£100,000 award to cancer man's wife

THE widow of a former golf club handyman who died from asbestos-related lung cancer has been awarded more than £100,000 compensation by a High Court judge.
Anthony Richardson worked as a live-in maintenance man at the Royal Lytham and St Anne's Golf Club from 1987 until 2002, but was to enjoy less than three years of his retirement.
He died, aged just 67, in February 2005 from mesothelioma, an incurablADVERTISEMENT

e cancer of the lining of the lungs, notorious for its slowness to develop and the agony suffered by its victims.
Left to grieve was his widow, Pauline, who testified at the High Court, along with her son, Paul, and whose evidence was today described as "patently honest" by top judge, Mrs Justice Swift.
Although Mrs Richardson claimed her husband had been exposed to asbestos in the golf club's boiler rooms, and during installation of a new heating system in the 1980s, the judge said experts were agreed that could not have caused the mesothelioma that killed him.
Instead she ruled the disease was the terrible legacy of his work, between 1975 and 1987, as a plumber and heating engineer, for small Lytham-based firm, G F Russell.
Mrs Justice Swift described how Pauline and Paul Richardson had, on February 3 2005, been told by a consultant that Mr Richardson had mesothelioma and had only a very short time to live.
They went to the hospice where he was being cared for to deliver the dreadful news and, when they asked him, he told them that he had been exposed to asbestos whilst working for G F Russell and another firm which had employed him in the early 1970s.
Mr Richardson died on February 24 2005.
G F Russell denied liability during the two-day High Court hearing, but the judge ruled, on the balance of probabilities, that Mr Richardson had "frequently encountered asbestos-based materials" in airing cupboards and bath panels whilst working for the firm.
The firm, which employs six people, was ordered to pay Mr Richardson's widow £118,610 compensation for his death and now also faces substantial legal costs bills.