Robin Russell-Jones

This audio clip is from a series of 100 life history interviews with environmental campaigners in the UK, 1970-2020. A quotation from this recording features in the book Voices for Change, published by UCL Press in November 2026 (available in print as well as a free PDF download). The full interview, along with the summaries, transcripts and recordings for this and the rest of the interview collection, is available at the British Library (Sound and Moving Image Collection, under the shelf-mark C2037). For more information, including educational materials and other resources, visit the Oral History of the Environmental Movement project website at www.royalholloway.ac.uk/ohemQuotation:Robin Russell-Jones: And this attracted the attention of a guy called Godfrey Bradman who was a multi-millionaire and he was a philanthropist. And he decided to set up an organisation called CLEAR, well no he didn’t, he decided to set up a campaign against lead in petrol and Des Wilson was co-opted to be the Chair. And he came up with the name of CLEAR, the Campaign for Lead Free Air. So that was launched in ’81, in February of ’81. And Des Wilson started it, he didn’t want to start it in London because he thought it would be too London-centric. He was very, very astute Des. He had founded, he was the founder of Shelter back in the sixties, the housing charity. So he knew how to run a campaign. So he started off by going, travelling around the North of England doing a series of radio interviews in Liverpool, Leeds, Sheffield and Newcastle. So he started up north. And of course the manufacturers of lead additives in petrol, Associated Octel, they of course are based in Liverpool. So they sent their expert on lead chasing us around the North of England trying to find out where we were going to go next and then going along and insisting on having their right to say their point of view. So they were running after us all around the North of England. [laughing] Of course we wouldn’t tell them where we were going but they used to try and follow us in a car. So it was quite exciting.Toby Butler: Gosh.Robin Russell-Jones: And then the other thing that Des had was he had a letter which had been written by Dr Yellowless who was the Medical Officer at the Department of Health. And it basically was a summary of recent data saying that he thought that lead was affecting children’s intelligence and though while it might only amount to a few percentage points on IQ, hundreds of thousands of children were being affected. So Des had that letter but he didn’t release it until six weeks after we launched CLEAR. So he then gave it to Harold Evans who was the editor of The Times and it was all over the front page of The Times. So that was when people realised this was going to be a serious, you know, campaign.Toby Butler: Yes. So were you aware of that letter, were you involved at that early stage of CLEAR?Robin Russell-Jones: No. I didn’t know until it came out.Toby Butler: Okay you came a little bit later. Right.Robin Russell-Jones: And then what was happening was I was still writing letters and articles about lead. But of course I was signing myself Senior Registrar, St John’s Hospital for Diseases of the Skin. And so Des said, ‘Look we can’t have a spot doctor talking about lead, it doesn’t make any sense. You’ve got to be, so you’ve got to become something to do with CLEAR.’ So he said, ‘You’re going to be Deputy Chair of CLEAR.’ So after that I wrote in my capacity as Deputy Chair of CLEAR.[…]Toby Butler: So what do you put the success of the campaign down to then? Kind of you already mentioned the small agile kind of team that you had.Robin Russell-Jones: Oh it was the conference in May of 1982 that tipped the balance.Toby Butler: What, so let’s just, tell me a bit, some more about that then. This was-Robin Russell-Jones: Well we knew that all the sort of really good data was coming from America. So we thought we ought to get them over and talk about lead. So we organised a two day conference at The Royal Institute of British Architects. And the reason we chose RIBA was because it’s right next to the BBC so the journalists didn’t have to walk very far. [laughing] It’s also a very nice venue.Toby Butler: Yes.Robin Russell-Jones: And we got- The key person on the medical side was Herb Needleman from Harvard who had done the definitive study in which he had correlated behaviour and intelligence with the lead content of shed milk teeth. So the thing about comparing IQ with blood lead is blood lead only tells you what the recent lead exposure is. It doesn’t tell you what the exposure was over the child’s life. Whereas lead in teeth, teeth is like a store for lead, so dentine lead was a much better index of long term lead exposure than blood lead. And Needleman was the first person to use tooth lead as an indicator. And he found very, very strong correlations. And I mean if you look at this thing that I wrote for the CLEAR newspaper, you know, the first one that went out, this entire graph there, that is Needleman’s study-Toby Butler: I see.Robin Russell-Jones: -showing all these things, distractable, not persistent, dependent, not organised, hyperactive, impulsive, frustrated, daydreamer. And then IQ and you can see that there’s a sort of dose dependent correlation between these features and the amount of lead in the teeth.Toby Butler: Gosh.Robin Russell-Jones: And the ones who had, were in the top lead content, they were all within the normal range these people, these kids, they were just divided up within the normal range for their lead content. But the ones that had the highest dentine lead were four IQ points lower than the ones who had the lowest dentine lead. And when Needleman presented this at Harvard you know he said, you know, ‘Lead is lowering IQ by at least four points, we don’t know how much brighter the lowest lead would be if they had no lead, but it’s at least four.’ And someone said, ‘Well why does that matter?’ And Needleman said, ‘This audience is full of people who’d kill their grandmother to have four more IQ points.’ [laughing] The other thing that Michael Rutter pointed out, so Michael Rutter was key because he was the Professor of Child Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry. And he was the Lawther Committee expert on child development. So he was a key member of the Lawther Committee. And he hadn’t quite gone along with their conclusions, you know. And we got him to Chair the conference. And he changed his position at the conference.Toby Butler: Really?Robin Russell-Jones: Yes. So he said that he had now come to the view that lead was affecting children’s IQ and that the confounding variables such as social class didn’t explain the data. So he was absolutely critical. And then the third person who was really critical was Clair Patterson. So Clair Patterson was a geochemist. He had worked originally on the atomic bomb production. He had the job of separating uranium-238 from uranium-235 so they could make a bomb to drop on Japan. Yes, so he was, he had become an expert in the separation of isotopes using isotope dilution mass spectrometry. So after the war, I mean he was horrified at what happened, you know, as he said, ‘We burnt them alive.’ He decided he would devote his life to something more productive for humankind. And the first thing he did was he dated the age of the earth. And the way he did it was by using lead isotopes. So the lead that is in the earth’s crust is derived from the decay of uranium. And of course we know the half life of uranium so we can work out, you can work out, you know, use a uranium clock. And then the comparator was an iron meteorite which had been formed at the birth of the solar system. So the iron meteorite had no uranium in it, it just had lead isotopes. So by comparing the lead isotopes in the meteorite with the lead isotopes in the earth’s crust he was able to work out the age of the earth which he worked out as 4.55 billion years old, which remains the date today, no one’s bettered it. But the very funny thing was that when he was trying to do these measurements, he realised there was something wrong, you know. Where he knew what the age of an earth, of a rock sample was from other geochemical data, he found that lead was giving him the wrong answer all the time. And he eventually realised that what he was measuring was not the lead in the sample, he was measuring contamination of his laboratory by lead. Lead in glass, lead in dust, lead in the air. There’s lead everywhere. So before he could do the measurements he had to build an ultra-clean laboratory which took him seven years of painstaking work. And then once he’d got his ultra-clean laboratory and he had his ultra-clean samples, he went and did the measurement in twenty-four hours.Toby Butler: Wow. And whereabouts was his laboratory? Is that in a city?Robin Russell-Jones: Caltech.Toby Butler: Right.Robin Russell-Jones: California Institute of Technology.Toby Butler: Okay.Robin Russell-Jones: And it was his lab they used for the moon samples because it was the only lab that was ultra-clean.Toby Butler: Yes.Robin Russell-Jones: So what he then realised of course, once he’d got the age of the earth, he then started saying, well, you know this lead where is it all coming from? You know so he started looking at pristine ecosystems to see what the natural level of lead was. And to see what the extent of lead contamination was in the modern world. And of course he realised that everything on the planet was contaminated with lead, you know. 100,000 times above background levels. So he went and got ice core samples from Greenland and he was able to plot the appearance of lead in the atmosphere. So it started with the Romans and the production of silver because lead is a by-product of silver. And then into c