Lung cancer victim in prison 11 times, court told

A MAN who lodged a ground-breaking lawsuit against one of the world’s biggest tobacco companies after developing terminal lung cancer was a convicted criminal who was sent to prison 11 times, a court heard yesterday.

Alfred McTear started the proceedings against Imperial Tobacco after he was diagnosed with the disease in 1992. He died in March 1993.

Yesterday, in the first case of its kind to be heard in Europe, his wife Margaret, 58, who is suing the company for £500,000 in damages related to her husband’s claim, began giving evidence.

She told the court her husband, a father-of-three, smoked up to 60 John Player king-size cigarettes a day.

The court heard Mr McTear, from Beith in Ayrshire, had lodged the initial action because he believed Imperial Tobacco had been negligent in failing to put warnings on its cigarette packets in the 1960s, when he started smoking.

As Mrs McTear was questioned by her own legal team, it emerged her husband had 36 criminal convictions for offences including assault, breach of the peace, fire-raising and fraud, crimes she attributed to her husband’s “drinking problem”.

Colin McEachran QC asked Mrs McTear, also a smoker, if her husband had ever tried to give up smoking.

She replied: “I can remember his trying to give up three or four times, but really without any success.”

Asked how this made her husband feel she said: “He was very angry and what he described as a bull with a sore head. At the most, I think it would have been for two weeks.”

She said that Mr McTear had started smoking 10 Bristol cigarettes a day around the time they married in 1964. She said within a short period of time, he had switched to John Player cigarettes and was smoking 20, sometimes 40 a day. She said by the late 1970s or early 1980s, he was smoking 60 of the cigarettes a day.

Her legal team are arguing that, when Mr McTear started smoking, there were no warnings on cigarette packets and that by the time these appeared Mr McTear was addicted to the habit.

The court heard that in May 1992, when Mrs McTear noticed her husband beginning to lose weight and look off colour, she persuaded him to see a doctor who sent him for tests to Crosshouse Hospital in Ayrshire.

Mrs McTear said: Because he was spitting up blood, she took a sample to be tested for TB.

“The doctor said it was cancer and probably because he smoked for so long.”

The court heard Mr McTear’s health deteriorated quickly as the cancer was inoperable and that, after suffering a collapsed lung, he became bed-ridden, partially lost his speech and had to use a commode before being admitted to a hospice in March 1999.

The day after being taken to the hospice he died with his wife beside him.

Asked how smoking was portrayed in the 1960s, Mrs McTear said it was advertised as being glamorous and that it “relieved stress”.

The court was then shown several cigarette adverts from the era which did not carry any warnings. One of the adverts stated: “Only Players Please So Much”. Another of the adverts was contained on the second page of a Rangers Football Club match programme from 1963.

Mrs McTear was also asked about her husband’s convictions.

She said: “It was mostly through alcohol. I asked him to seek help for his alcohol problem and we both went to Alcoholics Anonymous to see if that would help. I cared for him and kept hoping he would change.”

Between 1959 and 1991 he had 17 jobs, including time in the army in the early 1960s before being discharged.

A senior office wrote on a discharge application form that Mr McTear, who had spent several periods in detention for drunk and disorderly behaviour while serving in the Army, that he was “selfish and bone idle” and that he was “useless and a nuisance“.

Earlier the court heard evidence from Mr McTear given on commission a week before he died.

He had said he was not aware of warnings about the dangers of smoking, that it may cause lung cancer or how addictive it was, from the company.