18 March 1967. The Torrey Canyon hits the rocks. Millions of gallons of oil spill into the sea. Britain's worst ecological disaster unfolds in extraordinary archive accounts.

18th March 1967. The Torrey Canyon strikes the Seven Stones. Julian May, a boy on the Cornish coast, watches Britain's worst environmental disaster unfold. 50 years to the day later, he tells the story of the accident using extraordinary archive and eyewitness accounts. The clean up operation was as damaging, perhaps more, than the oil itself. The disaster led to changes to protect the environment. And it changed people's attitudes to it.

Radio producer Julian May grew up in Cornwall. He was on the north Cornish coast when the super tanker, the Torrey Canyon, almost 1,000 feet long, carrying 100,000 tons of crude oil, struck Pollard's Rock off the Isles of Scilly. The authorities were not prepared.

Hugh Scully described the sight as millions of gallons of crude oil spilled into the sea. A slick drifted ashore, polluting both Cornish coasts, Brittany and Guernsey where thousands of tons were pumped into a quarry. Rob Roussel explains what has happened to it - and why it's still there.

Julian May watched the surf turn chocolate brown, the sands crust with crude oil. He saw the gulls, guillemots and cormorants, dying horribly, clagged with tar. He remembers that smell. Mike Sagar Fenton, one of scores of young people who volunteered, recalls working tirelessly to clean the stricken birds.

One day May saw jets flying low, streaking westward - Buccaneers sent to bomb the ship and ignite the oil with napalm. One of the pilots muses on that mission.

Marine life was devastated, much of the damage was done by what was called detergent, but was in fact highly toxic. It did not so much clean as sterilise the beaches. T.O. Darke, farmer and fisherman, protested in the press, and his diary.

Producer and Presenter: Julian May.