Anthrax, Ammunition and Cyanide – What’s under the Golf Course according to the Locals

By May Chan-Rhodes

For many carefree afternoons and school holidays in the 60s, Julian Derrick and his friends would run around having adventures on the golf course – until they were told to stop when the tip was revealed to have all sorts of toxic refuse.

‘I can still remember the great sense of freedom… there was no worries ever, just lots of fun,’

Julian Derrick

‘I can still remember the great sense of freedom… there was no worries ever, just lots of fun,’ Julian recalled with nostalgia. Now 62 years old, he was born and raised on St Laurence Road, which is a stone’s throw away from the site.

There would be about 10 skips at the front of the tip for people to dispose of household waste like hedge cuttings, grass, and broken furniture. In the daytime, families could come out and empty their dustbins, too.

‘We would go down the tip and find old prams, take the wheels off and make go-karts,’ said Julian. ‘The guy who worked on the tip would come running over, and we would scarper round all these different humps.’

All the carefree adventures came to a halt when its darker past surfaced. One neighbour, called Matt King, told the children what lurked underneath the unassuming surroundings of the tip.

Mr King would say: ‘You don’t want to be playing on there if you knew what was down there.” “What’s that then, Mr King?” the children would ask.

‘And I can remember Mr King saying: ‘Dead cattle…there were anthrax cattle buried there in the early 1900’s, and sheep with Foot and Mouth (disease)’,’ said Julian.

In the 1970s, the Wiltshire Times featured pictures and stories on the drums of cyanide in the caves around the path leading from Greenland View to Bridge Street next to ‘The Avon’, referring to the Avon Rubber Factory, one of the biggest local employers at the time. It later became Avon Polymers.

Julian said the local people believed that The Avon was using cyanide, toluene, naptha and other powerful chemicals that were banned by the EU, in industrial cleaning. They believed that the factory then dumped the chemicals in the vicinity.

He also heard that American GI’s camped up at Upper Westwood also dumped their small arms, bullets, and probably defused grenades, towards the end of World War II. It was difficult for locals like himself to get the full picture because there was simply no monitoring of what went into the
dump.

‘I can certainly remember lorries going up about eight o’clock-ish in the evening,’ said Julian, whose bed room overlooked St Laurence Road. ‘I often wondered … why not go there in the daytime when the guy was there working, you know?’

When asked of his view of the proposed development of the site, Julian simply called it ‘dangerous’.

‘Dangerous. Dangerous,’ he emphasised. ‘There are rats down there; there are chemicals down there. They’ll release it all and who’s going to take the blame with this – if something catastrophic like death or illness happens?’

‘Cos I know what they’ll do, the Council being the Council. They will just literally say: “oh, nothing to do with us, nothing to do with us.’’

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Based on Jess Holtaway’s interview with Julian Derrick on July 26th 2024, for Keep It Green BOA