Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited

Turner Brothers Asbestos Company of Rochdale, England, began with packings in the 1870s and became a leading maker of asbestos textiles and packings, with mines in southern Africa. It was one of the three companies whose amalgamation, announced in 1919, created Turner & Newall, and by 1973 it was trading as TBA Industrial Products Ltd. Its Rochdale workers were studied for decades by company doctors and outside researchers, and claims against the Turner & Newall companies are now paid by the Federal-Mogul asbestos trust.

Draft. The history on this page was written from the documents in our library and has not yet been reviewed by a person.

History

The firm's own house magazine, Asbestos, marked Sir Samuel Turner's 80th birthday in April 1920 with a history of the business. It says the firm of Turner Brothers "dates from the year 1871," that its first patent, secured that year by Samuel Turner, was for a packing ring made from greasy cotton cloth and wire gauze with a rubber strip in the centre, and that after many months of experiments in spinning and weaving asbestos fibre, "The year 1880 may be said to be the birth year of the Asbestos Industry in this country."¹ A 1925 profile of Sir Samuel in the American trade journal Asbestos says his invention of asbestos packing "was really the beginning of the commercial asbestos industry," and that the government adopted it for the Navy.¹³ American accounts in 1924 and 1929 add that Turner Brothers worked with John Bell of Bell's Asbestos Company to develop the spinning of Canadian asbestos and for a time made asbestos goods to Bell's requirements; those accounts credit Bell, not Turner, with the Admiralty's adoption of asbestos packing.¹⁴¹⁵

By 1919 the American journal was calling the firm "the largest manufacturers of Asbestos products in that country, and probably, if all were known, in the world."¹⁶ Besides the Rochdale works at Spotland, it had a works at Trafford Park, Manchester, which a 1943 profile of a long-serving director says was "mainly engaged in the manufacture of asbestos-cement products, asbestos paper and millboard and various forms of asbestos insulation."¹⁷¹⁸ Photographs from 1918 in our collection show women at Turner Brothers in Manchester sewing asbestos mattresses for lining ships' boilers and cutting corrugated asbestos sheeting.¹⁹²⁰ A 1926 Turner Brothers letter in the library quotes Abbott & Co. (Newark) Ltd. a price for asbestos-filled mattresses.²¹

The firm reached back to the mines. In 1922 Asbestos reported Mr. Turner in South Africa to inspect the company's mining properties in Rhodesia, and a 1923 list of Rhodesian mines names the African Asbestos Mining Co. (Turner Bros.) as working several of them.³⁴ In 1929 the journal reported a ropeway being built by Turner Brothers to serve the New Amianthus Mine.²²

Turner & Newall. A notice dated November 1919 and printed in the firm's magazine in January 1920 says the directors of Turner Brothers Asbestos Company, the Washington Chemical Company and Newall's Insulation Company intended to amalgamate the three companies, each keeping its name and its own directors.⁵ That merger created Turner & Newall.⁶ In 1925 the London press reported an amalgamation with Ferodo Limited, the brake lining maker, and in 1928 Asbestos reported Turner Brothers joining with Bell's United Asbestos Company, an amalgamation the journal described in 1929 as being with Turner-Newall.²³²⁴¹⁵ A 1971 notice described Turner Brothers as "a subsidiary of Turner & Newall Ltd."²⁵

Products

The firm's products were mainly textiles and packings: a 1936 catalog noted in Asbestos covered "textiles or packings," and a 1967 advertisement offered aluminised asbestos cloth for heat-protective clothing, asbestos yarns and cloths "in all grades," the Permanite range of compressed asbestos sheet packings, and braided and proofed packings, calling the Rochdale works "the largest asbestos-textile factory in the world."²⁶² In 1971 the company announced Fortex, a line of chrysotile asbestos textiles made by a wet dispersion process, and that year it won the Queen's Award to Industry for exports; over 40 percent of its 1970 sales went to 119 countries.²⁷²⁵ It also made asbestos-filled plastics: a reference list gives Arpylene ARP 1040 as 40 percent chrysotile, and in 1976 a Union Carbide salesman reported a customer who had seen polypropylene "filled with a Turner Brothers asbestos product known as Arpolene."²⁸²⁹ Labels in the library include Durestos asbestos felt moulding material.³⁰

TBA Industrial Products. In September 1970 Asbestos still named the company Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. Ltd.; by January 1973 it was listing officers of TBA Industrial Products Ltd. at Spotland, Rochdale.³¹⁷ In December 1971 Asbestos reported that Turner & Newall was establishing a fiber research unit at the Rochdale works to study fibers other than asbestos.³² A 1980 report on Turner & Newall's industrial materials companies said exports made up 45 percent of TBA's sales and that "Sales of asbestos textiles were augmented by the successful introduction of the Fortaglas and Fortamid ranges of asbestos substitute materials."³³ TBA Industrial Products still appears in the journal in 1981.³⁴

What the documents show

Early cases. In October 1924 Asbestos recalled a case at Rochdale, first mentioned in its July number, in which an employee of an asbestos plant had died from what it called "asbestos poisoning," a death later made the basis of a suit against Turner Brothers Asbestos Company.³⁵ The firm's own magazine for 1918 to 1920 says almost nothing about dust in the works.⁶

Dust control. In December 1949 a visitor wrote in Asbestos that at Turner Brothers in Rochdale "The clean operating conditions in all departments were impressive" and that the removal of dust from cards, looms and other equipment was "highly effective."³⁶ In December 1950 Dr. J. F. Knox of Turner Brothers sent the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association a report on pulmonary cancer; his tables measure workers' exposure up to the completion of the factory's full programme of protection, which they date to 1932.⁸ Johns-Manville's chronology describes the report as finding "ten cases out of 100 cases in which carcinoma was associated with asbestosis" in autopsies from 1930 to 1950, and notes that Knox pointed out "the limitations of such small studies."⁸ A 1974 Johns-Manville seminar booklet, describing a study by Knox, says the Rochdale plant had no dust control before 1933 and calls the study "a dramatic illustration of the effectiveness of dust control."³⁷ The two documents give different years for the start of dust control, 1932 and 1933.⁸³⁷

Barry Castleman's history of asbestos, as our reading guide records, cites a 1958 report by Richard Doll to Turner & Newall on mortality among Turner Brothers workers from 1943 to 1957, and 1961 letters from Turner Brothers officials referring to an arrangement under which Keasbey & Mattison was not expected to trade outside certain areas and Turner Brothers did not do business directly in the United States.⁹³⁸ In February 1966 Joe Goldfield sent J. A. Vermeulen a report of a trip to Turner Brothers on health problems, one of the documents in Johns-Manville's chronology.³⁹

Company doctors. Dr. Hilton C. Lewinsohn was medical officer at Turner Brothers from 1966 and chief medical officer of TBA and medical adviser to Turner & Newall from October 1969 to September 1976, before becoming a medical director at Raybestos-Manhattan and later at Union Carbide.⁴⁰ With S. Holmes, Turner Brothers' chief health physicist, he wrote a 1972 article on occupational health factors in the United Kingdom, and in 1975 he presented a paper on forty years of surveillance of asbestos textile workers at TBA.⁴¹¹⁰

The 1976 OSHA debate. A paper titled "A Mortality Study Among Workers in an English Asbestos Factory," presented orally at an international congress at Brighton in 1975 and attributed to Howard, Kinlen, Lewinsohn, Peto and Doll, was cited by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration in proposing a lower asbestos limit.⁴² In September 1976 the Asbestos Information Association/North America sent OSHA data and a statement from TBA Industrial Products, which it called the "parent organization" of that factory, saying they showed the cohort provided no data "to impugn the adequacy" of the U.S. standard of two fibers per milliliter.⁴² TBA's own statement, signed by N. Rhodes, was more guarded. It said the view "that dust levels in our particular factory had been at or below 2 fibres/ml for many years" was mistaken: "Whilst this was true for certain locations it was by no means the level which had obtained on many of our operations."¹¹ It said the company's target of 2 fibres/ml in all working areas where respirators were not required would be reached by January 1, 1977, and that interpreting the data had been left to recognised medical statisticians.⁴³

Bankruptcy and trust

Turner & Newall was later bought by Federal-Mogul, an American auto-parts company, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 1, 2001.¹² Its plan was confirmed on November 8, 2007, and the Federal-Mogul Asbestos Personal Injury Trust took effect on December 27, 2007; it pays claims against the Turner & Newall companies.¹² Our library does not record what became of TBA Industrial Products after the early 1980s.

References

1. Asbestos (Turner Brothers), April 1920, p. 14
2. Asbestos magazine, June 1967, p. 23
3. Asbestos magazine, August 1922, p. 57
4. Asbestos magazine, August 1923, p. 15
5. Asbestos (Turner Brothers), January 1920, p. 10
6. Asbestos, the Turner Brothers Magazine: The Archive, 1918–1920
7. Asbestos magazine, January 1973, p. 44
8. Dr. J. F. Knox of Turner Brothers Asbestos, Report to the Quebec Asbestos Mining Association on Pulmonary Cancer (1950), ACL Doc 11250
9. Reading Castleman, Chapter 2: Cancer
10. Union Carbide exhibit UC-1276, H. C. Lewinsohn, The Surveillance of Asbestos Textile Workers ... at TBA Industrial Products Ltd (1975)
11. Union Carbide exhibit UC-1345, Statement by TBA Industrial Products Ltd., p. 3
12. Federal-Mogul / Turner & Newall Asbestos Trust Claims
13. Asbestos magazine, March 1925, p. 23
14. Asbestos magazine, September 1924, p. 34
15. Asbestos magazine, June 1929, p. 27
16. Asbestos magazine, November 1919, p. 7
17. Asbestos magazine, August 1939, p. 42
18. Asbestos magazine, November 1943, p. 15
19. Turner Brothers Asbestos: Sewing Asbestos Mattresses for Ships' Boilers (1918)
20. Turner Brothers Asbestos: Cutting Corrugated Asbestos Sheeting by Guillotine (1918)
21. Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. letter quoting asbestos-filled mattresses to Abbott & Co. (Newark) Ltd. (1926), ACL Doc 14598
22. Asbestos magazine, March 1929, p. 53
23. Asbestos magazine, June 1925, p. 42
24. Asbestos magazine, November 1928, p. 51
25. Asbestos magazine, July 1971, p. 16
26. Asbestos magazine, January 1936, p. 38
27. Asbestos magazine, May 1971, p. 16
28. Arpylene ARP 1040 (Turner Brothers Asbestos), product page
29. Union Carbide exhibit UC-292, E. J. Kleber call report on Thermofil, Inc., February 12, 1976
30. Label: Durestos asbestos felt moulding material (Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. Ltd.), ACL Doc 20302
31. Asbestos magazine, September 1970, p. 51
32. Asbestos magazine, December 1971, p. 16
33. Asbestos magazine, June 1980, p. 38
34. Asbestos magazine, April 1981, p. 38
35. Asbestos magazine, October 1924, p. 44
36. Asbestos magazine, December 1949, p. 16
37. Johns-Manville, A Condensation of Environmental Facts on Asbestos and Health, Customer Seminars (1974), ACL Doc 11664, pp. 19–20
38. Reading Castleman, Chapter 1: The Development of Knowledge about Asbestosis
39. Joe Goldfield to J. A. Vermeulen, Report of a Trip to Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. on Health Problems (1966), ACL Doc 11574
40. Union Carbide exhibit B1-025, Curriculum Vitae of Hilton Cecil Lewinsohn, p. 2
41. Union Carbide exhibit UC-1634, H. C. Lewinsohn and S. Holmes, "Occupational health factors in the United Kingdom" (1972)
42. Union Carbide exhibit UC-1345, R. H. Mereness (AIA/NA) to OSHA Docket Officer, September 17, 1976, p. 2
43. Union Carbide exhibit UC-1345, Statement by TBA Industrial Products Ltd., p. 4

People

People the documents tie to Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited, most often named first, with the titles the documents give them.

• Hilton Cecil Lewinsohn: Chief Medical Officer
• S. Holmes: Chief Health Physicist unreviewed
• J. F. Knox unreviewed

Asbestos products

11 products our documents name Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited as making or selling. Each product's page says what the documents say about it, including its asbestos content.

• Arpylene Arp 1040 (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Dura-Color (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Duraform (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Durestos (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Ferodo (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Firefly (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Firefly 800 (TBA Industrial Products, Turner & Newall)
• Fortex (TBA Industrial Products)
• Permanite (TBA Industrial Products)
• Sindayano (Turner Brothers Asbestos)
• Tba "T" Range (Turner Brothers Asbestos)

In our library

14 documents in our library name Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited, by collection.

In the Union Carbide documents

Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited is named in 24 Union Carbide documents dated 1964 to 1979 (1 as the source, 24 mentioned), from asbestos lawsuits over Union Carbide's Calidria asbestos. All are published in our collection.

• G. J. Stopps to J. A. Zapp, Jr. – Trip Report on the 1964 New York Academy of Sciences Conference on Biological Effects of Asbestos (1964) UC-4686 (mentioned)
• H. C. Lewinsohn and S. Holmes, 'Occupational health factors in the United Kingdom,' CIBA-GEIGY Review (1972) UC-1634 (mentioned)
• CIBA-GEIGY Review 1972/2: Special Issue on Asbestos (Nature, Mining, Textiles, Building Products, Plastics, Occupational Health) UC-5399 (mentioned)
• W. N. Johnson to F. H. Larrison and E. A. Piersall Forwarding AIA/NA Memos on the FDA Asbestos Task Force and the Bureau of Mines Asbestos Dust Standard (1972) UC-5096 (mentioned)
• H. C. Lewinsohn, 'Early Malignant Changes in Pleural Plaques Due to Asbestos Exposure: A Case Report', Brit. J. Dis. Chest (1974) Union Carbide 263 (mentioned)
• H. C. Lewinsohn, 'Early Malignant Changes in Pleural Plaques Due to Asbestos Exposure: A Case Report', Brit. J. Dis. Chest (1974) UC-1260 (mentioned)
• Hilton C. Lewinsohn, 'Health Hazards of Asbestos: A Review of Recent Trends,' Journal of the Society of Occupational Medicine (1974) UC-1278 (mentioned)
• Compilation of Lewinsohn Asbestos Health Papers and Related Articles, Including 'Health Hazards of Asbestos: A Review of Recent Trends' (1974) UC-1284 (mentioned)
• Hilton C. Lewinsohn, 'Health Hazards of Asbestos: A Review of Recent Trends' (1974) UC-2590 (mentioned)
• H. C. Lewinsohn, The Surveillance of Asbestos Textile Workers in relation to the Environmental Background during Forty Years of Change at TBA Industrial Products Ltd (1975) UC-1276 (mentioned, source)
• R. H. Mereness (Asbestos Information Association) to OSHA Docket Officer, Transmitting TBA Industrial Products Statement and Tables on English Asbestos Factory Cohort (1976) UC-1345 (mentioned)
• Peto, Doll, Howard, Kinlen and Lewinsohn, 'A mortality study among workers in an English asbestos factory' (1977) UC-1259 (mentioned)
• C. C. Evans, H. C. Lewinsohn and June M. Evans, 'Frequency of HLA Antigens in Asbestos Workers With and Without Pulmonary Fibrosis', British Medical Journal (1977) UC-2595 (mentioned)
• Glenda J. Spencer to H. W. Renshaw (A. E. Staley) Sending Calidria Asbestos Literature, with Literature Checklist, CIBA-GEIGY Asbestos Review Cover and Renshaw Letter to H. B. Rhodes (1978) UC-503 (mentioned)
• G. Berry et al., Asbestosis: A Study of Dose-Response Relationships in an Asbestos Textile Factory, British Journal of Industrial Medicine (1979) UC-1279 (mentioned)
• Berry, Gilson, Holmes, Lewinsohn and Roach, 'Asbestosis: a study of dose-response relationships in an asbestos textile factory', British Journal of Industrial Medicine (1979) UC-4788 (mentioned)
• Hilton C. Lewinsohn (Raybestos-Manhattan) Statement to House Subcommittee on Labor Standards on Asbestos-Related Diseases and H.R. 2740 (1979) UC-4098 (mentioned)
• G. Berry and H. C. Lewinsohn, Dose-Response Relationships for Asbestos-Related Disease: Implications for Hygiene Standards, Part I. Morbidity, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (1979) UC-1258 (mentioned)
• G. Berry and H. C. Lewinsohn, Dose-Response Relationships for Asbestos-Related Disease: Implications for Hygiene Standards, Part I. Morbidity (1979) UC-4097 (mentioned)
• Curriculum Vitae of Hilton Cecil Lewinsohn, Union Carbide Medical Director, Chemicals & Plastics Group Union Carbide 25 (mentioned)
• Curriculum Vitae of Dr. Hilton Cecil Lewinsohn, Union Carbide Medical Director, Chemicals & Plastics Group UC-1275 (mentioned)
• J. Beattie and J. F. Knox, Studies of Mineral Content and Particle Size Distribution in the Lungs of Asbestos Textile Workers (undated reprint) UC-1460 (mentioned)
• S. Howard, L. J. Kinlen, H. C. Lewinsohn, J. Peto and R. Doll, A Mortality Study Among Workers in an English Asbestos Factory UC-1532 (mentioned)
• Biographical Sketch of Hilton C. Lewinsohn, Assistant Corporate Medical Director, Union Carbide UC-4856 (mentioned)

Names in the documents

The spellings documents use for Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited, OCR misreadings included, so a search for any of them finds this page: TBA Industrial Products Limited · Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. · Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. Ltd · TBA Industrial Products · TBA Industrial Products Ltd · TBA Industrial Products, Ltd · TBA Industrial Products Limited, Lancashire, UK · Turner Brothers Asbestos Company, Ltd · Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. Ltd. · Turner Brothers Asbestos (TBA) · Turner Brothers Asbestos · TBA Industrial Products Company Limited · Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited, Rochdale · Turner Brothers Asbestos Co. Ltd, Rochdale (author's employer as shown on page 32; the cover page names no organization).

Where this comes from

This page brings together every document in our library that names Turner Brothers Asbestos Company Limited, across collections. Titles and affiliations are taken from the documents themselves, and units and subsidiaries are grouped under the company they belong to.