Accidental Hero

How a cigarette break one evening in the summer of 2007 changed baggage handler John Smeaton's life.

The Observer, November 2007

On Sunday 1 July, John Smeaton woke up at his family home in Erskine, on
the outskirts of Glasgow, to find he had not yet become a star. But it was only
a matter of hours. He was on his way to work at Glasgow airport, where he had
been employed as a baggage handler for more than 12 years, when his phone
rang. It was ITN, wondering if they could interview him about what had
happened the day before.

This was no problem. Before he did the interview that afternoon, a colleague
came up to him and said, 'What did you do that for, you maddie?' Smeaton
remembers replying, 'You tell me. I just wasn't thinking right.'

About halfway through his shift he was finding it hard to concentrate on his
work, which involved overseeing the loading and offloading of thousands of
bags a day. His supervisor said, 'Take as much time as you want.'

But there was little respite at home. Everybody was on the phone - ABC, NBC,
CNN. Smeaton began to regret giving one reporter his mobile phone number.
Some of the requests for interviews carried a financial incentive. 'I didn't want
to sell my story at all,' Smeaton remembers. 'I just wanted to keep my head
down and wait for it to blow over. But my friends said, "There's no way you're
going to sit there and get nothing out of this." I was like, "I don't want to be in
the papers."'

One of his friends began calling the newspapers to solicit offers for Smeaton's
story, something that annoyed Smeaton at the time. 'But he was only looking
after me, saying, "You earn bugger all, so if you get something out of this
you've got to take it."'

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