It was 40 years ago today

Anniversaries are much in the air - 10 years of Blairism, 25 years since the Falklands war and so forth - but here is something now almost forgotten, and it is worth copying it out word for word, or at least cutting and pasting, from the On This Day feature in the Register of today's Times.

An oil slick 18 miles long by four wide drifted south tonight from the stricken tanker Torrey Canyon, aground off the Scillies. The Ministry of Defence (Navy) said that unless there was a change in the weather it would miss the Scillies and Cornwall. Tonight, Cornwall, Devon and Dorset were hoping for an offshore wind to keep the vast oil slick from their beaches. An appeal was made to local fishermen to lend their boats for the fight against pollution.

Nearly 15,000 gallons of detergent were on their way to Cornwall from Scotland, Wales and Southampton. The chemical is believed to cost 8s. a gallon. There is considerable doubt, however, whether the amounts available will be sufficient to prevent disaster. Some estimates put the amount needed to destroy the slick as high as 3m. gallons.

The Torrey Canyon (listed as owned by the Barracuda Company of Bermuda and the Union Oil Company of Los Angeles) lay holed tonight with her starboard rail awash, and her bows beneath the choppy seas on Pollard Rock, one of the Seven Stones. She was still seeping oil. The vessel was on charter to British Petroleum and was on a voyage from the Persian Gulf to Milford Haven. There were fears that if the tanker broke her back, another 80,000 tons of oil might spill free.

The oil patch is believed to be the biggest ever to threaten the West Country coastline. The greatest danger is to the holiday season, which starts in two weeks. St Ives could suffer most from oil pollution. Its six sandy beaches are its main attraction and are little more than 20 miles away from the stricken ship.

It is interesting now for its own sake but also because of the way the words are rendered. Very old school, packed with facts and completely without top spin. It is just a report about the thing itself with not really much of an attempt made to "take it on". Also, the constant references to "tonight" seem both twee and portentous.

We were innocents then about environmentalism. It turns out now that the heavy-handed reliance on chemicals to break up the slick retarded the recovery of marine life. Surprise, surprise.

The following year, 1968, my parents took on their ill-fated hotel business between Helston and the Lizard. I can remember going to the gravelly beach at the bottom of the hill and finding balls of tar - remnants of the wreck that escaped the clean-up - on the shore or lurking in rock polls. It was an absolute no-no to get any of that dreadful sticky ooze on my clothes.