Screenwriter who did not live to see the credits roll

ONE FACE was missing at the premiere of Ken Loach's movie The Navigators - the screenwriter (and the man whose idea the film was) - Rod Dawber.

The 45-year-old died, just before the big night earlier this year, of mesothelioma, an asbestosis-related cancer he contracted working as a railwayman 20 years ago.

The Navigators, which has been sold to Channel 4, is a drama about how privatisation splits a close-knit gang of railway maintenance workers.

In the same week Loach commissioned the Navigators script, Dawber found he had mesothelioma, which hardens the lungs.

Before he died, Dawber established the liability of his former employer, Eastern Infrastructure, a post-British Rail residual company now owned by Balfour Beatty. He produced an internal memo which, he successfully argued, showed Eastern knew that railwaymen were routinely exposed to asbestos but thought it too expensive to remove or to teach men how to handle.

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