Inside Britain’s ‘Toxic Town’ where mass poisoning scandal left Brit kids dead and born without limbs

HAVING spent almost all of her pregnancy in hospital with complications, including diabetes and pre-eclampsia, Susan McIntyre felt a wave of relief when her baby boy was safely delivered. Yet, when newborn Connor was placed in her arms on August 6, 1997, the doctor broke the news he’d been born without a left hand. “I asked the doctor why it had happened, and he said maybe the baby had been sitting wrong in the womb,” says Susan, now 56, from Corby, Northamptonshire.

“The strangest thing is, I was in hospital for a long time [before giving birth], and I saw lots of other mums, and some of them had babies that also had issues with their limbs. Then I had a baby with the exact same thing. I did think that was strange.”. In a town like Corby, with a population of around 60,000, you would expect to see just one such birth every three or four years – but a total of 19 babies were born with limb differences during the period 1989-1998.

These, it would later transpire, had been caused by toxic dust emissions from a former steelworks, in what was the biggest case of foetal poisoning since the morning-sickness drug thalidomide in the 1950s and 1960s – and one of the UK’s biggest environmental disasters. New Netflix drama, Toxic Town, starring Doctor Who and Broadchurch actress Jodie Whittaker as Susan, tells the extraordinary story of the group of Corby mums who waged a landmark 10-year legal battle against Corby Borough Council, eventually becoming the first people in the world to prove the link between airborne poison and damage to foetuses.

Susan already had a three-year-old son, Daniel, when Connor was born. Under the strain of having a disabled child, her marriage to the children’s father Peter, a factory worker, ended when Connor was eight months old. In the months following his birth, they were in and out of hospital for corrective surgery on his hand, and she came across another baby from Kettering with similar limb differences.

She says: “You question yourself and wonder if you did anything wrong in your pregnancy. You know you haven’t, but that’s just a process of dealing with it all. It was a very dark time.”. When Connor was 18 months old, Susan had a life-changing knock at the door. “It was a journalist and he said to me: ‘This could be a big problem in Corby. We think there’s some sort of damage that’s causing this to your babies.’ Nobody knew what it was, just that there were a lot of babies that had this.”.

The Sunday Times journalist Graham Hind believed the abundance of limb differences in such a short period could be linked to the reclamation of a former steelworks in the town, which had closed down in 1980, but was regenerated by the council between 1984 and 1999 to create shops, parks and businesses. “I didn’t want to get involved at first because I was scared,” says Susan. “We were like little people, and we were frightened to say anything because we didn’t know what would happen if we went up against the council.

We were frightened to say anything, as we didn’t know what would happen if we went up against the council. "You didn’t want to lose your house and everything you’d worked hard for and got in life. We thought it was best to be quiet and toe the line.”. She did eventually contribute to Graham’s article published in The Sunday Times on April 11, 1999, and was subsequently contacted by solicitor Des Collins, who offered to represent the mums in launching a legal battle against Corby Borough Council.

A second mother, Tracey Taylor, had worked in an office on an industrial estate close to the steelworks while she was pregnant with her first child, and had no idea that the thick dust that regularly covered her car was toxic. Her baby, Shelby, died just three days after her birth on April 19, 1996. Tracey, now 53, who lives in Kettering, says: “It was like the Sahara Desert had done a great big whoosh over.

"You could clean your desk, and by the time you picked your coffee cup up, it was thick with dust again. We wouldn’t even go out at dinner time, because it would burn the back of your throat. It was awful, but you didn’t realise you were drinking and breathing toxic waste.”. A third mother, Maggie Mahon, joined the cause after reading about it in the newspaper. Her husband Derek worked at the reclamation site and she recalls beating dust from his clothes every evening when he came home while she was pregnant. Their son Sam was born with a club foot on July 10, 1997, and endured years of operations to correct it.

Mum-of-two Maggie, now 53 and a teaching assistant from Corby, says: “The doctors put Sam’s foot in a splint when he was a week old, and he’d go into hospital every so often and they’d stretch it. “Later on, he had a pair of little boots he had to wear for six months. The first day they put his boots on, the doctors said: ‘He’s going to hate this, but don’t take it off whatever you do.’ That night, he was crying and crying. Derek came in from work one day, and I said: ‘Read this article – you worked among all this, and Sam’s got a club foot – that’s a bit coincidental, isn’t it?’”.