Charney Hall School, Grange-over-Sands

The name Windscale probably doesn’t mean much to the children of today but in the October of 1957 the newspapers were full of an incident which took place just around the Cumberland coast near the small village of Seascale. We knew all about Seascale because we played football and cricket against its preparatory school. Fully exposed to the Irish Sea its location was forbidding, cold and wind swept, not at all like the more gentile, protected shores of Morecambe Bay. Now reinvented as Sellafield, Windscale was Britain’s first nuclear power plant. It was originally built to produce the ominously named plutonium, a radioactive chemical element used in the hydrogen bomb, and a constituent of ‘Fat Man’ the atomic bomb which was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan and hastened the end of World War II. Plutonium was a product of the Manhattan Project, a top secret American venture during World War II that worked exclusively to develop an atomic bomb. Los Alamos Laboratory tested t