Girl died because father was covered in asbestos dust

Each lunch break, William Harknett would come home to steal some time with his youngest daughter, Sylvia.

Little did he know that, after mornings spent grinding blue asbestos at work, poisonous dust was sinking into his overalls.

Mr Harknett died of an asbestos-related illness in 1978 and his daughter, whose married name was Sylvia Tapley, also contracted asbestos-related cancer.

She died in April 2001, aged just 59. Now, after more than four years of legal wrangling, and a week before the case for compensation was due to go to trial, her husband Terry has been offered a landmark ?107,500 settlement by his late father-inlaw's firm. As soon as doctors diagnosed her with mesothelioma in June 2000, Mrs Tapley suspected the hours spent on her father's knee might have been the cause of her illness.

She described to her husband how she would sit with her father, often brushing his clothes down and playing with the mask he wore while at work.

"Sylvia was the youngest and would sit on his knee almost everyday as he came home from work," her widower Terry Tapley, 64, explained.

"He would clock in at 8am, and always come home for lunch as it was five minutes from work.

"In those 10 months, as she was deteriorating, she would sit and talk about her family, her father, her mother and her sisters, but she never complained. She never said, 'Why me?'

"She just said, 'We've got to get on with this'."

Initially the Central Asbestos Company in Bermondsey, where Mr Harknett worked in the 1950s and early sixties, disputed it could have foreseen that an employee walking home in work overalls was likely to cause disease or contaminate-members of their family. But, at the last minute, it offered the compensation.

For Mr Tapley, bringing the case has meant reliving his wife's death in minute detail.

"I was going over Sylvia's death probably every three or four months, recounting as much as I could remember," he said. "When you're going through that kind of thing, you're in a fog.

Watching her go from a healthy person to that in 10 months was like a fog and afterwards, all I can remember is going over and over her death." Pauline Chandler, a partner in Pannone & Partners, a firm which specialises in industrial disease cases, was first approached by Terry Tapley for advice in September 2000.

"We knew it was going to be very difficult," she explained, "in cases such as these, the only source of compensation is the companies that employed their loved one and, if they've ceased to trade, from their public liability insurance.

"Sadly, there will be many more cases like Sylvia's [that is] the legacy this dangerous material has left us with."

Mr Tapley encourages others who have suffered an

"undeserved bereavement" to take the battle to court, and says now it is over he feels he can lay his wife to rest.

"I feel happy for Sylvia that she has got justice, she fought a hard battle and this is not only justice for her, but for others," he said.

"Cases like this are not going to reach a pinnacle until about

2020 and it's something that has to be highlighted."