Martin Forwood obituary

For 30 years Martin Forwood, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a thorn in the side of the huge Sellafield nuclear complex in Cumbria. With his unrivalled collection of original documents on the nuclear industry he was a more reliable source of information to journalists and campaigners than the government-owned industry British Nuclear Fuels, or anyone in Whitehall.

But Martin was not just an armchair campaigner; he went in for many imaginative direct actions, including, in 2003, chaining himself to a railway line to halt a nuclear waste shipment from Italy destined for Sellafield. When he came up in court charged with a Victorian-era offence of obstructing the railway, which carried a potential sentence of life imprisonment, the judge acknowledged his sincerity, reduced the charge and fined him.

Afterwards he collected some radioactive mud from the Esk estuary near Sellafield, fashioned it into something resembling a mud pizza and delivered it in a lead-lined suitcase to the Italian embassy in London. It was taken away by the Environment Agency, which tested it, found it was indeed radioactive and eventually, forced by its own regulations, returned it to Sellafield to be disposed of in the Drigg low level waste depository.

On another occasion, donning a wetsuit on a dark night, Martin swam out to a nuclear waste ship anchored in Barrow harbour, fixing industrial magnets to the keel to show how vulnerable the ship was to terrorist attack. Next day he rang the harbour master to tell him about his action and navy divers removed the magnets. Security was stepped up but Martin was never charged; he suspected the authorities were too embarrassed to take things any further.

For a man who had once been a servant of the state – as a detective in the Cheshire constabulary, a military policeman along the Berlin Wall, and a scientific officer for the Met Office – a career switch to undermining the establishment had previously seemed unlikely.

His parents, Brittain Forwood, a farm manager, and his wife, Nan (nee McAfee), came from wealthy backgrounds; his great-grandfather was Sir William Forwood, a Liverpool shipowner and philanthropist.

Born in Borth Wen, Anglesey, Martin went to Shrewsbury school and then joined the merchant navy as an officer cadet with the Clan Line shipping company, sailing repeatedly to the Bay of Bengal. Tiring of that life, he joined the Cheshire police force in 1959 before signing up with the Royal Military Police in 1963, which immediately posted him to Berlin.

He did a three-year stint patrolling both the Berlin Wall and the border fence between East and West Germany, witnessing many failed attempts by East Germans to reach the west. He also periodically guarded Spandau prison and escorted its most celebrated prisoner, Rudolf Hess, to hospital.

In Berlin in 1965 he married Ann Pasterfield and a year later left the army. Back in Britain he decided to take up mushroom farming at Blackwater in Cornwall, but was unable to make a go of it and, with a young family to support, soon signed up with the Met Office.

After several postings around the country over a period of 10 years, including at the chemical weapons establishment at Porton Down, Wiltshire, he was eventually sent to Cumbria. When his marriage to Ann broke down he left the Met Office and began to work on local markets as a picture framer before opening up a shop in Millom, near Barrow.

When Lee, the 12-year-old son of his new partner, Janine Allis-Smith, developed leukaemia in 1980 – one of a number of children in Cumbria to do so at the same time – local anti-nuclear campaigners suspected a connection with plutonium releases from Sellafield and formed a group that eventually became Cumbrians Opposed to Radioactive Environment (Core).

Martin and Janine volunteered to help the group and began a long battle to get British Nuclear Fuels to stop discharging millions of gallons of liquid waste laced with plutonium into the Irish Sea. The uncovering of the leukaemia cluster led to campaigns by Greenpeace, and finally persuaded the government in the late 1980s to order the discharges to be dramatically reduced.

For Martin, however, the concession was too little too late. Lee had survived but Martin had since come to the conclusion that Sellafield’s vast industrial complex, which employed 10,000 people but was producing nothing except spent uranium and plutonium for no useful purpose, should be shut down.

He and Janine, supported by the Goldsmith Foundation, became full-time campaigners and ran the Core office in Barrow from the early 90s. They gathered official documents, received leaks of secrets, collected scientific evidence and assembled masses of reports from which they produced regular briefings for the media. Martin would patiently explain to journalists the workings of the nuclear industry, its many failed projects and its inability to deal with its waste.

Despite his vehement opposition to nuclear power he was respected even by industry figures for his honesty and probity. The Sellafield Stakeholder group, a largely pro-industry committee that he quizzed at each of its meetings, gave him a standing ovation when he and Janine won an international award for his campaigning work – as well as some much-needed funds to carry on the work.

In the year before his death he was boosted by the announcement that all nuclear reprocessing activity would end at Sellafield by 2020, and that plans for new reactors at the nearby Moorside nuclear power station had been abandoned.

He is survived by Janine, by his daughters, Louise, Rebecca and Deborah, from his marriage to Ann, which ended in divorce, by Janine’s two sons, Lee and Steve, and by his sisters, Kate and Jane.

• Martin Grant Forwood, anti-nuclear campaigner, born 4 May 1940; died 6 October 2019