Music historian and author Charles ‘Dr Rock’ White charts the achievement of environmental campaigners Sons of Neptune in his new book. Harry Mead reports.

STAN LAUREL was born in Ulverston, when it was in Lancashire.

Since he soon hopped over the Pennines, to spend his boyhood in County Durham, you perhaps knew that.

But what about rock ’n’ roll star Bill Haley’s mother? She too was born in Ulverston.

Who better to reveal this obscure fact of rock music history than Dr Rock himself – Scarborough chiropodist Charles White, the official biographer of Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis, and the broadcaster of more than 900 TV and radio shows?

Dr Rock records Ulverston’s Laurel and Haley link in a new book. But its subject isn’t rock, the cinema, or even Ulverston. And that’s what gives it a rather special distinction.

Shedding his Dr Rock guise, Charles White has produced arguably the most entertaining book ever written on an environmental campaign.

Scrub out “arguably”. Even if the competition for an entertaining environmental book stood at Nobel Prize level, Charles White’s The Adventures of the Sons of Neptune would win hands down.

The Sons of Neptune? Hopefully, you remember them, or rather haven’t forgotten them, which is not quite the same. A group of six male friends in Scarborough, they dubbed themselves Sons of Neptune from their daily habit, begun in the late Seventies, of seabathing each day, generally before work.

In 1983 they took up arms – to fight a proposed sewage scheme. From a new plant sited directly below Scarborough’s castle headland, this was intended to pump sewage, screened for solids but otherwise untreated, out between the resort’s two bays.

Assured that currents would carry away the effluent, whose harmful bugs would also be destroyed by the action of sun and sea, most Scarborians welcomed the scheme.

By citizens and authorities alike, the Sons were branded scaremongering troublemakers.

But, by obtaining expert opinion that the headland site was unsafe, they defeated the plan.

And when the plant, built instead near homes at Scalby, polluted the beach (as the Sons had forecast), monitoring by the Sons forced that plant’s shutdown.

Meanwhile, the Sons had discovered that the prevailing scientific view of the sea as a giant disinfecting tank was unsound. A report by the Sons led to European law that all sewage from major outlets must be neutralised by ultra-violet radiation. Since 2001, Scarborough has thereby benefited from a full-treatment sewage plant – built in the very place, Cowlam Hole, north of the town, suggested by the Sons at the outset.

Those are the broad facts. Charles White enlarges and enlivens them with an exuberance his rock heroes would admire. Like the campaign itself, his account brings Wop Bam ALoobop – or something like that – to the conservation cause.

HOW do Ulverston and Bill Haley’s mother fit in? Well, the Sons took their name as an affectionate nod to the Sons of the Desert – Laurel and Hardy fans. Keen as any, they attended a convention in Ulverston where, says Charles, “there was much madness and gladness happening.” They partook of it and returned to the serious business of campaigning.

Serious, but never solemn, stunts backed up both a mass of pioneering research they succeeded in assembling and the matchless local knowledge of their recruited seventh member – retired Scarborough harbourmaster Captain Sydney Smith, who knew the local currents better than the back of his hand.

To highlight false assurances (“bare-faced lies”, Charles calls them) about sewage treatment by Margaret Thatcher, the Sons floated a “Thatcherloo” on the Thames.

The river police swooped and Charles, Capt Smith and Sons leader Freddie Drabble, a Scarborough solicitor and Charles’ twin spirit in zest and dedication, were briefly jailed.

The experience didn’t deter the sons from dumping dead sea creatures at an international conference. As he transported this stinking cargo, Charles asked himself: “How badly do you want to be a conservationist?” His answer: “How badly do you want to live?”

THE Sons’ daily bathe had convinced them that the sea was suffering. “Between 1983 and 1992 the build-up of pollution was alarming,” remembers Charles.

“The disappearance of the eels and crabs that had been wriggling under our feet. The breaking waves lost their sparkling white. At times we could only gasp in despair.”

Crucial to their success was research in the US by Professor Jay Grimes, of New Hampshire University. He established not only that bacteria and viruses can survive in seawater for weeks, even months, but that some bugs can transfer their resistance to others. The Sons visited America, met Grimes, saw his research and the latest technology for zapping the bugs. But though a Lancashire coast sewage scheme was abandoned largely on the basis of the evidence brought back by the Sons, the promoters of Scarborough’s scheme kept their heads metaphorically in the sands. Charles recalls their “inane” comment: “While bacteria in the sea might remain alive longer elsewhere, they do not do so in the North Sea at Scarborough.”

OFTEN excluded from local meetings, the Sons were once warned by a marine engineer: “You lads could end up in the concrete of one of those outfalls.”

But they never flinched.

Freddie Drabble firmly declared: “We are not prepared to see our marine environment turned into a poisonous mire.” And when the chairman of the water authority insisted, wrongly, that Bridlington’s sewage scheme met EEC standards, Charles White told him: “You will smoulder in your own putridity.”

Imaginative to the last, the Sons released white doves to mark the opening of the Cowlam Hole plant. At a conference on marine science last year, their efforts were handsomely saluted. Referring to the adverse impact of sewage on the sea, Professor David Kay, an expert on environmental health, told the Sons: “You were the first to observe this happening – and the first to take action.”

Probably they were also the first whose campaign saw members quaffing beers with an affable Texan while singing the Laurel and Hardy opus Honolulu Baby. Not in Ulverston this time, but Honolulu. Charles White recalls it with gusto. It might not be strictly relevant – but reader, you won’t care. Amid the fun you’ll get the message: clean seas matter, and this is how we got them.

• The Adventures of the Sons of Neptune by Charles White (The Sons of Neptune, £10)