A father with inoperable lung cancer may sue his former company for giving him thousands of free cigarettes, which he blames for the disease.
Simon Neale, 57, said he was given 1,200 cigarettes for free every month while he worked for a company which later merged with British American Tobacco.
Mr Neale chose to smoke the freebies and said he became a heavy smoker as a result of his job perk.
But last year Mr Neale was diagnosed with lung cancer, which he said 'knocked him for six'. He quit smoking after finding out about the illness.
An anti-smoking charity said Mr Neale is not alone in his suffering and called for other potential victims to come forward and 'call Big Tobacco to account'.
Simon Neale has developed inoperable cancer and blames it on the thousands of cigarettes he was given for free while working for what is now British American Tobacco (stock image)
Mr Neale spent four years working as a salesman for Rothmans, a British cigarette manufacturer, from 1982 to 1986.
While he worked there, he said, he was given so many free cigarettes he often had 30,000 of them kept in a safe in his car boot.
'It's staggering looking back on it,' he said. 'But I was told when I joined the company that I'd be getting 1,200 free cigarettes a month.
'Working at Rothmans, I went from being an occasional smoker, a social smoker, to being a heavy smoker because I had so many cigarettes given to me.
'Last autumn, I was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and it knocked me for six. The worst thing was telling the children.
'The lung cancer has all come about from me working for Rothmans.'
Law firm Leigh Day is now considering suing British American Tobacco, which absorbed Rothmans in 1999.
BAT is a multinational firm worth almost £70billion and the biggest publicly traded tobacco company in the world.
Lung cancer was once a rare disease and considered peculiar by doctors but a surge in the popularity of cigarettes triggered an 'epidemic' of it.
Cigarettes started to become mass produced and popular towards the end of the 1800s, with lung cancer cases appearing increasingly often years later.
One scientist in 1898 suggested tobacco dust, rather than smoke, could be triggering tumours – but his theory was corrected in 1912 when another said the smoke was to blame. But this wasn't proven or widely believed.
By the 1920s lung cancers were starting to become common and doctors tended to blame smoking, dust from tarred roads, industrial air pollution, and exposure to poisonous gas during World War I.
But by the 1940s and 50s experts were beginning to understand it was smoking cigarettes which was driving up cancer rates.
A poll in the US in 1954 found about 41 per cent of the public believed in the
