20 YEARS ON FROM A RURAL DISASTER
FOOT & MOUTH SPECIAL REPORT
Farming was ready for better times at the beginning of 2001 – with great strides being made in exploiting the region’s ability to produce high quality food and drink in a beautiful environment. Then Foot and Mouth disease struck. PHILIP BOWERN reports in the first of a week of articles marking the 20th anniversary of the outbreak
FOOT and Mouth disease flares up from time to time in Britain, but on February 19 2001 it had been 19 years since the last outbreak, which – though serious – was nothing like a disaster. So when Anthony Gibson’s telephone rang that morning to report a new outbreak of the disease, the National Farmers’ Union South West Director, though concerned was not unduly alarmed. The outbreak was, after all, in Essex, found in pigs at an abattoir – a long way from the Westcountry for which Mr Gibson had responsibility. In his autobiography, out this week, he writes: “I expressed an appropriate degree of concern without, it must be said, being overly worried. I thought back to the outbreak on the Isle of Wight in 1981, when I’d been summoned from my Sunday lunch to write a feature for the Western Daily Press, nearly getting myself breathalysed in the process. That had proved to be a nine-day wonder. I suspected this might be the same.”
As it turned out, it was anything but.
The pigs had not brought the disease with them from their farms, which would have made tracing the source of the outbreak relatively straightforward, they had caught it at the abattoir, where dozens, potentially hundreds, of lorries had been coming and going for days. The urgent task was to track down the initial source and, in the meantime, to stop all animal movements, ban exports of meat and livestock and shut down markets.
There was relief when the source was traced back to Heddon-on-theWall, Northumberland, even further from the Westcountry than Essex. But it was short-lived. As Anthony settled down for a quiet weekend the phone rang again and the Ministry of Agriculture veterinary officer for Devon told the region’s farming leader FMD had been found in the county. Anthony writes: “He went on to explain that one of his veterinary officers had been called out that afternoon to a farm at Highampton, near Hatherleigh in the wilds of West Devon, where cattle were showing suspicious symptoms.
“The disease had been confirmed. The farm was the premises of a well-known farmer and livestock dealer called Willie Cleave, who wasn’t an NFU member but whom I knew vaguely by reputation.”
The fact that Mr Cleave had a number of holdings, not one farm, and dealt in livestock across a wide area added to the risk that the disease had spread far and wide. Like coronavirus today, Foot and Mouth disease, though primarily affecting animals, is spread by close contact. It did not take long before reports of FMD outbreaks were cropping up all over the Westcountry, one of the regions of Britain which was worst affected by the crisis.
The initial answer was to maintain the ban on all livestock movements, effectively lockdown farms and prevent the public from crossing footpaths or visiting areas where there was a risk disease could be present and passed on. Footbaths filled with disinfectant, straw similarly soaked in the stuff appeared all across the countryside; the aim was to contain the disease. Yellow tape bearing “keep out” messages and “animal disease area” were put up all over the South West. And it was to get worse.
The only way to destroy the disease in livestock was slaughter and burn. In what seemed like almost medieval tactics, the pyres were built and the animals piled high and set alight. But, as Anthony writes, this was proving to be an enormous challenge. “The number of outbreaks grew slowly as the crisis unfolded. West and North Devon and the Forest of Dean were the main foci of infection, although we did experience a handful of outbreaks in Cornwall, Wiltshire and, a bit later, Somerset. But it soon became clear that the process of confirming disease, slaughtering and burning the livestock and disinfecting the farms was going anything but smoothly. MAFF’s contingency plans were mostly based on experience in the 1967 outbreak, when farms were both much smaller and more self-contained. No-one had any experience of assembling the hundreds of tons of straw, coal and railway sleepers necessary to create a pyre capable of incinerating, in the case of Willie Cleave’s home farm, 200 cattle and 800 sheep. To allocate this massive logistical challenge to MAFF vets with absolutely no experience of anything even remotely similar made no sense at all.”
Pressure grew to send in the Army. And criticism was also levelled at Tony Blair’s Labour Government, already suspected of failing to have sufficient interest in the countryside.
Ever since it was elected in 1997 Blair’s New Labour had been under fire from rural interests. In 1998 at least a quarter of a million rural dwellers from across the country descended on central London for the Countryside March. The Government’s response to Foot and Mouth, little more than two years later, was seen by many to reflect its uncaring attitude towards the countryside.
Anthony, in his book, takes a rather less critical view of the government of the day. He writes: “The suspicion was that the Blair government was reluctant to involve the army, and so by implication concede the scale of the crisis, because it might mean the General Election scheduled for May 3 having to be postponed. I’m not sure that was necessarily true. A more plausible explanation for what did indeed seem to be anything but a decisive response to a rapidly worsening crisis – bearing in mind that the situation in Cumbria was even worse than in Devon – is that MAFF fatally under-estimated the extent to which the disease had spread in the period of up to three weeks prior to the discovery of the first outbreak when it was in the sheep population without anyone realising it, because, rather as with Covid 19 and teenagers, sheep will very often carry FMD without showing any symptoms. It was only when they came into contact with cattle that the disease’s presence was revealed.”
The pressure for military intervention increased, however with Anthony openly challenging Agriculture Minister Nick Brown on live television and the Western Morning News and others calling on the government for a more aggressive approach to the disease. Anthony writes: “My anger and frustration, amplified deafeningly through the pages and editorials of the Western Morning News, whose Farming Editor, the late and much-missed Carol Trewin, and Editor, Barrie Williams, could not have been more helpful and supportive, was starting to produce some results.”
But it was not the answer. Anthony goes on: “A day or two later the army arrived, even if
Their presence served to complicate rather than simplify the case-handling process
Major Belinda Forsythe and her contingent of trainee military police were anything but what the doctor ordered. Rumour had it that, as they arrived at disease control HQ at Clyst Hydon, they were booed by the veterinary staff. Whether that is true or not, they certainly did very little to improve the situation. Their role was to ‘oversee’ the logistical operation of slaughter, incineration and disinfection. They weren’t required to get their hands dirty themselves, merely to sit in judgement on what MAFF’s exhausted vets were up to. Worse still, their presence served to complicate rather than simplify the casehandling process.”
The crisis rolled on, with the countryside closed tourism leaders – as today with coronavirus lockdown – began to despair as visitors were effectively barred from much of the countryside and the stench of burning cattle and sheep hung in the air near the pyres.
By late March Prime Minister Blair decided he needed to get directly involved in the battle against FMD. Anthony met him at the Ministry of Agriculture HQ in Exeter. He said Blair was in a listening mood. “‘What can we do to help?’ he asked. I said that the main thing was to provide a military dimension which could actually make a difference by getting stuck into the grim work on-farm. And acting quickly was vital to minimising the risk of spread from an outbreak. The standard procedure was for the MAFF vet on the ground to ring a specialist at HQ in London, describe the symptoms and seek confirmation. But with cases multiplying across the country, there were reports of this process having taken over 12 hours.
“‘Why can’t you trust the vet on the farm to make the diagnosis?’ I asked. Blair turned to Alastair Campbell. [His press secretary] ‘Can we do that?’ he asked. The great man nodded his approval. ‘OK then, we’ll do that, and I’ll see what we can do about the army as well.’ There was a scrum of reporters, photographers and cameramen to be fought through as we emerged from what was no more than a half hour meeting. ‘More satellite dishes in that car park than at Jodrell Bank,’ I noted.
“I then gave probably half a dozen interviews, saying that the Prime Minister had listened to what we’d had to say and seemed genuinely concerned.”
Eventually, following the loss of thousands of animals and the start of warmer weather, which bears down on the virus, the disease began to abate but the scars ran deep and are still felt in the livestock rearing parts of the Westcountry to this day Anthony Gibson’s autobiography: “Westcountryman – a Life in Farming, Countryside, Cricket and Cider” is published by Charlcombe Books price £20. Copies are available through all the usual outlets. WMN readers can order at a discount by going to www.anthonygibsonbooks. co.uk/westcountryman
TOMORROW Foot and Mouth changed the way I farm – Wayne Copp talks to Athwenna Irons