ABSTRACT
On 31 March 1959 police in the Lanarkshire village of Wishaw traced three boys who were believed to have been contaminated with radiation while playing in an ash pit in the village. A nearby clock factory had been dumping wastes from its luminizing workshop at the pit and by chance somebody from the factory had seen the children there some days earlier. The boys were taken down to the Radiological Protection Centre at Sutton in Surrey the following day for a check-up and later pronounced to be ‘out of danger’. The Times reported that there were ‘nervous smiles all round’.1
