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From: "Aftermath News"
Final agony of RAF volunteer killed by sarin in Britain

Guardian - Sept 28, 2003

Final agony of RAF volunteer killed by sarin - in Britain

Ronald Maddison: Took part in experiments in 1953

As the inquest into the death of a 'human guinea pig' at Porton Down opens, a
witness breaks 50 years' silence to recount the horrors he saw

Antony Barnett, public affairs editor
Sunday September 28, 2003
The Observer

Like most 19-year-olds, Alfred Thornhill had never seen anybody die. When the
fresh-faced trainee engineer from Salford answered his call for National
Service, he thought he could handle anything.

Dispatched to the ambulance service, the self-confident teenager arrived for a
month-long posting at Porton Down, the Government's top-secret chemical weapons
laboratory in Wiltshire. He was proud to be doing his bit for his country.
But nothing could have prepared the young Mancunian for the horrific events he
witnessed on a May morning in 1953. Answering an emergency call, he witnessed
scenes which would haunt him for half a century and thrust him to the centre of
an inquiry into one of the darkest hours of British military history.
Until today Thornhill - now a 70-year-old pensioner - has never spoken
publicly about what he saw. He feared the Ministry of Defence would send him to
prison.
He has now broken his silence to tell of the day he arrived at Porton Down's
gas chamber and saw the convulsing body of 20-year-old Ronald Maddison thrashing
around on the floor, spewing substances from his mouth.
Thornhill's eyewitness testimony will form a key plank of the reopened inquest
into Maddison's death, which is due to be heard in the next few weeks.
Maddison, an RAF engineer from County Durham, had been used as a human guinea
pig by MoD scientists experimenting on the lethal nerve gas sarin. Like hundreds
of others from the armed forces, Maddison had volunteered for the trials,
believing he was going to Porton Down to take part in some 'mild' experiments to
find a cure for the common cold. Instead, by dropping sarin onto Maddison's
skin, they used him to help determine the dosage of the lethal nerve agents.
Thornhill's accounts of the agonising last hours of Maddison's life shines a
light into the murky past of this secretive establishment and the shocking
experiments carried out on volunteers. Hundreds are suspected of dying
prematurely or going on to develop illnesses such as cancer, motor neurone
disease and Parkinson's. Despite the grief and fury of survivors and their
families, over the decades successive Governments have sought to bury the
scandal. But Thornhill's testimony could change all that.
'I had never seen anyone die before and what that lad went through was
absolutely horrific... it was awful,' he said. 'It was like he was being
electrocuted, his whole body was convulsing. I have seen somebody suffer an
epileptic fit, but you have never seen anything like what happened to that
lad... the skin was vibrating and there was all this terrible stuff coming out
of his mouth... it looked like frogspawn or tapioca.'
Thornhill recalls a number of scientists standing around Maddison. 'You could
see the panic in their eyes - one guy looked as if he was trying to hold his
head down. There were four of us who picked him off the floor and put him in the
back of the ambulance. He was still having these violent convulsions and we
drove him to the medical unit at Porton.'
By the time he reached the unit, it had been cleared of other casualties and
there were men in white coats standing around a bed.
Thornhill was told to carry Maddison over and it was then that the young
ambulance driver saw a second image that would haunt him for decades.
'I saw his leg rise up from the bed and I saw his skin begin turning blue. It
started from the ankle and started spreading up his leg. It was like watching
somebody pouring a blue liquid into a glass, it just began filling up. I was
standing by the bed gawping. It was like watching something from outer space and
then one of the doctors produced the biggest needle I had ever seen. It was the
size of a bicycle pump and went down onto the lad's body. The sister saw me
gawping and told me to get out.'
The next day Thornhill was 'devastated' when he was told by a medical officer
that the young man had died. He recalls the whole medical unit stinking of
Dettol as if it had been sprayed everywhere to decontaminate the rooms.
Thornhill was asked to drive the body to the mortuary at Salford General
Hospital and instructed to take the back roads.
At the time, Thornhill was suspicious of what had happened and why he was told
to take such a strange route to the hospital, but he simply followed orders.
'There was a lot of talk among the squaddies about nerve gas and mustard gas
and the like, but nobody really knew what was going on. In those days you
trusted the authorities and didn't ask too many questions. You kept yourself to
yourself.'
There was another reason why Thornhill kept quiet. 'I was called into an
office and read the riot act by a medical officer. He made me sign something and
told me if I ever spoke a word about what I saw at Porton Down I would be sent
to prison. I was frightened and didn't want to go to jail, so I didn't tell any
of the other lads what I had seen.'
Over the years, Thornhill has had frequent flashbacks of the terrible events
he witnessed, but has never mentioned them outside his immediate family. 'I used
to see things on the news and on TV that used to bring it all back to me. I
remember seeing the news about Saddam Hussein gassing the Kurds and I couldn't
stop thinking about that young lad.'
For 50 years, Thornhill found it difficult to stop wondering who the dying man
was. 'I noticed his blue RAF trousers under the blue boiler suit, but that's all
I ever never knew about him. I thought he might be married and his wife or
parents would want to know what happened and that there was somebody with him
when he died. I was recently engaged and I would have hoped somebody would have
done the same for me.'
Yet it was only this summer when he heard a report on a local Manchester radio
station about a police inquiry into the death of the RAF engineer Ronald
Maddison at Porton Down, that it all fitted into place. 'I stopped in my tracks
when I heard it. I knew that was it him, that it was Maddison. It was the right
date, he was in the RAF and they said it was the only person who had died at
Porton.'
Thornhill telephoned the Wiltshire police who were conducting the inquiry and
a team travelled to Manchester the next day to interview him. He gave them a
nine-page statement detailing all he knew and saw at Porton Down during his time
there. An original MoD inquest was held in secret in 1953 and recorded a verdict
of death by misadventure.
Although the police inquiry into events at Porton Down found insufficient
evidence to mount a criminal prosecution, their findings were passed to Lord
Chief Justice Woolf who ruled that the inquest must be reopened. Lawyers for
Maddison's family and the hundreds of other volunteers who have suffered
subsequent illnesses are hoping for a verdict of 'unlawful killing'.
Thornhill now wants to meet Maddison's family so he can talk to them about
what he saw. 'What that lad went through was horrendous, it shouldn't have been
allowed to happen to anybody. We talk about Saddam Hussein gassing his own
people but what we did at Porton Down was the same... I want his family to have
some justice.'
With Thornhill now ready to speak out 50 years later, Maddison's family might
finally be able to get just that.

Race to test a Cold War killer

Porton Down was established as a research centre on the edge of Salisbury
Plain in 1916, to help Britain catch up with German chemical weapons technology.
By the time Alfred Thornhill was an ambulance driver there in 1953, British
intelligence believed the Soviets were stockpiling nerve agents, such as sarin,
which could kill instantly or cause paralysis, convulsions and breathing
difficulties. Scientists at Porton Down wanted to know the precise doses to
cause such symptoms.
From 1945 more than 3,000 men were sent into the gas chamber; various amounts
of liquid nerve gas were dripped by pipette onto their arms. Many believed they
were helping to find a cure for the common cold.
Ronald Maddison died 45 minutes after 200mg of the deadly nerve agent sarin
was dripped onto a patch of uniform on his arm.The coroner's report was never
released but Lord Chief Justice Woolf has now ordered a fresh inquest.

Final agony of RAF volunteer killed by sarin - in Britain
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1051293,00.html