Four thousand people died in the great London smog of 1952. Yet as Mick Hamer disclosed in New Scientist, government ministers at the time ridiculed the seriousness of it. Cabinet papers released under the 30-year rule in 1984 revealed that Harold Macmillan, the housing minister, and the future prime minister, as being disdainfully dismissive. “Today everybody expected the government to solve every problem,” he told the cabinet. He went on to suggest setting up a pointless committee: “We cannot do very much, but we can seem to be very busy.”
Uncomfortable facts are one of Mick’s enduring interests. In 2004 he ferreted out the story of the “doomsday wreck”. A second-world-war ship, stuffed to the gunwales with unstable bombs, lies on the bed of the River Thames, less than two miles from the Kent town of Sheerness. The shipwreck was well known: its dangers were not and for decades had been shrouded in a cloak of official secrecy. The bombs were fused. If the fuses become damp they will be unstable. The ship could explode at any time. It could be one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions. But it would be expensive to make the ship safe, so successive governments have filed the problem in the “too difficult” tray. The story was picked up by a number of Fleet Street papers, including the Daily Mirror and more recently the Observer. The ship is still there. The government is keeping its fingers firmly crossed.
As New Scientist’s transport correspondent, from time to time Mick is asked to forecast the future. In 1985 he was one of 20 people invited to describe what life would be like at the end of the century. The results were published in a book called Living in the Future. By the end of the century, said Mick, computers would be controlling the flow of traffic and vehicle engines as well as providing travel information to commuters. Today turning up at a bus stop and seeing a display with the time of your next bus is old hat. But this was a forecast that was made when the only travel information on bus stops was a printed timetable and four years before scientists first floated the idea of a World Wide Web.
In 2001 Mick was shortlisted for the Syngenta science writing awards for an article called “All that Jazz”. It was a quirky choice for the science writing awards. It dealt with the latest research into the secrets of swing, and quite why it is that some jazz makes you want to tap your feet and other music leaves the audience unmoved.