Diksha Sundriyal
In Netflix’s ‘Toxic Town,’ a terrible reality comes to light when several children are born with differing birth defects. The span of their births coincides with the time in which the city was indulged in the reclamation of a defunct steel factory and transferring its toxic waste outside the residential area. At the time, no one understands the repercussions of the mismanagement, but it is the mothers and their children who feel the loss. The heaviest loss, perhaps, is felt by Tracey Taylor, who loses her first child to this tragic turn of events and then fights for justice.
Tracey Taylor Lost Her Daughter to the Toxic Waste Mismanagement in Corby
Tracey Taylor lived in Kettering with her husband, Mark, whom she’d met when she was seventeen and had married in 1994. She would go to and fro from Corby for work and never thought much of the dust that became a part of her life during the years of the reclamation. It wasn’t until she got pregnant and delivered their first child in 1996 that the repercussions of the exposure started to show. She first noticed a child born with deformities when she was admitted to the Kettering General Hospital. The baby of a woman in the bed opposite to hers had missing toes. At the time, Tracey didn’t give it much thought. Her husband had been at home when she went into labor, and in the beginning, no one thought that something untoward would unfold during the delivery process, but things took a backslide pretty soon.
The first time Tracey saw her daughter, Shelby Anne, she noticed that the baby had a malformed ear. However, she couldn’t say anything about it as she herself had started hemorrhaging. It was so bad that even the doctors thought she would die, and her husband was told to say his goodbyes. Fortunately, she pulled through, but this happiness didn’t last long. Tracey noticed that her daughter wasn’t feeding, and something felt off about her. When she raised her concerns, she was told not to worry, and it was simply her anxiety talking. Eventually, however, she made them listen, which is when little Shelby was looked at and sent to the special care unit. A worried Tracey had her daughter blessed and christened by a priest in the hospital parking lot because no one was allowed inside special care.
The next morning, the baby was put in an incubator and transferred to a hospital in Oxford, where the tests showed that Shelby Anne’s heart had only two chambers instead of four. Moreover, her lungs were also not developed properly, and with both these things in mind, she didn’t have much chance of survival. The doctors offered to perform surgery, but even with that, the chances of her survival remained pretty low. Tracey and Mark decided that if their daughter could breathe on her own, they’d let the doctors go forward with surgery. However, little Shelby didn’t survive for long and passed away days after she was born.
Tracey Taylor was a Key Factor in Winning the Case
For a long time, Tracey Taylor couldn’t understand what went wrong with her daughter. It was when Susan McIntyre appeared in a TV interview in 2003 that she connected the dots. Back when she was pregnant with Shelby, Tracey used to work around the same area where the reclamation work was going on, and that’s where the role of the dust came into the picture. She remembered the dust taking over everything around her like “a sandstorm in the desert,” so thick that it was impossible to keep the windows open because it would get everywhere. “You could clean your desk, and by the time you picked up your coffee cup, it was thick with dust again,” she said, describing the scene as if “the Sahara desert had just done a great big whoosh over.”
Tracey also felt the impact on her breathing as she couldn’t live without inhalers when she was in Corby, but once she was far enough from town, she could breathe easily. Following McIntyre’s interview, she reached out to the lawyer, Des Collins, and told him everything about the situation back then. This confirmed for him that dust was, in fact, the way the toxins had spread throughout the town and infected women. He called her the missing link of his investigation because, with her testimony, the affected women could be linked to the factory.
Now that Tracey had received a proper explanation about what happened to her daughter and why, she focused on getting justice for Shelby. However, she received a setback when she was told that she would not be presented as one of the claimants in the trial because, to win the case, they had to turn the focus on the kids with limb deformities. As tragic as Shelby’s case was, she did not fit the criteria. While this was a disappointment for Tracey, it did not deter her from testifying in the trial to help win the case and get justice for eighteen other claimants.
Tracey Taylor Still Holds the Memory of Her Daughter Close to Her Heart
Now in her 50s, Tracey Taylor lives in Kettering, which has been her home for almost the entirety of her life. She has three children with her husband, Mark: twins Brandon and Callum, and a son, Dominic. After losing Shelby Anne, the second pregnancy was emotionally difficult for Tracey, as she worried that something might go wrong with her children again. When the twins were born, she left her job and decided to stay home to care for them completely.
As for her daughter, she has continued to keep little Shelby in her memories all these years and includes her in everything they do as a family together. On Christmas, she leaves a stocking at Shelby’s grave. While she still feels the loss of her daughter, she also feels grateful that she and Mark got to know her. “There are people in this world who would love to have children and have never had that. We had four days with her, so even if we never had more children, we still have something other people don’t have,” she said.
The fight for justice for the children of Corby brought Tracey close to the other women who fought beside her. She continues to be close friends with a number of them. When she was approached about the making of ‘Toxic Town,’ she was eager to be a part of it as she believes that there is much more to the story that hasn’t come out even now. She hopes that the Netflix series will create awareness around the issue and make “people of Corby realize just how much they have been affected by this.” She also met with actress Aimee Lou Wood and expressed her gratitude and happiness for presenting Shelby Anne’s story to the world and bringing her the justice she deserved.
Read More: Sam Hagen: What Happened to the Former Corby Councillor?
