True stories can often be stranger – and even more shocking – than fiction, and there’s one that left viewers particularly gobsmacked when a new drama series based on real events landed on Netflix last month. Toxic Town revisits one of the UK’s most significant environmental legal battles – the Corby toxic waste scandal.
The series tells the horrifying true story of a group of mothers in the small English town of Corby whose exposure to industrial pollution after the demolition of the nearby steelworks led to a decades-long fight for justice after their children were born with birth defects. Three young mothers, Susan McIntyre, Tracey Taylor and Maggie Mahon, are the focus of the series, with the trio banding together to challenge their local council.
“It’s a genuinely working-class story,” Toxic Town writer Jack Thorne told Netflix website, Tudum of the show. “It’s a story of people who are not part of the system that have never thought the system would work for them, working within the system and [fighting for] the result they deserved.”
The demolition of the steelworks, which once employed almost half of the town’s residents and was one of the largest in Europe, in the 1980s involved moving toxic waste across Corby – however, the council contractors employed weren’t experienced in dealing with the hazardous nature of the materials. Trucks, often uncovered, moved contaminated materials through residential areas, leaving a thick haze of dust that plagued the town for years.
All the mothers involved in the later legal case claimed to have come in contact with the dirt and dust from the clean-up while pregnant, however, they didn’t piece the puzzle together for years.
“I was in hospital with lots of other mothers having babies, and some of them had babies that had problems with their limbs. And I’d say, ‘Oh, you’ll be all right,’ and I’d comfort them,” Susan, whose son, Connor, was born without fingers on his left hand, told Tudum. “And then four months later, the same thing happened to me. I had a baby with the exact same thing.”
Maggie’s son, Sam, was also born with a limb difference – a club foot – while Tracey’s daughter, Shelby, was born with a two-chamber heart and died at 4 days old.
There were many other children with severe birth defects, all born within a 15-year timeframe that coincided with the steelworks’ protracted demolition – the numbers were impossible to ignore. Still, a 1999 Northamptonshire Health Authority study found no unusual cluster of birth defects.
It took solicitor and Corby local Des Collins, who had been made aware of the “Corby cluster” from a Sunday Times exposé in April 1999, to rally more victims willing to join a case – with 19 families ending up signing onto the class action lawsuit. He conducted his own investigation, revealing birth defects in Corby were three times higher than in the surrounding area, and assembled a team of experts to testify against the council.
Ten years after the Sunday Times article, a three-month civil court hearing ruled in favour of the claimants. And while Corby Borough Council disputed the verdict and prepared an appeal, they ended up reaching a private settlement with the families in 2010.
Though the settlement didn’t make the years of pain and suffering of the affected families disappear, it did provide some comfort and consolation.
“We had to show we were strong independent women who were going to prove that what they did was wrong and we were not going to be lied to,” Tracey has reflected on the landmark ruling.
“All the years of fighting and then finding out that yes, the judge believed us mums and we were right, it brought a real big sense of relief because it was like, ‘I didn’t do anything wrong, it’s not my fault.’”
