.F.
EVANS: I didn't realize
till later, when I went into journalism,
that he was doing what a good reporter did.
He asked questions.
"What was it like?
"Wh-What happened?
Wh-What was your equipment?"
And so on.
And they gave him such a story of desperation.
They felt they'd been let down by the Royal Air Force,
by the French, about the Maginot Line being a nonsense.
And when we got back to the boarding house--
we didn't stay in hotels, we stayed in boarding houses--
there was a Daily Mirror front page up there.
"Bloody Marvellous!"
"Bloody Marvellous," it said about the evacuation.
And then I thought, "But my dad's telling
"a completely different story.
Who's telling the truth?"
Think of 9/11.
And what happened in the ex-- in the rush to be patriotic,
the British people and the American people
actually went along with an atrocity--
the invasion of Iraq.
So what is the duty of a newspaper
in those circumstances?
Is it to keep up people's morale?
Or is to do the much more difficult job,
still very difficult, of going against the grain
of popular opinion and looking for the truth?
NARRATOR: His most high profile and emotionally draining
campaign also had its origins in the Second World War.
I am the officer commanding the regiment
of Royal Artillery guarding this camp.
The officers and men
regard this job as a duty
that has to be performed, and none of us are likely to forget
what the German people have done here.
NARRATOR: The German company
Chemie Grunenthal had been a soap and perfume manufacturer.
But in 1946, it diversified to exploit a voracious
postwar demand for antibiotics and sedatives.
Authorities were concerned
that the unsanitary conditions in which people were living
were likely to lead to epidemics,
and sedatives and sleeping tablets were much in demand
by a people whose nerves were shattered.
By the mid-'50s, Germany was a calmer place.
Chemie Grunenthal faced stiff competition
from other pharmaceutical companies.
And the demand for their sedatives
and antibiotics had fallen to normal levels.
They needed a best-seller.
And they thought they'd found it
in thalidomide, an addictive euphoric.
At the time, barbiturates
were much more prevalent than today,
and people were inadvertently overdosing in alarming numbers.
An appealing selling point was that it was believed
to be impossible to overdose on the drug.
JOHNSON: The particular focus
on supplying thalidomide to pregnant women
came about because, at that time,
the prevailing medical belief
was that morning sickness was psychosomatic.
And I've had this from the drug company salesmen themselves.
They-they thought that if,
if a pregnant woman was being sick,
because she was just overexcited about have--
being pregnant,
you'd sedate her, and she'd calm down
and she'd stop being sick.
(film projector rattling)
NARRATOR: Christmas Day, 1956.
In Stahlberg, Germany, a young nervous
expectant father, who worked as a chemist
for Chemie Grunenthal, was waiting for news
from the delivery room.
But the news he received was not what he'd hoped.
His child was born with no ears.
His wife had been given samples
of the Chemie Grunenthal's wonder drug
to help combat her morning sickness.
That Christmas Day saw the delivery of
the world's first thalidomide baby.
(machine chugging)
The fact that one of the very few women given the drug
had had a deformed baby was not picked up on.
And Chemie Grunenthal went ahead
and marketed their product across the world.
A handful of countries, including the U.S.,
refused it a license, but most accepted
the manufacturer's test data on face value,
and allowed the drug to be prescribed.
In 1958, it was licensed for use in the U.K.
under the trade name Distaval.
The active drug substance in both Distaval
and Contergan was thalidomide.
SADIE GALVIN: Well, I didn't even know I'd taken it.
I felt unwell for a week.
And, um, Wednesday afternoon, closed the shop,
decided to go round the corner, just a few yards
round the corner to see my GP.
And she said, "I've got a new drug that's out, a miracle."
She said the word "miracle,"
miracle drug.
"It's fantastic. You'll be okay."
So I took the little bit of paper,
not realizing I had accepted my death warrant that day.
PEARL DANDILY: From the minute I got caught,
I had that sickness.
The chemist told me, like...
I said, "Do you know about these tablets?"
And he just said, "Oh, they're for helping you to sleep
and-and sickness."
So I took 'em.
Which they did, they was good, don't get me wrong.
They were smashing when I... when I took 'em, you know.
I felt real good.
Vicky and I got married.
She was 21. I was 22.
After some months, Vicky told me she was pregnant,
and we were absolutely thrilled.
And she went along to see her doctor,
who said that he thought she was a bit anemic.
So, fine,
so he gave her a prescription
for iron tablets and one other.
And I'd been asking her, "Can you feel the baby kick?"
And she used to say, "Well, not kick, but press."
I started into labor at 7:10 on the Saturday morning.
And my husband always worked on a Saturday morning.
And I just said to him, uh,
"You'd better get round and bring the midwife."
And I'd just put me legs on the bed,
and she come and she went, "Oh, my God."
And the sleeves went up
and no coat off and she just dived in.
"Dived in."
And she was born at ten minutes to 8:00!
And, uh, and my husband come in
and he just said, "I'm sorry, love," and he was crying.
My mum was a-a midwife, you know.
She'd seen all sorts of things through her nursing career,
and, uh, she said, you know,
to the nurses, you know, "Well, where's my, you know, son?"
And they said, "Well, we've just, uh, you know,
we've taken him away."
Uh, and one of the nurses said, "And you won't see him."
And there was the, uh, cradle
with, uh, Louise lying in there
that can only be described as a, as a torso
with sort of little flowers
where the arms and legs should be.
And, uh, after a few hours, I-I got myself together
and I went back to the hospital
to find, uh, Vicky, you know,
in a terrible state and a priest in the room.
He said, "Well, I'm explaining to Vicky that it's God's will."
I said, "You don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Not God's will at all. It's drugs. It's pills. Out!"
And I threw him out.
There was a very low level of expectation
when we were all born.
Um, we were all written off, and, uh, my mother was told
that I would probably only live for about six weeks.
And, in fact, when I was born,
apparently, um, they thought I was stillborn,
and I was put in some kind of a container
and put in... put under me mother's bed.
And I don't know whether I coughed
or someone knocked the box or something--
there was some kind of movement,
and then they realized I was, I was alive.
What has also become clear
is that a large number of babies were actually born alive,
but they weren't allowed to live.
The doctor came to me
and said that my son was born handicapped.
In fact, his arms and legs were short.
Doctors and midwives were suffocating deformed babies
or they were, in the hospitals, putting them out in the cold...
on the cold slab in the cold room,
in the hope that they'd die quietly.
He thought it'd probably be best that...
I should go home and forget I'd ever had him
and have another one straightaway.
My mother and father, thank God,
had saved up enough from the dogs,
and my mother opened a small shop,
counting ra... during rationing.
So they'd accumulated enough money,
and they got me into a girls' college.
How did I pull that off?
I mean, the girls were learning shorthand and typing.
They've got a shorthand stiffing of 120 words a minute.
"Can I get a job?"
♪ ♪
EVANS: In 1961,
I was offered the editorship of The Northern Echo,
a great daily newspaper in Darlington,
circulation of more than 100,000,
and which had once been edited by
one of the greatest British journalists,
called W.T. Stead.
In fact, I sat at the desk, and there was
a handwritten letter he wrote to his proprietors
in eight... late eight... 19th century saying,
"Thank you.
"What a marvelous opportunity
for attacking the devil."
Not off this block, sorry.
There's a story coming on with that one.
But, um, there we are.
NARRATOR: He saw campaigns as the way ahead.
He had a sharp eye for which issues to zero in on
and began to develop techniques which would prove his hallmark.
EVANS: I wrote a paragraph
like this in The Sunday Times
to say that Vancouver was introducing a campaign...
no, introducing a program for what's called a Pap smear,
to detect cervical cancer in women
before it developed into full cancer.
And I thought, "Well, why don't we have one of those?"
NARRATOR: The method had been known since the 1920s
and was in use in many other countries.
Death rates began to fall remarkably
after the American Cancer Society
introduced Pap smears in 1957.
Every year, 2,500 women died needlessly in the U.K.
So we began a campaign.
♪ ♪
NARRATOR: He wrote editorials, articles and pamphlets
and contacted every MP to try and persuade the government
to have a screening program in Britain.
The Minister of Health at the time was Enoch Powell.
And so the local MP, Jeremy Braid,
got up and asked a question.
Said, "Uh, Minister, in the light of the articles
"in the Northern Echo, will the minister agree to start
a program for the detection of cervical cancer in women?"
Mr. Powell rose.
"No, sir."
Okay.
Week after week.
"No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. No, sir."
Here was a brilliant man without a heart.
NARRATOR: The drip, drip, drip campaign continued,
week in and week out.
EVANS: Until, finally,
the Minister of Health was changed to Anthony Barber,
and he said, "Yes, sir. I'll set up a pilot program."
NARRATOR: The Northern Echo's cervical cancer campaign
showed how a newspaper could persuade
those in power to change their minds.
To this day, tens of thousands of women
owe their lives to the power of the press.
And Harry found that there was no shortage
of wrongs to be righted.
♪ ♪
MOTHER: He wasn't a boy of violent nature.
He loved his wife and baby.
REPORTER: What did he tell you at the time though,
when you went to see him in prison?
MOTHER: He said, "Go and see Christie, Mum.
He's the only man can help me."
He said, "I never touched 'em." He said, "Christie done it."
PARKINSON: At the time,
the trial of Timothy Evans
excited very little public interest.
But three years after Evans had-had been hung,
his trial took on a new and disturbing importance.
In March, 1953,
the bodies of three strangled women were discovered here,
in this alcove in Christie's kitchen.
HAROLD EVANS: They quickly executed Christie
without really uncovering the true story,
which was that Christie was a serial killer.
He'd killed many women.
He just happened to be in the same house with Evans.
NARRATOR: Questions were now being asked
about the Evans verdict.
Harry's involvement began when he was contacted
by a local businessman in the Northeast.
EVANS: Herbert Wolf sent me an article.
And I'm reading this article, and I'm so...
shocked.
I went to see the Home Secretary who signed the death warrant,
and I said, "You signed the death warrant."
He said, "I-I did, and I regret it.
We hanged the wrong man."
I said, "We've got to get it... justice done."
He said, "You will never get it done
against the forces of Whitehall."
So I got hold of Herbert Wolf,
and the two of us decided to work together.
And we... I published one editorial,
then another editorial, then another editorial.
I commissioned articles
on previous hangings that had gone wrong,
the history of the death penalty,
the life of Timothy Evans, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
NARRATOR: The Echo campaign lasted 12 months.
Every edition of the paper was decorated
with the Man on Our Conscience logo.
Relentlessly, this drip, drip, drip went on
until even the staff began to wonder
if it was going to succeed.
EVANS: A newspaper campaign has to be prolonged, very often.
Because the forces
of rigidity are strong,
particularly in bureaucracies.
And, secondly, it takes time for the penny to drop.
There's a famous American editor who said,
"The moment a newspaper man tires of his campaign
"is the moment
the public is just beginning to notice it."
NARRATOR: Meanwhile, there was a growing consensus
in the country that the time
to abolish the death penalty had come.
EVANS: And, finally,
the Home Secretary was now a new man
called Roy Jenkins,
great reforming Home Secretary,
and he announced that we'd have a public enquiry
into the hanging.
It was a model verdict,
but, nonetheless, it enabled Roy Jenkins
to get up in the House of Commons
and, uh, announce a pardon.
So we won. And at the same time, the death penalty was abolished.
Now, I can't claim that we abolished the death penalty.
Many campaigners had been on that,
uh, particularly Sydney Silverman.
But I think we can say that Herbert Wolf
and Ludovic Kennedy and Michael Eddowes
and, to some extent, myself helped to speed up the process.
NARRATOR: By 1962, the full horror of thalidomide
was obvious, and the drug banned worldwide.
(news theme playing)
MALE REPORTER: The problem of tighter controls to prevent
the distribution of dangerous drugs such as thalidomide
is a matter of concern to the president
at his news conference.
He outlines the steps
the government plans to take.
KENNEDY: The Food and Drug Administration
have had nearly 200 people working on this.
Every doctor, every hospital, every nurse have been notified.
Every woman in this country, I think,
must be aware that it's most important
that they check their medicine cabinet and that
they do not take this drug, that they turn it in.
NARRATOR: But unlike the American health authorities,
the British Minister of Health, Enoch Powell,
said no to a public inquiry,
no to setting up a drugs testing center,
no to issuing a warning against anyone using leftover pills,
because he thought it
a scare-mongering publicity stunt,
and no to giving a statement afterwards.
"No need to bring the press into this," he said.
EVANS: Mr. Enoch Powell
had been asked if he would set up a public inquiry
to discover how was it possible
for a National Health Service doctor
to prescribe a pill which is going to have
these devastating effects.
Mr. Enoch Powell said, "No, sir."
The thalidomide parents went to see him,
and had the same answer.
And the civil servants gave them the same answer.
Everybody gave the same answer--
i.e. you're on your own.
NARRATOR: Powell's unwillingness to help them
left the families with only one remedy:
To sue the manufacturers for negligence.
But the families had pitted themselves
against a formidable opponent.
Worth the equivalent today of four billion pounds,
Distillers Group produced a raft of famous brands,
including such household names as Johnnie Walker Whisky
and Gordon's Gin.
Its chairman, Alexander MacDonald,
had gained a reputation as a man of granite.
The families had to rely on public funding.
But the government begrudged spending taxpayers' money
on what it regarded as a weak case.
Every single newspaper said the same thing--
The Guardian, the Economist, The Times, the Telegraph--
saying the same thing as the drug company,
the Ministry of Health.
What they were saying was...
this drug was tested
according to the standards of the time
when nobody thought a drug could cross the placental barrier
and affect the fetus.
And the solicitors representing the families had accepted this.
So if you imagine, here you have the families
represented by a legal firm
who agrees with them that there's no case for the parents.
You can't have a case of negligence,
because there's been no negligence,
because they did the standard test at the time.
NARRATOR: With no idea of the darker background
to thalidomide, Harry ran a story
in The Northern Echo in order
to win sympathy for the children.
EVANS: I published these photographs
expecting to evoke sympathy for the children.
And what I got instead of sympathy was criticism.
Uh, uh, not a... almost a denunciation.
"We do not want to see pictures like this
"in our newspaper.
"Please do not show us these scary things."
NARRATOR: Although most families were scared off
by Distillers lawyers, 62 families did issue writs.
Once the writs had been issued though,
it became illegal for the press to print facts
or comment on a pending trial.
With thalidomide, this meant that nothing could be published
that might influence a judge until every case--
every single case-- had been settled by the courts.
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Whenever
a-a rich company was...
had acted badly, they would sue.
They would issue what we called "a gagging writ,"
which gagged all criticism under the pretext
that it was sub judice, that it was in court.
So no one could comment critically
on any of the parties.
NARRATOR: Distillers response to the 62 families
was to wait until just over three years
to reach an out-of-court settlement,
in which, although not accepting liability,
they agreed to pay some compensation.
Most of the other victims' families
had no idea that a settlement had been in the offing.
By design or happy coincidence,
once the case had been settled and the press free to report,
the three years statute of limitations
on personal damages had expired.
The families of the other parents were deemed
out of time and wouldn't be able to sue.
One of the out-of-time parents was David Mason.
MALE REPORTER: David Mason, West End art dealer.
A man who built up his business from scratch
when he was earning three pounds a week.
Father of four,
and one of them one of the first thalidomide children.
And a man who, alone, pitted himself
against the multimillion pound might
of the Distillers company.
MASON: I can remember thinking,
even in those days-- w-was not a litigious society--
"I'm going after Distillers,
"and I'm gonna make them accountable
"for all these deformities
that they've caused with other children."
I hadn't been told how many were involved,
but I knew that there were other children involved,
were other victims.
And that was the start of it.
NARRATOR: It would also be a new start
for Harry Evans.
The campaigns of this obscure northern newspaper editor
and, in particular, that of cervical cancer,
had caught the eye of the then editor
of The Sunday Times,
Denis Hamilton, who was on the lookout for his successor.
It had taken just 20 years
from his first days at the Ashton Under-lyne Reporter
for the boy who failed his 11-Plus
to be offered the editorship of one of the most
highly-regarded newspapers in the world.
Harry Evans' Sunday Times was a-a kind of golden age,
not only because of the editorship,
but also because of the proprietorship.
So, he edited under Lord Thomson, who was the last
of the sort of grandee broadsheet press barons.
Basically, most of my time on The Sunday Times
was on investigative journalism.
Well, it's a hell of a difficult job.
PHILLIP KNIGHTLEY: Working for him was fun.
I got up every day
with a sense of adventure, going in to The Sunday Times,
of what we're going to do this week.
And whatever it was, it was going to be bright
and it was going to cause people who,
as they opened their Sunday Times
on Sunday morning to say, "Wow."
NARRATOR: The Sunday Times employed
its investigative journalists
as part of a team known as Insight.
-Leave this page. -ELAINE POTTER: Harry understood
the importance of teams of journalists
whirring away at really difficult
long-term projects.
News. That is opinion.
It-it would have been very difficult to create,
I find it hard to imagine, with any other editor,
though others have tried, not totally successfully.
(typewriter clacking)
NARRATOR: In only his second month as editor,
Evans set his newly-formed Insight team
on an investigation that took eight months
and was bitterly resisted.
In 1951, British intelligence
got alarmed about how the Soviets
seemed to be one step ahead on British cooperation
with the Americans over nuclear weapons.
Two diplomats in Washington,
Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, fled to Moscow
before they could be questioned.
Who tipped them off?
Might Kim Philby be the third man?
Well, if there was a third man, were you in fact the third man?
No, I was not.
KNIGHTLEY: The Sunday Times
took up the case because somebody had
told the editor, Harold Evans,
that, uh, Philby-- the Philby case--
was far more important than anyone ever suspected.
I mean, he must go down in history as the most remarkable,
uh, penetration agent in the whole history of espionage.
He was well on the way to becoming
head of British intelligence.
My chairman, Denis Hamilton, rang me up and said,
"You'd better be in the House of Commons tomorrow
"because the Foreign Secretary
is going to denounce you as a traitor."
All I will say is we've published nothing
which is not already known to the Russians.
KNIGHTLEY: The government was intent on us
not telling the story because it was such a terrible mess.
It was run by, uh, incompetence
and, uh, o... the...
from the old boy network.
And I remember once, the... the head of the service came,
when I was prime minister, into my room,
rubbing his... he said, "I've got that chap.
I've got him. I've been after him for 18 months."
And I looked very gloomy, and he said,
"Aren't you pleased, Prime Minister?"
I said, "I'm not at all pleased."
He said, "We've been wonderful.
Our chaps knew he was a wrong'un and we got him."
"Yes", I said, "But when the keeper shoots a fox here,
he doesn't hang it up outside the master of foxhounds' house."
"What are we going to have now?" "We'll have an inquiry.
"You'll be told your service is rotten from top to bottom.
"You should have Lord Radcliffe as a commission.
"We have a debate in the House of Commons,
and the government will probably fall."
"Well, see."
Oh, you don't do those things.
You put them quietly away.
RALPH NADER: Harry Evans was, uh, editor for The Sunday Times
in a country that had an Official Secrets Act.
It was just the opposite, uh,
of our freedom of information laws.
That is the, uh, the, uh, presumption
was secrecy, uh, in, uh, in the U.K.
In-Instead of the presumption being openness,
and then the government had to explain why some information
was kept secret. So he was up against
a very hostile atmosphere, which would have exposed him
and his reporters to, literally, to prosecution.
(typewriters clacking)
EVANS: I had a very good staff at The Northern Echo.
But nothing can compare the staff of people
I had at The Sunday Times, who were not only more numerous,
you know, more experienced and...
So I said, "Let's keep an eye on the thalidomide children."
(film projector rattling)
NARRATOR: Although it had been reported
that an agreement by Distillers and the 62 families
who'd sued in time had been agreed,
the press were not allowed to report anything
regarding the financial settlement
whilst the two unequal sides were in negotiations
about what that level of compensation would be.
EVANS: And it was finally agreed
by Distillers that if the parents withdrew
the charge of negligence,
they would make a settlement of 40%
of what a full settlement would be.
So they'd go before a judge--
this story keeps getting worse and worse--
so they'd go before a judge to decide
what would be 100% settlement,
and knowing that they're only going to get 40% of it.
Utterly and totally miserably inadequate.
NARRATOR: He thought he had no opportunity to help,
until The Sunday Times was contacted by a whistle-blower,
who gave them 10,000 internal Distillers documents.
EVANS: What the documents revealed was
a unscrupulous marketing campaign
to market this drug.
What they did not reveal...
...was how the disaster had occurred.
NARRATOR: They'd been warned of its danger
five months before it was eventually withdrawn.
Those five months were the period in which
the majority of victims were conceived.
These documents definitely could not be published,
as they bore directly on a case before the courts.
But a second set
that came The Sunday Times' way had more potential.
EVANS: So we now have The Sunday Times room packed
with filing cabinets
with documents in German being translated.
NARRATOR: The second set were internal
Chemie Grunenthal documents related to a case being brought
against them in the German courts,
in a size of trial not seen since Nuremberg.
These documents catalogued a get-rich-quick mentality
in which the safety of the drug
had been the main selling point.
Contergan was given to 370 test subjects,
of whom 160 were nursing mothers.
The report based on these trials stated that
side effects were not observed either with mothers or babies.
It cunningly implied that the babies were in the womb
when the mothers took the drug.
This was not true.
EVANS: That raised the first crisis for us.
Could we publish the story
of how the German company marketed a drug
without proper testing?
Because did that bear on the British case,
and if we published the German story,
would it be contempt of court?
NARRATOR: The lawyers pored over every word,
bearing in mind that a breach of the contempt laws
might see Harry wind up in jail.
EVANS: So we did get ready to publish the German case,
and Godfrey Hodgson produced a fantastic scary article
that I put on the front page of the Review Section-- five pages
with a picture of one of the German doctors
who'd been involved with the Nazis.
And I sat back in a defensive crouch...
...pretty sure we were going to get
a contempt of court citation.
NARRATOR: For the first time,
thalidomide was shown to be a corporate disaster,
rather than an act of God.
But to Harry's frustration,
the families' lawyers remained overawed by their opponents.
Mindful that Distillers threatened
that they were quite prepared for the case to go to court
because they were confident of victory,
the families' lawyers weren't emboldened
by The Sunday Times article,
but settled on a fraction of what their clients needed.
And the judge-- a nice old man without a single clue--
sets a level of compensation which is ridiculously low.
NARRATOR: Press reaction wasn't
what Harry had expected, either.
EVANS: The press headlined that
as though the families had won the pools.
Lottery prizes, as though they'd won millions.
NARRATOR: Outraged by the inadequacy
of the amount of money offered by Distillers,
he decided to skirt around the law,
and avoiding the subject of the company's negligence,
published comment on the compensation.
But even that was risky.
I remember writing the headline, "What price a pound of flesh?"
arguing that the levels were not enough.
And the lawyer said, "I think that's contempt."
Our own lawyer.
I said, "Well, so be it. To hell with it." (chuckles)
So we took the chance and published that article.
That was 1969.
The consequence of that settlement
in 1969 was to suddenly alert
the huge number of other families who hadn't realized
that their children were thalidomide victims.
They just thought they were unlucky,
and they didn't know there was a prospect of a settlement.
By the end of a couple of months,
369 families had joined the few from the beginning,
so we now had close to 500 families.
The 369 were too late to sue,
but the courts agreed
that even though they were out of time, they could sue.
So one day, I got a letter through the post,
uh, saying that there was to be a meeting
of all the thalidomide, uh, parents.
So we duly went to the meeting,
and when we got there, of course, there were--
I don't know-- 600, 700 people, something like that.
NARRATOR: The lawyers spelled out the terms of the offer.
It was even less generous than the award given
to the original 62 who'd settled.
And they put pressure on the families to accept
by saying that if it wasn't agreed to by all the parents,
no one would get anything.
MASON: He drew this thing out, and, of course, there were
occasional rounds of applause from the parents,
because, let's face it,
nobody thought they were ever going to get anything.
And he said the mean figure
of what it amounts to is three million pounds.
So I thought, "Three million pounds?
For 400 victims?"
So I worked it out quickly, and I-I came to the conclusion
that would mean with Louise, 8,000 pounds,
or putting it crudely,
2,000 pounds per arm and per leg.
The outcome of the meeting was mixed.
We had, on one hand...
NARRATOR: Financially, David Mason was
in the fortunate position that he could afford
to reject the offer,
but many of the parents were in a desperate plight.
Distillers applied enormous emotional pressure,
but Mason and a few others remained firm.
...where I want the small print to be...
EVANS: There were five parents,
one of them famous-- David Mason, an art dealer--
and others who said, "I'm not going to accept that.
"I'm not going to accept this compensation
for my daughter Louise, which is inadequate. Why should I?"
And Distillers answer was,
"You're sacrificing everybody else's compensation."
MAN: You parents are happy with the settlement
-that's been discussed? -(murmurs of agreement)
We settle with the settlement. We'll settle with that.
Uh, I received threatening letters.
I received threatening phone calls.
I was referred to by certain other parents
as being unchristian.
Mr. Mason does claim, in fact,
that he represents most of the thalidomide parents.
He does not claim, and it was proved in there just now!
He might have claimed... be the spokesman for a few,
but for the vast majority of parents,
he doesn't represent them at all.
NARRATOR: Mason had been advised
that a figure of 20 million pounds,
nearly seven times the amount offered by Distillers,
was the minimum required
for the long-term care of the children.
But many of the other parents could not afford to hold out.
GALVIN: It just went from bad to worse.
He had no wheelchair, he had no helmet, he had ab...
and I'll say, nothing.
I took lettuce from the peel bucket, and tomatoes,
and washed them and brought them home,
and they lived on that for the weekend.
DONNELLY: My parents were just typical working class parents.
Me dad works on the tugs, on the River Mersey,
and me mother was a housewife bringing up six kids,
so they had no idea about class actions or lawyers, or,
you know, suing people in court.
It must have been a massive struggle
for them really, you know.
They had the burden
of taking on the court cases and everything,
and I just got on with me childhood.
NARRATOR: Distillers identified David Mason
as the ringleader of the small group standing out
against a deal being struck, and they increased the pressure
by threatening to withdraw their offer.
Divide and rule seemed to be the order of the day.
MASON: And the next dreadful thing
that, uh, happened was that, uh,
I received a writ through the post.
Distillers took me into the court
and tried to take my daughter away from me
and have her made a ward of court
on the grounds that by refusing this offer,
I was acting against her best interests.
Therefore, if they made her a ward of court,
the official solicitor would act for her.
The official solicitor would sign off on Louise,
and everybody would get their money.
NARRATOR: Mason lost custody of his daughter,
but he appealed, and a date was set for the court case.
Along with their own action, Distillers financed
the legal teams of some of the parents who wanted to settle.
The crux of their argument being
that no successful claims had been made
anywhere in the world,
and that Mason was acting unreasonably.
Their method of defense was to launch an attack.
Justice Hinchcliffe removed Mason's...
removed the parental rights of Mason and the others.
(chuckles): His-his...
His children were now consigned to the treasury solicitor.
It's like...
Bleak House is not in it.
NARRATOR: Through a mutual friend,
David Mason was introduced to the Daily Mail's editor,
David English, who, moved by the story,
agreed to publish a series of articles on Mason's struggle.
Hello. Yes. David Mason.
NARRATOR: But he warned that if he proceeded,
the Distillers deal may be withdrawn,
and the other parents would be out for his blood.
MASON: Out came the first edition
of the Daily Mail-- wham!--
where they ran, for four days, double page spread,
spelling out exactly what had gone on,
and all hell was let loose.
And the attorney general's running around,
injunctions were being sought,
God knows what, and eventually an injunction was obtained.
EVANS: Nobody would talk to David Mason after that.
The Daily Mail
was told by the attorney general it was liable
for a contempt prosecution, and it dropped it.
NARRATOR: As the appeal date loomed,
Mason was contacted by an American lawyer
who had read one of the Daily Mail articles.
Distillers had argued that no one had ever won a case
for compensation against the makers of thalidomide,
and therefore, Mason was acting unreasonably,
like a barrack room lawyer, in pursuing his claim.
But the American had won just such a case in the U.S.
With only the weekend before he was due back in court,
Mason flew to America,
where he was given copies of the court papers.
He arrived back in the U.K.
on the morning his appeal was to be heard,
and got the papers in front of the judge, Lord Denning.
(tires squeal)
MASON: Denning came in,
put his papers on the table, bad-tempered way,
and sat down and said, "Now, then."
He said, "I'd like all the people
representing the other parents,"
he said, "and Distillers to stand up."
He said, "Do you recall having told me, having told this court,
"that no case had ever taken place anywhere in the world
with a successful outcome?"
"Uh, yes."
He said, "Well," he said, "I have to tell you,
"I have the court record that...
"that Mr. Mason found over the weekend.
What have you got to say about that?" "We didn't..."
"You didn't? You didn't what? You didn't know about it?
You didn't... you didn't know about it?"
He said, "Well, for a barrack room lawyer
and a man of perverse views," he said,
"Mr. Mason hasn't done bad, has he?"
So there was sort of silence.
He said, "I'm adjourning the court."
Bottom line: I won her back.
I won her back.
NARRATOR: Although David Mason had won a person victory,
the press were still muzzled on the wider issues
regarding the compensation.
In the end, he refused to waste his time
giving interviews that never appeared,
spiked by newspapers' lawyers citing contempt of court.
The thalidomide children receded back
into the vacuum of silence,
exactly where Distillers wanted them.
Anthony,
I've got a letter from the chairman of Distillers.
I'll read it to you.
"Thank you for your letter of 23 June..."
EVANS: From time to time, you become
absolutely convinced you're going to achieve something.
I didn't...
always expect that, but in the thalidomide case, I did,
'cause it seemed to me it was so transparently an injustice.
Phil Knightley stayed on the story,
keeping in touch with the parents.
And that moment when he came
into my office and said,
"They're being offered half of what they are entitled to
by comparison with the earlier judgment,"
that was when I decided to start the campaign.
Harry Evans said,
"If necessary, I'll run a story about thalidomide
for the next ten years to get justice for these children."
I know that sounds like a-a film script, but that's what he said.
NARRATOR: Harry decided it was time
to contact the most prominent thalidomide parent.
He had an idea of the next step.
So he sent Phillip Knightley to see him.
MASON: He said,
"I want you to come down to The Sunday Times,"
he said, "and, uh, meet Harold Evans
and meet some of the board."
And he said, "I'm on the Insight team."
He said, "And we think we have a way
of freeing you up and helping you."
James Evans, no relation of Harry Evans
but as their lawyer, had found a way through.
JAMES EVANS: Our argument throughout was
contempt is about prejudicing the legal issues in a case.
If you steer clear of those
but advance the moral arguments,
then you should be allowed to do this.
Now, there was no decision on-on this,
and, uh, we just had to take a bit of a chance on it.
And this provided us with the opportunity to-to write about...
to write about thalidomide on a...
from a moral point of view
rather than from the negligence point of view.
I mean, it should be quite a short hearing.
HAROLD EVANS: James Evans saw it as his job not to stop us
publishing things which were in the public interest,
but to justify them
once we were satisfied it was in the public interest
and to find the justification in law
for getting round
the most restrictive press laws in Western democracy.
He was so calm.
He said, "I get the picture."
Tourist says, "Find me a safe way up the Eiger."
One wanted to be sure that one took the editor
up this sort of, as it were, north face of the Eiger
by the safest possible route.
Uh, but, of course, uh, the editor carries the can here.
NARRATOR: Harry and James spent late nights making sure
they'd covered every base,
because this was a very big risk
for both the paper and its editor.
HAROLD EVANS: I asked him to draft
an editorial.
Well, he's a top lawyer,
and he drafted an editorial which I made very little...
few changes.
And I wrote the headline "Children on our conscience"
and launched the moral campaign.
♪ ♪
(speaking indistinctly)
And probably the most striking thing
is to get the actual inventor of thalidomide...
NARRATOR: As the Insight team compiled the first article,
Harry prepared to contact the great and the powerful
in order to enlist support for the campaign.
He broke the news to Joan.
So he said, "Joan, we're gonna have to write to
every single MP a separate letter."
He didn't want photocopies being sent to all the MPs,
so I just set about typing 620
or 630 letters.
He-he hammered the point, really,
that it was such an injustice to the children.
EVANS: The phone rang.
It was the advertising director.
"I believe you're gonna go ahead
"with, uh, this strong attack on Distillers.
"I want you to know that they spend 60,000 pounds
with advertising with The Sunday Times."
He-he broke new ground in terms of focusing
on the very corporations whose advertisements funded
the newspaper's profit.
He said, "It won't stop you, I know.
And it shouldn't."
(machine whirring)
I brought David Mason into the office to see the presses
going round with the story,
which he couldn't believe would ever happen.
MASON: And he said,
"I want to show you the power of the press."
And we went downstairs, and, uh,
there was silence in the room.
And he said, "See that button?
Push it."
And all these papers just poured off.
He gave me one of the first copies,
which I still have.
(whirring)
♪ ♪
His, uh,
generosity, his kindness, his compassion,
his-his brilliance as a journalist,
his... the way he was able
to get a cohesive team about him,
the way he was able to motivate people.
That was the best thing that happened to the campaign,
Harry Evans coming on board.
EVANS: No sooner had we published
than a deafening silence
came over every other newspaper.
I can remember being at the BBC,
the only place which would even interview us,
a lawyer at my shoulder.
I mean, th-these children exist in the real world,
and we mustn't, uh, be put off
telling the public about the plight of the children.
The only person we heard from was the attorney general.
"What the hell are you playing at, publishing this stuff?
It's contempt of court."
NARRATOR: What prompted the threat was a line
at the bottom of the first story,
which promised future articles on the origins of the tragedy--
by implication, an exposé of Distillers' negligence.
EVANS: It wasn't the thought of avoiding jail
which was uppermost; any fool can go to prison,
and I certainly would've been prepared to do it.
But if we had published a single article
and gone to prison, end of campaign.
No-no further money for the children or anything,
no further public discussion.
So we tried to avoid that throughout, all the time.
We wanted to sustain the campaign.
Thalidomide was a campaign from the outset.
He never envisaged just doing one piece.
In fact, what we all learnt-learnt from Harry
is that a single investigation did not deliver.
I think it might not be a bad idea also
to write... I'll write to Distillers today...
POTTER: It-it was three-pronged.
Th-There was the whole... the legal story,
uh, the investigation into-into the drug,
and, of course, the families
who were at the heart of-of everything.
We were so overstretched
that we decided we'd get somebody in
just to pursue the families,
and that's when Marjorie came in.
Well, my role was to go round the country
and stay with and interview and experience what it was like
to have a thalidomide child at that time.
I would go along and I would
actually lie on the floors of some of their houses
and know what it was like to have to wake up
every moment in the night and turn
a thalidomide child over who couldn't turn themselves.
By living their lives with them, living and experiencing
what they experienced, I felt I understood
what it was like to have a child with these deformities.
When I started finding
the thalidomide children and their families,
some of them were very hard to track down.
And some of them certainly didn't want
to be interviewed.
It was a very difficult task.
And what I did find was stories that...
very bleak circumstances.
They were receiving very little help, very little recognition,
and they were being shunned by society.
Everyone was afraid.
They were afraid of these deformities
of the children.
And not only was it
just the arms and legs.
Some of the children had... were like a jigsaw,
a jumbled jigsaw of the displaced organs.
I would know what it was like just taking a child
into a café, say.
And within minutes, within seconds,
you look round, and the queue had evaporated.
Or I would go along with them,
say to a crowded beach,
and, within minutes, it was a deserted beach.
Marriages broke up.
Husbands walked out.
"That creature's got nothing to do with me."
GALVIN: One day... (whispering): my husband...
I can't say it in front of... My husband.
-Can you hear me? -INTERVIEWER: Yes.
Said to me, "We've got to talk."
And I said, "Yeah, talk."
I couldn't believe it. He said...
he said, "You have a choice."
I said, "What?" I said, "No."
I said, "That's a choice I will never make."
So I said... He said, "Otherwise, I'll..."
I said, "Well, that you'll have to do.
I'm not gonna give up on this one."
And that's what he did.
And I was left with a big mortgage.
I was left with children, small.
And I didn't want them affected by the epilepsy.
And I knew I had to think and think very hard.
And I got the night duty, 12-hour shift every night.
And I did that for 16 years without ever going to bed,
and, for some reason, I was never tired.
Somebody's looking after me.
WALLACE: What happened with The Sunday Times,
Harry Evans, he would put these photographs
on the pages of the newspaper
that everyone else would say was unacceptable.
But by doing so,
he really liberated many of the families.
MYRIAD SINCLAIR: The doctors said
this had been caused by me eating lamb
that had been infected from a nuclear fallout.
We suspected when we saw the first article by Harold Evans.
We wrote to The Times
and got information from them.
And without that, we wouldn't have known.
NARRATOR: The moral campaign had shone a light
on the lives of the thalidomide victims.
But still, the threat of legal action by the attorney general
hung over The Sunday Times.
EVANS: The real turning point in the campaign was
I got a letter
from the attorney general one day.
"The attorney general decided not to proceed against you
"on what you've already published, the moral campaign,
"but if you go ahead with the rest of what you said,
take care. We..."
The implication: we will then sue you.
NARRATOR: The attorney general's letter to Harry
allowing the moral campaign
effectively granted the same right to MPs.
Jack Ashley and Alf Morris had been supporters
of the campaign from the very first.
In parliament, they had been the main driving force
behind trying to persuade the speaker to grant a debate.
EVANS: That day-- that very day-- Jack Ashley
was going to see the speaker in the House of Commons to say,
"Look, let's have a debate on this.
These-these children are not getting proper compensation."
And the next day, the speaker agrees to give up
parliamentary time for the Labour Party
for a debate on thalidomide.
That's the moment.
Before the debate,
I was stopped in the corridor
by the prime minister's personal assistant.
He said,
"We'd like you not to go ahead with your campaign,
"and we've arranged for an extra five million pounds.
But don't go ahead."
So I said, "I'm sorry. It's not enough."
I said, "I want... We need 20 million.
I'm advised we need 20 million."
NARRATOR: Jack Ashley opened with words
that moved members on all sides of the House.
"We are debating today a great national tragedy.
"Nonetheless poignant because it happened ten years ago.
"But what kind of adolescence will a ten-year old boy
"look forward to when he has no arms,
"no legs and is only two feet tall?
"That is the height of two whiskey bottles
"placed one on top of the other.
"How can an 11-year old girl look forward to laughing
"and loving when she has no hand to be held
and no legs to dance on?"
EVANS: So, we had the debate,
and that was absolutely stunning,
because now the press, having been scared--
either scared of contempt
or competitively jealous, whatever--
would now report in the case, we now had a case.
Also, what was now very important,
as distinct from when I was editor at The Northern Echo
and got complaints, I now got thousands of letters
saying, "Please continue."
I think there was definitely a-a...
maybe not a day, but definitely a week
when the fight changed from nobody knowing about it
to, you know, the population of England
realizing that something was happening.
NARRATOR: Once free to report,
much of the press joined
with The Sunday Times in condemning
how the children had been treated.
Now informed at what had been going on,
the public were shocked and disgusted.
The floodgates opened, and Distillers reeled.
Distillers were on the back foot,
trying to limit the damage and the amount of compensation
they would have to pay.
They responded by apparently raising their offer
from anywhere between five and 11 million pounds,
but these were exposed as little more than
accountancy tricks designed for them
to pay as little as possible.
Within a very short time, the plight of the children
became a national talking point.
People wanted to help in any way they could.
A small group of people decided to appeal
to the individual shareholders directly.
When they approached Distillers to buy a list of the names,
the company, who were legally bound to comply,
said the volumes would cost 2,000 pounds--
a figure well beyond their reach.
They turned to Harry for help.
So they came to our... my office,
uh, with Knightley's encouragement,
and we bought the shareholders, uh,
paid Sunday Times money buying the lists of names
of the shareholders so we could write to them.
MASON: It was like a general election.
I mean, the phone would go, and, uh, people would say, uh,
"We represent Ealing Council.
We have so many shares, and we support Mason."
And, uh, so it went on.
So I thought, "Well, this is great."
Another person who made a huge difference was Ron Peet,
who headed the Legal & General company.
I was speaking as an institutional investor.
And I thought that it would be in the shareholders' interest
if Distillers were to make some sort of reasonable offer.
And he-- amazing-- he got up
and-and made a speech in the city, as I recall...
Their products had clearly done a vast amount of harm,
and they were not admitting any moral liability,
which I thought there was.
It is now evident and has been made clear
that we have the necessary ten percent
of the voting power needed to serve upon Distillers
notice for them to call an extraordinary general meeting.
And indeed, the share price for Distillers
started to tumble and fall.
Because by now, we've had the huge debate in Parliament,
we've got the continuing campaign in The Sunday Times
with photographs and Marjorie Wallace's stories and stuff.
And we got, as our high explosive pack,
that Bruce Page and Elaine Potter documentation
of the fact that it...
there really was negligence here.
NARRATOR: As press and the public's anger built,
so did the pressure on Distillers.
Individuals and retailers
started to boycott their products.
Many companies, big and small, offered whatever they could
to aid The Sunday Times campaign.
DAVID GREIG: I personally have been very concerned
about this for a long time.
And with all this, uh, as I call it,
lack of understanding for the feelings
of the people involved,
then somebody has got to take a step.
PEET: Customers were turning against Distillers' products.
And there were these stories going around
about people going into the duty-free shop at Heathrow
to buy whiskey, and when asked what they wanted,
they said they didn't mind as long as it wasn't Distillers.
And that didn't seem to me to be very good for shareholders.
NARRATOR: Harry's moral campaign had grown to such an extent
that it caught the eye of American
consumer rights champion Ralph Nader,
who offered his support.
Mr. Nader. How are you? Nice of you to phone.
NADER: David Mason asked me
if I could help him with the consumer groups
in the United States to put pressure on Distillers,
uh, to up their paltry compensation.
So I decided to go over to America.
I got Ralph Nader to agree to see me.
MALE REPORTER: David Mason will be meeting
Ralph Nader later tonight, and they're expected
to hold a joint press conference later
to announce what action they plan to take.
MASON: And I got on this Pan Am flight, and I'm sitting there,
and then there was this announcement.
They said, "Well, um, ladies and gentlemen, now we're going to...
"the drinks trolley will be going round,
"and we can offer you Johnnie Walker's Whisky
and Gordon's Gin and this and that."
I thought, "What?" So I got...
I thought, "I'm not standing for this."
So I followed the drinks trolley round the cabin.
So when somebody said, "I'd like a-a Gordon's Gin",
I'd say, "Well, I'm David Mason. This is..."
And I had the newspaper things and they'd say,
"Well, I'll have another drink."
I followed the drinks trolley all the way round the plane,
and not one person bought a Distillers product.
Now, the importance of that was very...
It was absolutely huge.
All you had to do was, uh, develop enough antipathy--
maybe five percent of sales reduction--
and these companies would pay attention, because y-you're
dealing with hundreds of millions of dollars.
And once a stigma is attached
to a brand name and that brand name
involves alcoholic beverages which are easily abandoned,
uh, in favor of similar alcoholic beverages,
uh, the message was quite clear to Distillers.
MASON: And, uh, there were all loads of press.
CBS, NBC, you name it, they were all out there.
Uh, Harold Evans had done a great job
of laying it on with the press over in America.
What they're really after in the complicated,
uh, accounting, uh, processes of-of these companies
is-is to... is to pay out just enough
to avoid having any net cost to the company.
Uh, now, the significance of the boycott
is that it talks the language of Mr. MacDonald,
who understands, as they say, pounds and pence.
And one chap stood up and he said,
"Mr. Nader", he said, "the realities
of bringing about a boycott", he said,
"are very far-reaching and huge,
and just to set it up would take forever."
And I said, "I think I can answer that,
"because I was flying over here on a Pan Am flight
and the following thing happened."
And I started to recount what had happened
on this Pan Am flight and how everybody boycotted the prod...
Well, th-they just loved it.
And Ralph was looking at me, absolut...
'Cause I hadn't told him about it, and everybody wa...
everybody was laughing, and-and he said,
"Well, there we are. Mr. Mason's just carried it forward
and shown you how it can be done."
And David was extremely articulate.
Uh, one should never underestimate the role
of-of a handful of the parents
who broke through their grief and became,
uh, eloquent advocates for their cause.
NARRATOR: The Sunday Times moral campaign
wasn't just going to fade away.
In nine days, Distillers shares
lost 35 million pounds in value.
This was arithmetic Edinburgh understood.
EVANS: We began the campaign in September 1972.
Three, four months later, Distillers caved in.
And they offered the 20 million.
Uh, the...
We were told that the treasury had to tax it.
So I wrote an editorial the same day,
saying this would be unthinkable.
And Harold Wilson, the next day, gave an extra five million
so that no tax had to be paid.
Here, David.
LOUISE MEDUS-MANSELL: I remember being in the paper,
on the press.
I remember, um,
the strain on-on the family.
And I also remember meeting Harry at my house.
I didn't know who he was; I thought he was
a rather strange man to start off with.
And the fact that he and my dad and the rest of the campaign,
you know, the rest of the campaign team
finally did get the compensation--
that was so important to us.
You know, I remember saying that at...
(clears throat)
...that at the end of the day, there were no medals to be won,
because the victims still had no arms and no legs.
(film projector rattling)
MIKEY ARGY: We received the compensation,
and the trust fund was set up
around the same time, because they were aware--
Harold Evans was very aware--
that we would need that money for the rest of our lives.
NARRATOR: But the settlement was not universally acclaimed
by other commentators who didn't know the full facts.
EVANS: Peregrine Worsthorne and all those were saying,
"Harold Evans is like a Robin Hood.
He's just, you know, a bandit holding people up."
AJP Taylor, the famous historian, said,
"This is outrageous, what The Sunday Times was doing."
So, it's very, very important, therefore, to conti...
for two reasons: one, to show what had happened,
and two, to learn.
If we don't learn from this drug disaster,
which we should have learned in 1962, we should ha...
1963, we should have learned, 1964.
And we're now in 1973, and we still haven't learned
what the cause of the disaster.
They're really incredible.
This is... this is the, uh, chemical breakup of it...
NARRATOR: Although they had won the moral victory
and proper compensation,
the true story about the drug had yet to be told.
The Insight team carried on
with their forensic investigation
into the hidden causes of the disaster,
and started to compose the most explosive piece of all:
"Thalidomide: The Story They Suppressed."
POTTER: After the...
the September the 24th article appeared,
it was only after that, uh,
that we... we really began the investigation.
NARRATOR: The first question to ask was:
Why did Distillers want to license the drug?
They had little history of pharmaceuticals.
POTTER: The thing about Distillers
was that they were new to drugs.
Thalidomide was practically the first drug they'd ever handled.
And they'd read an article, which I think actually appeared
in The Sunday Times, uh, written by Aldous Huxley,
a sort of Brave New World account
of what was going to happen,
a sort of futurologist sort of piece,
saying that drugs were gonna replace alcohol.
And they-they sort of had a bit of a panic, and they thought,
"Well, we better do something about this."
And that is... that is why they got into drugs.
(machine clacking steadily)
NARRATOR: The investigation looked
to challenge the Distillers claim
about the tests carried out in that era.
POTTER: We looked to see which drug companies did what
and what they knew about drugs in the '50s.
I then went to America.
And I went round all the major drug companies,
finding out what they knew
before marketing new drugs.
And what we very quickly learned and confirmed
was that the serious companies,
the companies which had been in the business for a long time,
did reproductive studies actually looking
to see whether they produced
damage to the fetus.
Lederle, Hoffman-LaRoche,
Smith-Kline & French--
they all did reproductive studies.
And ICI here.
ICI actually went to
the level of using primates, uh, which was very serious indeed.
NARRATOR: In 1957, Distillers had sent the drug
for independent testing.
The results warned that it could cause damage
to the thyroid gland, a known cause of birth defects,
but they still went ahead.
Bruce Page went to extraordinary lengths
to understand the complex details
of how the drug actually worked.
PAGE: One of the things you've got to
understand about... about the testing of drugs
is, even now, with the best possible technology,
it isn't foolproof.
But you can say
that nature... usually provides warning signs
around desperate chemicals.
And almost any time you look at thalidomide,
it shows up bad.
It's a very complex little molecule.
Exists in strange forms,
and its actions are very unpredictable.
Thalidomide is asymmetric, and that's in the words
of Dr. Robert Smith, I recall, at St. Mary's Hospital.
He said, "Just look at that.
"That's a nasty molecule.
There's something wrong with it."
Grunenthal were really, really bad at drug testing,
and Distillers knew nothing about it at all.
The intersection of
this bunch of soap makers, which is what they had been,
with the bunch of whiskey makers in Britain,
was a horrible one-off disaster.
EVANS: The Minister of Health at the time, Mr. Enoch Powell,
instead of rushing to the defense of the parents,
doesn't have a public enquiry and is
briefed, or receives a briefing,
which is basically the Distillers case, and accepts it.
Yes, the civil servant who briefs Powell is himself briefed
by a senior man at Distillers.
NARRATOR: Finally, the investigation was complete.
The results damning.
But still, The Sunday Times was prevented from publishing it
because an injunction was in place.
MALE REPORTER: And you can't tell me now
what was going on in Distillers?
I can't tell you, no.
I'm bound by the injunction, as anybody else is.
Did they have research facilities,
laboratories for testing drugs, that sort of thing?
Not on the scale that would've been necessary
to market a drug like thalidomide in Britain.
But nonetheless, they did market it.
Yes, they went ahead and marketed it.
And how that came about is the part that you can't tell?
That's what I'm not allowed to tell.
We're already on touchy ground here.
The details of why they actually picked on thalidomide,
why they went to Chemie Grunenthal,
uh, what tests they did on the drug
before marketing it on animals, uh, what tests they did to see
how the drug was absorbed into the human system,
what tests they did to see whether it was safe
for pregnant women to take before advertising it as such,
what clinical trials they did and the results
of those clinical trials, I can't discuss.
NARRATOR: However, building on the Insight team's research,
the Thalidomide Trust and others have finally,
but only recently, began to uncover the full story
of the drug's development.
They looked into how the owners of Chemie Grunenthal
had had the resources to set up a pharmaceutical division
when all around them was rubble.
They discovered that they were paid-up members
of the Nazi Party
who'd exploited the Aryanization program
in order to buy up Jewish-owned companies
at a fraction of their value.
According to the company's records,
it only took eight weeks from starting
to develop their wonder drug to the first patent
for thalidomide being filed.
This seemed a suspiciously short amount of time.
In all likelihood, the scientists involved
had been working on these compounds prior to the war.
NARRATOR: Hitler ordered one of those scientists
to develop an antidote.
After the war, Otto Ambros went on to work
at Chemie Grunenthal.
JOHNSON: Now, Otto Ambros was known as "the Devil's Chemist,"
and he was the man
who decided that there should be a big concentration camp
at a place called Auschwitz.
We looked at thalidomide,
and we looked at the claim that
it was a completely new type of compound,
and we discovered instead that, in fact,
it was one of thousands of similar compounds,
and-and some of them well-known drugs,
that went back to the 1940s and the 1930s.
We got hold of the earliest patents for thalidomide,
and we showed them to one of our experts,
and he looked at the description of the effects
of this chemical and said, "How did they know that?"
And the effects he was looking at
were five different effects on the nervous system.
NARRATOR: These five separate descriptions show
that the writers of the patent knew that the drug acted
on the nervous system in such a way
that it caused a slowing down of muscle movements,
creating a sedating effect.
It reduced the metabolism, heartbeat,
circulatory and digestive systems
with effects on the immune system.
JOHNSON: There was no legal way
in which they could've tested this chemical on humans
before they wrote this patent.
And in any event, in postwar Germany,
that would've been illegal.
Although we have no direct evidence
that thalidomide was used or tested in the camps,
there is a lot of circumstantial evidence,
and one of the startling stories we heard
was from the mother of one of our thalidomiders.
SINCLAIR: It was my brother-in-law
who was one of the first
into Belsen Concentration Camp, who liberated them.
It was only nearing the end of his life that he said,
"You know, that's where I saw babies
with deformities like thalidomide."
He said, "Some were living, only just,
and others were very dead."
But he says, "They had been
obviously giving it to the mothers of these children."
REPORTER: This is the doctor in charge of the female section
of the concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen.
(woman speaking German)
She adds that various medical experiments
were made on the prisoners.
Doctors gave some of them intravenous injections.
And it was when we started looking at the patents
for similar compounds in the 1940s that we realized
that all of these drugs were being tested
for their anti-convulsant effects, and...
this... this made sense
only in an era where people were trying
to find antidotes for the nerve poisons.
MALE REPORTER: This clothing will protect the wearer
from contact with liquid nerve agent,
as well as from nerve agent vapor.
And if symptoms of nerve agent poisoning appear,
you have still another form of protection:
your atropine injector.
This is to be used only after symptoms
of nerve agent poisoning appear.
NARRATOR: Any potential antidote
to the nerve gasses would have to have been designed
to temporarily deaden the victim's nervous system.
However, this effect would have catastrophic consequences
for a baby developing in the womb.
JOHNSON: The way the drug damaged the babies was acting
as a nerve poison, and the thalidomide molecule
gets into the baby, just as its nervous system
is starting to form,
and kills the developing nerve end,
and it does it with great precision.
(heart beating)
The nervous system begins developing around day 20,
so, on day 20 to 21,
uh, the-the baby is liable to have severe brain damage.
Then at day 21
to 22,
it may remove one or both of the eyes
and damage the remaining eye.
And at 23, it'll take away the hearing.
And it may remove the ears,
it may damage the inner ear, the middle ear,
the outer ear, and it may do those in random combinations.
And around day 24, it will begin removing the arm system,
so it begins with a complete removal of the arms,
until by 28, it'll just be damage to the hands and wrists.
And around day 30, it'll be the removal of the legs,
or severe damage to the legs,
down to day 35,
where it will be moderate damage to the legs and feet.
So, thalidomide attacks the embryo
almost with the precision of a sniper's rifle,
with the effects changing day by day.
NARRATOR: So thalidomide was a by-product
of the Nazi chemical warfare program.
It only stood out from the other compounds developed
at the time because it acted
as an addictive sedative that gave the user a high.
DANDILY (echoing): So I took 'em, which you did.
They was good, don't get me wrong.
They were smashing when I... when I took 'em, you know?
I felt real good.
TELFORD TAYLOR: The crimes with which these men are charged
were not committed in rage
or under the...
NARRATOR: Ambros was implicated in serious war crimes
involving the deaths of tens of thousands of people.
But by the time of the Nuremberg trials in 1946,
the Allies were overwhelmed by war criminals.
-Otto Ambros. -Ambros.
NARRATOR: Although some Nazi scientists were executed,
most punishments were relatively lenient.
JOHNSON: Otto Ambros could
no longer go and work in the top companies in the industry,
and that's why they were working around smaller businesses
like Grunenthal.
NARRATOR: Inexplicably, in December 1970,
the judges at the trial of executives of Chemie Grunenthal
suspended what was by then
the longest criminal trial in German history.
After two and a half years in court,
the accused were neither exonerated nor found guilty.
The question of criminal responsibility
has never been concluded.
The Page-Potter article was finally completed
and the presses ready to roll,
but The Sunday Times were told they couldn't publish,
and an injunction was issued by the attorney general.
They appealed and won.
The case then went to the House of Lords.
EVANS: So we're now in the House of Lords,
and I'm sitting there with my colleagues.
And the final conclusion of the judge is the following--
just listen to this--
"The article will be banned.
"It is perfectly all right for The Sunday Times
"to have conducted a moral campaign,
"but it is illegal to publish the facts
on which the moral campaign was based."
So we've now lost in the House of Lords.
So what do we do?
So we appeal to the European Commission of Rights
that Harold Evans, representing my colleagues, of course,
had been denied free speech
under Article 10 of the Human Rights Act.
So we then got in bumpy airplane rides to Strasbourg
week after week after week
to argue the case before the court.
And we won by... really, by two votes.
FEMALE REPORTER: Mr. Evans, just how significant
do you think this judgment is today?
Tremendous. It's the most important judgment for the...
not only for the freedom of the press
but for the citizens' right to know in England.
The most distinguished group of judges have told
the British government, "Reform the laws."
They've got to do it now.
That was Harry's greatest achievement, I think,
to change British law in favor,
if you like, of press freedom, in favor...
give more power to the powerless, in a sense,
by enabling investigative journalism
to continue despite a gagging writ.
♪ ♪
(typewriter clacking)
EVANS: The production is
superb today; we're well ahead.
Everything's pretty... Well, everything is set.
Everybody who we wanted to-to comment has said no,
and we'll say that on the front page.
And in the meantime, I must get on with this.
MAN: It's the right number of words, is it?
I think it's over. I've...
My guess is that we're probably two or three columns over.
But how can you deal with ten years of nonsense
and silence and secrecy?
♪ ♪
(speaking indistinctly)
NARRATOR: The Insight team's exposé of Distillers
was finally published.
It was the culmination of a long battle
and a significant step towards liberating
what Harry famously called "the half-free press."
RUSBRIDGER: There's something about the institutional weight
of a newspaper that has to stand behind reporting,
and-and that is... that is the fourth estate.
And I think that's-that's the thing that I most fear
about the digital age, is-is that you lose that
counterbalancing force of-of what the institutional weight
of the press standing behind reporting.
Uh, whether it's against countries
or corporations or governments.
Uh, and, you know,
I think Harry Evans, in some ways, embodies that.
NARRATOR: In 2005, Harry was given
the post of editor-at-large for Thomson Reuters,
the world's largest news agency,
where he once again works under the proprietorship
of the Thomson family.
EVANS: Every newspaper editor's
face should be marked with his features removed
and a big question mark superimposed.
Does he have curiosity?
He needs to have a sense of purpose.
What is he in the game for?
Is it to maximize money?
Is it to maximize his own reputation?
What is it for?
Once it d... gets defined by the making of money only--
let's say we need it, we need to be sustained--
but once it's defined by the making of money,
there are no inhibitions.
Anything that makes money, he's justified.
To my way of thinking,
which sounds a bit like a Boy Scout,
that's not a sufficient definition of a good editor
and a sufficient guidance.
(indistinct chatter)
Yeah, she likes having hers done.
I hate it.
EVANS: This whole fantastic story
can only begin by my saying to everybody here,
b-beginning first with the mothers, whom we often think,
"Oh, they were the mothers."
Yeah, the mothers,
giving birth to you,
much as you were loved, it was a shock.
And the fathers--
most of whom were good, some of whom were not.
And, of course, you.
And I just think it's absolutely astonishing
and amazing to me
that those babies I first saw
when I was editor at The Northern Echo
are now here making lives.
So if we'd never won a penny of compensation,
that would be an amazing reward.
So congratulations to you.
(applause)
ARGY: He changed the dynamic
and the intention of what was going on
in the rest of the world, where the fault was with the parents.
You know, countries were saying that,
"Well, the mothers took the drug.
It's their fault the children are like this."
But Harold Evans came along and he said, "No,
"this is the fault of the pharmaceutical companies,
and they're the ones who must pay."
And he took the blame away from the parents,
which is a massive thing, because any parent
will always blame themselves for the way their child turns out.
-Thank you so very much. -(applause)
He took that responsibility away and that guilt,
and he made it very clear that it was
the pharmaceutical company, Distillers,
and not the parents who were at fault.
There was a Daily Mirror front page...
GALVIN: I will remember
as long as I live the day I read
in that paper about that injunction, that writ,
and about what they were going to do.
-It's here. -He was determined
to take on the big boys. And, you know, the bigger they are,
the harder the fall, which he proved.
(Dominic speaks indistinctly)
He's only a little guy, but, my God,
he is Mr. Perfection, Mr. Sunday Times.
Without him, we didn't stand a... we didn't stand a chance.
The ever complex,
multifaceted, changing,
thrilling nature of the mosaic of news.
And that's how I got into journalism.
♪ ♪
Let me make the following statement
on behalf of the government.
I know many thalidomiders have waited a long time for this.
It is agreed with the National Advisory Council
of the Thalidomide Trust.
The government wishes to express
its sincere regret and deep sympathy
for the injury and suffering endured
by all those affected when expectant mothers
took the drug thalidomide between 1958 and 1961.
ARGY: It was like
the world stood still; everything just stopped
when Mike O'Brien, the health minister,
started his statement of regret.
It was kind of like... The only way I can describe it,
it's like everything went into alignment.
The challenges that many continue to endure,
often on a daily basis...
I'd waited my whole life to hear this apology,
and finally I've heard it.
And then I flew out to New York that night
on the 6:00 p.m. flight.
Next morning, I went banging around to Harold Evans' house.
And it was so exciting, because for everything
that Harold had managed to do for us,
one thing he hadn't been able to do was get that apology.
So we watched it together and we just had our arms wrapped round
each other, and we were just crying, staring at the...
at his little computer screen,
watching Mike O'Brien make his apology.
♪ ♪
(music fades)