At the Institution’s annual dinner and awards ceremony – which saw Michael Clapham MP honoured for his campaigning work to raise standards of work safety in the UK – Hurst defended his profession from guilt by association with those who over-zealously apply health and safety regulations to prevent firemen from climbing ladders, firework displays from taking place or policemen from rescuing drowning children.

“Most such decisions are not taken by the qualified safety practitioners”, Hurst said, “but by managers who are often looking for an excuse not to do something and find health and safety requirements an easy excuse for saying No”. It is usually amateurs that take such decisions, either recklessly or because they are unreasonably risk-averse, “without a clue as to the consequences", he said. “Bureaucratic bunglers in town halls, office and workplaces around the country are making decisions in the name of health and safety that stops makes life unnecessarily difficult and in many cases it's to cover their own backsides”. Safety professionals had had enough, Hurst said, and he would use his year as president too help smash myths that “health and safety” stops people enjoying themselves.

While not a zealot, Hurst did admit to being passionate about being a safety specialist and explained why this was so. “When I was an 11 year old during the school holidays, playing in the back garden, there was a knock on the front door,” Hurst said. “Standing behind my mother on the doorstep I saw my father's manager on the doorstep saying, ‘I'm sorry to tell you that Harry's had an accident at work and is on his way to hospital’ and offering to take mother and son to see him’”.

Hurst's father lost one leg below the thigh and the other below the knee. "I then saw someone who had been an active man start to deteriorate into a heavy drinker and a gambler, who became very angry and bitter and took his frustrations out on those closest to him”. For that reason, he told his after-dinner audience, his was “not just a job that pays the mortgage.”

During many years writing on the subject, I’ve heard other stories of personal experience, if not tragedy, or near-tragedy, influencing a career path. This may be a sub-conscious influence, I think, such as in my own case. As a young graduate chemist, working in a Greek synthetic leather factory in the 1970s, I blindly followed a routine procedure for reducing the temperature of the ovens that cured the polyurethane¬ plastic leather: opening the oven doors and filling the factory air with formaldehyde vapour (acutely toxic and implicated with several forms of cancer, Google Scholar throws up half a million references for Formaldehyde Toxicology). I stayed less than a year, only later linking the respiratory symptoms I had experienced with the work I'd been doing.

Dangerous substances consultant Desmond Waight recalls a domestic incident that "sensitised" him to the importance of labelling of chemicals:

"When my son was four, he went into the garage, unbeknown to my wife and me, and later emerged saying he had drunk something that didn’t taste nice. His breath smelt strongly of chemicals and investigation showed he had accessed a paint brush cleaner. The bottle bore nothing more than a trade name and directory enquiries could not identify the producer. An off-duty local GP gave correct advice (“give him plenty of water to drink”) and for four hours my son passed foul-smelling wind (we kept him away from fire thinking it was a flammable substance!) and had no effects that we are aware, even though he had ingested some of the cleaner, probably dichloromethane. It was shortly after this incident that I was first asked to package chemicals and, when no-one could advise me, I started learning about chemical hazard communication. 32 years later I am still doing this for a living!"