Toxic Town’s concluding disclaimer revealed that the character of council leader, Roy Thomas, isn’t specifically based on a single person but loosely based on a number of leaders who served the Corby Borough Council (CBC) from the beginning of 1984 through to 2009-10. In 1980, after facing huge government cuts and sanctions, the British Steel Corporation permanently shut down its steelworks operation, leaving more than 11 thousand people unemployed. In order to keep Corby from turning into a ghost town, the Corby Council devised a plan to regenerate the town and create a new Corby. Under the leadership of Kelvin Glendenning, they took on the biggest land reclamation operation in Europe with the goal of bringing Corby back to life in 10 years.
As per the media reports, Glendenning served as CBC’s leader from 1984 to 1995, implying that Sam Hagen, who had been a part of the council for more than 30 years, worked with Glendenning and knew how recklessly he was handling the operation of the toxic waste management from the steelworks. The early 1990s was quite a controversial period for the CBC. They had told the public and the government that the contaminated waste would be cleared out in 10 years, which explains the management’s urgency and the reasons behind their rash decisions. During the same time, Hagen, who worked as a deputy leader, raised concerns that the council leader was taking shortcuts to finish the project in the promised timeframe, which might have health implications on the people of Corby. But as mentioned in the very beginning of the Netflix series, Hagen didn’t have any concrete evidence at hand to support his accusations.
It was in the same time period that Mark Bosence, the real-life counterpart of the whistleblower, Edward Jenkins, tried to report to his seniors about the mishandling of hazardous waste from the steelworks. However, instead of taking any strict actions and investigating his concerns, the management removed him from the reclamation project and shifted him elsewhere. Bosence and Hagen’s investigation even revealed that the council leader, including a number of officials from the higher management, had been fraudulently handing tenders and contracts to the wrong bidders. The reason for such an irregularity was simple. The council leader wanted to lower the cost of the reclamation operation so that they could increase their profits within the budget passed by the government. The series, as well as the corresponding real-life events, made it abundantly clear that the fictional Pat Miller and his company, Rhodes & Miller, weren’t equipped with the expertise to carry out toxic waste management at such a large scale, yet the council leader gave them the contract, given Pat Miller was ready to do the job at a cheap rate. In real life, CBC had signed the contractors named Noone and McGowan Ltd. and Shanks & McEwans Ltd. for land reclamation and removal of toxic sludge. However, as per the court’s 400-page judgment, most claimants saw the filthy-dirty lorries of Shanks & McEwans spilling toxic mud on the public roads. As of today, both these companies are dissolved. Furthermore, none of these contractors ever faced any criminal charges in the Corby case.
Glendenning stepped down from the leadership in 1995, paving the way for the new candidates, but it didn’t make much of a difference. The damage had already been done. The dried-up contaminated silt turned into red toxic dust that affected the pregnant women in the small town and caused birth defects, which had no real cure. But even though Glendenning sounded like the evil behind the whole tragedy, none of the council leaders ever accepted the fact that it was their fault. The crimes didn’t even come to light, or more accurately, no one really established a link between the toxic dust and the deformities until a Sunday Times journalist, Graham Hind, started investigating the cluster of birth defects in 1998.
In 2003, Chris Mallender, the new CBC chief executive, took up the reins of the council, and whilst he was in office, continued to deny the claims made by the mothers and their solicitor. As per the real-life timeline, Des Collins met with Mallender to seek a settlement for the aggrieved parties, but Mallender refused their terms and decided to take the matter to court. It was during Mallender’s tenure that the court ruled in favor of the mothers and asked the CBC to make monetary compensation to the 18 families (numbers may vary) that amounted to 14.6 million pounds. Now, the reason why Toxic Town and its showrunners portrayed Roy Thomas as the face of the Corby Borough Council facade was to ensure the viewers associated the evil that was polluting the town with one face and one face only. If the miniseries kept changing the identity of the antagonist for the sake of historical accuracy, the impact of the council’s defeat and the claimants’ victory probably would’ve been diminished. Hence, they took creative liberties to make Roy Thomas the punching bag, not just for the characters but the audience as well. In short, Roy Thomas personified corruption and the ignorance of the authorities, whose actions led to the devastating birth defects in a small merry town of Corby.
