Dark Harvest: how secret government experiments with anthrax destroyed a remote Scottish island
For the first couple of days, most people think they’ve caught a cold. By day three, the coughing, fever and muscle aches have disappeared. Only then does it return, this time even stronger than before. First, it infects the lymph nodes in the lungs, creating a pool of bloody fluid in the chest cavity. As the infection spreads through the body, the patient, now unable to catch their breath, begins vomiting handfuls of blood. Death arrives within 48 hours. This is the effect of anthrax inhalation on just one person. But what would the effects be if the poison was used on an entire community? To answer that question, we need to travel to Gruinard in Scotland.
During World War Two, this isolated island became the sacrificial lamb of Churchill’s germ warfare experiments, experiments that left its soil impregnated with poison. It began with a letter. “By the time you read this, the campaign will have started in earnest. The first delivery will have been made – and where better to send the seeds of death than to the place from whence they came?”
The letter, published in the Glasgow Herald, was the work of the Dark Harvest commandoes, an organisation hoping to shed light on the government’s destruction of Gruinard. The commandoes’ first “delivery” was a curious thing: a bucket of soil left outside the Porton Down biological research centre, a top-secret Ministry of Defence laboratory in Wiltshire, not far from where the poisonings of Sergei and Yulia Skripal would occur many years later. On inspecting the soil, investigators found that it contained Bacillus anthracis, commonly known as anthrax. The soil, it was discovered, was not from Wiltshire but from a small island 600 miles to the north.
In 1942, British military scientists travelled to Gruinard from Porton Down and seized control of the island. With the help of locals, a team of 50 scientists began collecting sheep and placing them in open pens. The livestock was then exposed to anthrax dropped in the form of bombs from a Vickers Wellington bomber. Three days later, the sheep started dying in droves, their lungs filling up with pools of blood and their legs erupting with dark red sores. Nobody seemed to understand that those same bombs had also poisoned the land, scattering anthrax spores across the island, which would remain in the soil for many decades to come.
Having concluded that biological weapons could paralyse entire communities, perhaps even whole cities, the scientists packed up their equipment and made their way back to Wiltshire. The war was over anyway, and there was no use for such weapons. The experiments were abandoned, leaving landowners with a heavily contaminated landscape not fit for purpose.
It was agreed that the land would be sold back to them for £500 once the contamination had subsided, though they vastly underestimated how long that would take. Signs reading “landing prohibited” were placed around the island, warning potential visitors to stay well away. Of course, there was nothing to stop the poisons of Gruinard from crossing the channel of their own accord, which is precisely what happened in the 1960s when a sheep carcass washed up on the mainland. The infected carcass was found and devoured by a local dog, which became violently ill. Soon, horses started dying at random.
For the next 20 years or so, the government paid huge sums of money to ensure the confidentiality of the Gruinard experiments. That became much more difficult in 1981 when the Dark Harvest commandoes decided to confront the government once and for all. Four days after the anthrax-laced soil was found at Porton Down, another package of soil was found outside Blackpool Tower, where the Conservative Party Conference was being held.
Det Insp Colin MacDonald was sent to investigate a group of Scottish anti-nuclear activists, but no arrests were ever made. On December 7th, 1981, Dark Harvest posted a final letter to the door of the UK government’s Scottish Office HQ in Edinburgh. In it, the group explained that their activities would now come to an end, the aim of their protests having been achieved: the secret of Gruinard was finally out there.
In 1986, researchers at Porton Down developed a new chemical, a blend of seawater and formaldehyde, which was sprayed over the land at Gruinard, cleansing it of Anthrax. Vaccinated scientists in protective clothing swarmed the island once again, this time seeking to heal rather than brutalise the landscape. In 1990, shortly after junior defence minister Michael Neubert was sent to remove the warning signs from the shore, the heir of the original landowner repurchased the barren and decimated island for £500.
