'The love of my life' died from asbestos poisoning

A husband has spoken of his heartache at losing his wife of nearly 60 years to asbestos poisoning.

Tony Boxall, of Lechford Road, Horley, said his wife contracted mesothelioma, the medical name for asbestos poisoning, when she was soldering valves on aircraft radios in Salfords as a teenager.

Speaking days after a West Sussex coroner passed a verdict of industrial injury on his 77-year-old wife Evelyn, Mr Boxall said: "She was the love of my life."

Despite receiving the confirmation last week, Mr Boxall said he and his family already knew the cause.

"We knew exactly what it was. She was working at the company in Salfords when she was 16. We got married when she was 21.

"The trouble is it laid dormant for so long. The way it grows is much like fungi."

Mr Boxall, 79, a highly acclaimed amateur photographer with a list of accolades to his name, said he fell in love with his wife when she was 16 and he was in the Army.

The father-of-two watched his wife deteriorate from the bubbly, determined woman he once knew into someone who needed 24-hour care.

"From last August she started to get out of breath and we found out she had fluid on her lung."

Following a lung biopsy in Sutton, Evelyn went to East Surrey Hospital where she was told she needed radiotherapy for mesothelioma. Virtually all mesotheliomas are caused by exposure to asbestos.

Gradually the disease worsened and she became too ill to undergo radiotherapy. The grandmother-of-four spent her last days in St Catherine's Hospice, in Crawley, where she died on April 1 this year.

Mr Boxall said: "All the time she was ill she never complained once. She was terrific and the care at St Catherine's was absolutely superb.

"I remember when the nurses came to the house to take her to the hospice and she knew it was the last time she would be at the house.

"She asked the nurses to take her to the conservatory. I said to her 'why do you want to go out there, ducky?' She said to me 'because I want to say goodbye to my lovely garden'.

He added: "It broke my heart seeing her like that.

"I loved her very much and I miss her tremendously."

On October 30, Mr Boxall received the report from the West Sussex coroner that Mrs Boxall had died of "industrial injury".

It followed Mrs Boxall's spell working in a Salfords factory soldering parts on an asbestos worktop. She also worked part-time in Television and Camera Services, in Victoria Road, Horley.

She gave her family strict instructions about having a party in the garden after her funeral. "I even had to tell a joke to get people to laugh," said Mr Boxall.