HEROES ALL! Mail and you to the PPE rescue
Readers’ epic response to our call to arms
NURSES with bin liners as uniforms; terrified pensioners trapped in germ-filled care homes; phones ringing off the hook in empty warehouses; the Prime Minister in intensive care. And with every passing day, another gallant key worker struck down in the line of duty...
It’s easy to forget just how bleak things were back in the spring.
That, however, was the catalyst for one of the most extraordinary newspaper campaigns of modern times: just days later, on a rainy evening at a near-deserted Heathrow, I watched an airliner stuffed with 20 tons of personal protective equipment (PPE) arrive from the other side of the world.
Within hours its precious cargo was on its way to the UK front line. A triumph of sorts – except that it was only the start.
It was back in early April that the chairman and editor of this newspaper finally decided that enough was enough. Though it is the media’s job to prod and poke the government of the day, there is a quid pro quo. When things get really bad, so the Mail believes, the right to criticise comes with an obligation to help. That time had come.
The British public had shown that they were desperate to assist in whatever way they could. There were touching stories of schools making face shields for the local hospital, of restaurants sending dinner to the nearest intensive care unit and so on. The problem, however, was a shortage of proper PPE. No amount of clapping on doorsteps could produce that. And the UK, along with most nations, was having to fight over dwindling supplies in a global marketplace.
So the Mail decided to help. A small group of us from various parts of this company was given a simple instruction: fill an airliner with PPE and deliver it to the NHS front line. We were in no doubt that, having done it once, our famously generous readers would want to do it again and again. Their response would bowl us over. Speed was of the essence. Thanks to the staff at the Charity Commission, we registered a new charity – Mail Force – in a matter of days.
We talked to the highest echelons of the NHS and established clear guidelines. First, we would not touch existing NHS supply lines. It would be futile to bid against our own side. Second, we would not donate anything without formal approval from the Department of Health’s own experts.
There were numerous reports of dubious agents and faulty goods crowding the market. Nearly all the world’s PPE came from China so that was where we would have to focus. Two things were vital: know-how and funding. The Mail, its chairman Viscount Rothermere and his family had donated an initial £1.25million but we were going to need much more. US software giant Salesforce was already sourcing PPE for hospitals in America and wanted to help. Its co-founder and chief executive Marc Benioff agreed to match initial donations up to £3million. Fund management experts Marshall Wace were on board with another £ 1million through chief executive, Ian Wace.
Philanthropists Hans and Julia Rausing directed £1million of their Covid emergency fund to Mail Force. Despite the urgency, we had to examine all offers of PPE very carefully. Some kit lacked the necessary certification. Some did not
meet Public Health England specifications. The NHS was particularly short of isolation gowns and had told us that it was seeking coveralls as well. We found a supplier of highquality, hooded ‘hazmat’-style coveralls which met all the requirements and managed to secure 50,000 of them at the market rate. We had a chartered Boeing 787 Dreamliner on standby. Our agents also offered us 100,000 basic Type II masks to fill the remaining cabin space. All told, here was 20 tons of vital PPE. The Department of Health team (who were working round the clock) checked it all out and gave their approval. Mail Force One was on its way to Shanghai.
It was a nervous wait. Just days earlier, the Canadian government had sent two jets to Shanghai to collect tons of PPE only to fly home empty-handed. I had a recurring nightmare of opening up our cargo to discover boxes full of plastic ducks or computer parts. Even so, it was a gratifying moment to be standing in the rain on the Heathrow ring road on the evening of April 28 watching our plane thundering out of a dark grey sky. Overnight, the cargo cleared customs (no ducks, mercifully) and, by dawn, was on its way to the NHS’s central distribution centre in the Midlands.
A small fleet of hired Mail Force vans helped make some of the first deliveries to Milton Keynes University Hospital. A day later, they went to care homes and charities. WHIlE
most of our PPE would go to the NHS, staff were keen for us to help other healthcare workers in need. In most cases we were delivering to places which had dutifully planned their PPE but had been let down or were running low.
I well recall arriving at one New Forest care home where staff were down to their last day’s supply of equipment when our van pulled up. They were jumping for joy. By then this newspaper had launched its appeal on behalf of the charity. Having spent £1million on that first airlift, Mail Force had to keep on delivering. The response was staggering. Our readers were unstoppable. We had to despatch extra helpers to our makeshift sorting office in leicester as the cheques poured in, as well as letters which left many staff in tears. For this had touched a deep nerve, a very deep nerve indeed.
Take Sylvia Duxbury of lancashire. She had just lost her beloved husband of 48 years, John, to Covid- 19. The retired auditor, grandfather and great-grandfather had been a resident at the Alexandra Nursing Home in Poulton-leFylde and Sylvia had been immensely touched by the way the staff had looked after John. So she made a generous donation to Mail Force in his memory, praising the charity for ‘grasping the nettle’.
By way of thanks, the home invited Sylvia and her daughter to be there when the Mail Force van arrived. It was an emotional moment. Elsewhere, at the Croft House care home in West Yorkshire, the jubilant staff very sweetly baked their van driver a cake.
Among our earliest donors was the Duchess of Cornwall. ‘ I’m delighted to contribute towards this magnificent campaign,’ she said. Former prime minister Sir John Major praised Mail Force for ‘avoiding heartache and misery for many thousands’, a view echoed by fellow ex-PM Gordon Brown, actor Sir Michael Caine and singer Sir Cliff Richard.
Actress Dame Emma Thompson made a handsome donation by way of thanking all of the NHS, especially those in Scotland who had been caring for her mother. As word continued to spread, so the campaign kept gathering momentum. Stagecoach founder Sir Brian Souter donated £500,000 and we received £200,000 from the Scheinberg Relief Fund.
Businessmen lord Michael Spencer and Sir Tom Hunter each sent us a generous six-figure sum as did the Duke of Westminster. Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of New York, sent us £200,000 while US investment bank Jefferies sent $100,000 (£75,000) in memory of its British-born chief financial officer Peregrine ‘Peg’ Broadbent, who died of Covid-19. Jeremy Darroch, head of Sky, donated both money and television advertising slots.
All the while our readers were bombarding us with generosity and often heartbreaking stories. As a result those airlifts kept on coming. We continued to seek new and better sources of kit (one early batch of Chinese masks, for example, came with the right EU certification but lacked the highest-grade fluid resistance and the factory was later accused of using slave labour; we never touched them again).
Our operation grew and grew. I watched a million masks touch down at Stansted. Weeks later, we flew a holiday jet into Bournemouth airport packed with no fewer than
four million masks on board. I went aboard to find them stuffed into every last seat, overhead locker and even one of the loos. THESE
were all superior Type IIR fluid-resistant masks sourced by our excellent lancashirebased partners, the ISSA Group. We wanted to start sourcing homegrown PPE, too. With ISSA we supported a new production line in Blackburn. When Griffin Mill, a former carpet factory, switched to producing hospital aprons, we bought the first run of 1.5million. They were such good aprons – so said the NHS staff who tried them – that we ordered nearly 20million.
We placed similar orders for new British-made face masks. When Bluetree, a Rotherham- based printing operation, announced it was opening a new plant making masks, Mail Force ordered the first six million. We also ordered half a million face visors from the Kingsbury Press, another printer-turnedPPE producer near Doncaster.
By summer NHS supplies had stabilised thanks to the new PPE ‘tsar’ lord Deighton. But the care and charity sectors were still desperately short of kit. Mail Force teamed up with the Salvation Army to help distribute millions of masks and aprons. We have now bought enough of them to supply more than a dozen much-loved charities through to 2021.
In recent weeks we have been providing top-of-the-range testing machinery across the UK. The three most remote hospitals in the country – on Shetland, Orkney and in Stornoway in the Western Isles – each received an £80,000 standalone BD Max testing machine.
Mail Force has spent £300,000 on a new three-part system for london’s Great Ormond Street Hospital. ‘ This is a really significant amount of money and this kit is as good as it gets,’ said general manager Nick Towndrow.
And so it goes on. This has been a campaign like no other in response to a crisis like no other. You, our readers, have been quite magnificent. We cannot thank you all in person. But wherever you live, rest assured that your donation has not only reached every corner of the country but that it has made a real difference. let’s hope we don’t need to do it again. But if we do, we know whom to ask.