Ken McGinley, who has died aged 85, was the founder of the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association, set up in 1983 to gain restitution for soldiers who were required to watch in close proximity as British and American nuclear bombs were detonated on various Pacific islands.
Ken himself was present at two atomic and three nuclear bomb detonations while serving with the Royal Engineers on Christmas Island in 1958, standing in shorts and with his hands over his eyes. Aged 19, he was one of more than 20,000 members of the British armed forces who took part in a series of tests that established the UK as the third recognised possessor of thermonuclear weapons.
Returning home with physical and emotional problems, he was medically discharged at 21, and suffered a duodenal ulcer, a condition which, by 1962, had led him to have two-thirds of his stomach removed. He also became infertile and developed polycythaemia, a rare but treatable type of blood cancer.
Ken formed the British Nuclear Test Veterans Association in 1983 and was its chairman until 2002. Over the years he collated huge amounts of data from veterans, and used it to try to pressure the government into action. In 1993 he and a group of veterans sued for £100,000 in damages in relation to health problems that they put down to their involvement in the tests – but they eventually lost the case in the European court of human rights.
Ken was one of eight children born into a poor household in Johnstone, Renfrewshire. He left Johnstone high school in 1953, at 15, to work as a bank boy for the local flax mill and then for the haulage company Wilson Brothers as a van boy. At the age of 18 he signed up with the army for 22 years and left Scotland for the first time. It was while helping with construction and logistics related to the tests on Christmas Island that Ken and his fellow soldiers were required to be spectators as bombs were detonated.
After his discharge from the forces he became a bookkeeper at Littlewoods department store in Paisley, staying there for the rest of his working life and retiring as a manager.
I first met Ken face to face in 2022, but he had made an impression on me since 1997, when my father was battling a rare cancer after radiation exposure at Operation Buffalo in Australia (1956). He wrote to me, and phoned me, often, and I was deeply impressed with his strong, caring personality, his drive, his networking capabilities and his humility – all of which helped him to gather up allies in the media.
During the course of his campaigning he had talks with Ronald Reagan, was involved in the creation of the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act in the US, and gave a presentation to the Japanese Congress, who afforded him the title of Hibakusha, normally reserved only for Japanese survivors of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In addition Ken was a founder, and sometime editor, of Fissionline, an online newspaper that deals with nuclear and cold war topics.
He is survived by his wife, Alice (nee Mead), whom he married in 1960, and their adopted daughter, Louise.
