Nancekuke History

Last summer, Graham Smith very kindly sent me a copy of the documentary he produced about Nancekuke, which was broadcast on ITV in the West Country region in 2001.  It features interviews with local men who worked at Nancekuke and some fascinating archive footage of local protests from the late sixties and early seventies.  The credits at the end were a good checklist of my sources and I was pleased to see that I recognised most of the names.  Since then he has put an edited copy of the programme on YouTube, so today we've added a link to it in the menu above.  There are two links because it is in two parts ... well it was on ITV so obviously it had to have a commercial break!  

CDE Nancekuke was established in 1950 as a production plant for nerve gas on the site of a disused World War II airfield, RAF Portreath. The location near the coast in Cornwall was chosen because existing government facilities at Porton Down in Wiltshire and Sutton Oak in Lancashire were considered too close to large centres of population for nerve gas production, although Sutton Oak had been used for production of mustard gas. One benefit of Nancekuke's location on the coast was that any leaks of gas might disperse out to sea.