Posted on 26 January 2025 by Fiona Wells
Adoption 70 years Ago to Today
As a family, we have had a varied experience with adoption services over a 70 year period, with many twists and turns along the way. Our family story could have its’ own episode on Long Lost Family.
I met my husband in the summer of 1977. We knew quite quickly that we were the right ones for each other when he asked me whether it mattered to me that he had been adopted as a baby. It didn’t matter to me at all-being just 20 and having a romantic idea of a poor woman in dire circumstances having to give her baby away. Besides, the 2 girls of our neighbours while I was growing up had 2 adopted daughters. However, it mattered greatly to my husband. He had married at a young age and the marriage had failed. In hindsight, he was trying to make a family of his own. His adoption had been used against him in the most awful way-” You weren’t wanted” “You’re a bastard” “Your mother gave you away” amongst other hurtful things. These comments left their mark. He did not know until his mid teens that he had been adopted. His parents had decided to wait until then as they had also adopted a little girl, five years younger than him and had wanted to tell them together. My husband was devastated as unlike some families who hear of ‘secrets’ he really had no idea that he had been adopted. His parents could not give him any information about his birth mother. He had always felt ‘different’ and now felt that he knew why. There was no consideration about familial characteristics and he was physically very different to his parents. They were both much shorter than the national average, whereas my husband reached 6 feet and was very tall and gangly as a teenager.
The change in the law in 1975(I think) allowed adopted children access to their birth records. He was able to obtain his original birth certificate and see where he had been born along with his original name and that of his birth mother. From these details I was able to contact the hospital where he had been born and obtain his birth record. He was a full term baby whose mother was 17 years old the day after he was born. It included his birth weight- so much information that gave him a better picture of himself. His birth certificate showed an address where his mother had lived and worked-she was a domestic servant. It was probably a mother and baby home- but it no longer existed. We tried accessing birth records but could find no one with her name and seemingly came to a dead end.
Life moved on and we were married, hoping for a family of our own. It was at the beginning of IVF treatments and we joined the wait for help. Around this time, on a New Years’ Eve, my mother-in-law started telling me how she had come to adopt my husband. She had known when she had married that my father-in-law that it was unlikely that he was able to father children. He was from a very devout Catholic family, and the local priest knowing that they were childless, invited them to go to the local Nazareth House where she had the pick from two baby boys. Five years later, the priest arrived at their house with a baby girl for them to look after temporarily, and there she stayed. Our conversation was interrupted and she never spoke of it again.
This information led me to believe that my husband had been adopted through the Catholic Church and we were directed to the local head of the Catholic Children’s Society (no longer in existence)
To obtain his birth information, he needed counselling from a nun who was also a social worker. He learned that his mother was Irish and had come to England to give birth. The nun became quite a friend to him and over time suggested that we would make good adoptive parents-something we had not considered. We stopped attending IVF appointments and duly entered the vetting process. After first being advised that we would make better foster parents (no reason was given for this) we were eventually approved to adopt.
There was a book at the time, circulated by BAAF. There would be details of children free for adoption and details of how to apply for them. It was like a catalogue.We applied for a brother and sister, were down to the last two couples and were unsuccessful. We later learnt that the matching had failed and we were asked to consider these children. We didn’t do this as in the meantime, the nun we had become friendly with, told us of a five year old boy in Nazareth House in her area (this was 40 miles away from us).
Introductions were made and home visits carried out every weekend for about 2 months before he finally moved in with us. We knew A had some speech difficulties, but nothing we felt we couldn’t deal with although we had specified that we did not feel we had the skills to help a child with disability. A stand out comment from this time was my father asking why such a beautiful looking child was still looking for a family-there must be something wrong. How prophetic did that statement turn out to be?
From the start, A had a much stronger attachment to my husband, quickly calling him Paul-Dad, then just Dad. Within a few weeks of starting at the local school we were called in to be told that it was believed had a hearing problem. A hearing test at the local hospital showed him to be severely deaf- one step from profoundly deaf. He would need 2 hearing aids along with help from a teacher for the deaf, at school. This explained A’s speech problems and we queried why is deafness had not been picked up previously. It turned out that he had never completed ANY of his milestone checks. We later learned that he was considered at risk from birth and has been passed around a variety of unsuitable people to be looked after. It appears that no one knew where he was from week to week. He was also very small for his age due to poor feeding. I quickly became adept at hearing aid maintenance and retrieving batteries that A had fed to the family dog. He coped really well with his hearing aids as it must have opened up a new world to him. His specialist teacher was a lovely woman who occasionally took A out with her own family to give me a break once the behaviour problems started. My husband did shift work and the behaviour problems escalated when he wasn’t there. He would often come home from work to find me sobbing or I’d go into work a blubbering mess.
I can’t really remember when the behaviour problems started and escalated but I do know that we didn’t really have a ‘honeymoon’ period. There was self injury where A would punch himself in the head then head butt the wall usually accompanied by screaming. Later, furniture would be smashed and his personal things broken. I was taught restraint techniques to limit the damage done to himself and this resulted in me being attacked until I was able to hold him. It was something that happened when it was just the two of us at home until one day he had a total meltdown just as his social worker arrived. I quickly ushered him into the house so he could witness what I was regularly experiencing. How wrong was I? He was appalled that I had called him to witness things instead of being hit and beaten whilst attempting to restrain A. Our relationship deteriorated so badly that he said he was not comfortable coming into my home as he did not feel welcome. We also had a court appointed Guardian ad Litem who visited to compile a report to support our adoption of A as we still very much wanted to do this.
Behaviour problems escalated again at home and school. He disrupted school assemblies and was ostracised by his peers. He was not invited to parties and parents stopped talking to me at the school gate. I was being called into school on an almost daily basis to discuss things. In the morning he refused to get dressed and when I eventually managed to get him into his clothes, he would simply remove them. At school he would tear his clothes and I became quite good at patching them, refusing to replace them. Adoption didn’t go ahead as A was not showing signs of being happy and settled.
He’d been with us for just over 3 years when I suddenly found myself pregnant. By this time we had been married almost 11years. What should have been a time for celebration was muted as not to make A feel unwanted or that he was being replaced. Our home was set out so that 2 bedrooms were one side of a split landing and a further bedroom and bathroom at the opposite side of the house. A’s bedroom was next to ours and as not to unsettle him, the baby’s room was the opposite side next to the bathroom. We went the extra mile to include A in everything and made much of him being a lovely big brother. I eventually gave birth to a baby girl and at first A seemed happy to fulfil his role and enjoyed feeding and playing with her.
My husband had put looking to his birth mother aside when after having A about 3.5years, that we had a surprising phone call from the nun who had started us off on our adoption journey. When opening the mail, she came across a letter where a mother who had given up a child, was asking for help in tracing him. She recognised the details immediately after her contact with us and it was indeed, my husband’s birth mother. Amazingly, in her younger days she had been a domestic servant to who eventually became Cardinal Basil Hulme. She had been searching for her son for many years and in desperation had contacted him for help. She was advised to try the Catholic Children’s Society for help.Both mother and son were counselled before meeting, and met in the main office of the Catholic Children’s Society. Her story was very sad. She was the youngest of a large family and had become pregnant at 16 by a man who ran who owned the local village shop in southern Ireland. It was the time of the Magdalen Laundries where ‘fallen’ women and girls went to work and have their babies who would then be taken from them for adoption. To avoid this, an older brother and sister arranged for her to be smuggled under the cover of darkness, to England to have her baby. The year was 1955.
She eventually married and went on to have around 6 more babies who were either stillborn or died shortly after birth. She took my husband to see their graves and I believe there was some sort of genetic incompatibility between her and her husband. She had been in a serious accident prior to her meeting my husband and had suffered severe head injuries. She was sometimes quite muddled and called my husband Michael (He was now Paul and she had named him Peter) we wondered whether there was another child she’d had to give up but this wasn’t clear.
Meanwhile at home, things seemed to be relatively calm until I was woken up one morning by the baby screaming. On entering her bedroom I found A holding her up and I could see that her leg had a gash and she was bleeding. She was around 5 months old at this time. A could give no explanation of how she had come to be injured. Although we had baby monitors in her and our bedroom, we had heard nothing.
This triggered off one of the worst periods of my life. I began surviving on very little sleep. I was afraid the baby would be hurt again. My husband was still doing shift work and his newly found mother became increasingly demanding. She was always on the phone or wanting my husband to go and visit, which meant an overnight stay. It was if they were trying to catch up on 35 years+ of his life. She was not interested in her grandchildren and I was finding this and things at home increasingly difficult.
My husband and birth mother had only known each other a little over a year when she died suddenly from a heart attack. My husband attended her funeral (ironically on his adoptive mother’s birthday) where he met a many members of his birth family. He did not keep in touch with his birth mother’s husband until several months later when he forwarded an unpaid bill of his birth mothers to my husband. She had hired a private detective to look for 2 sons who had been adopted. My husband and another son whose birth name was Michael. We had guessed there was another child but had no way of finding him.
There was still no prospect of A being adopted and by this time I did not think that I wanted to proceed with things. My husband was firmly on the side of adoption. What if his adoptive mother had given him up? There was no reasoning with him over this. I meanwhile was becoming afraid of A and what he was capable of. I was almost knocked unconcious when pegging washing out. A had swung the rotary clothes line with all his might, knocking me to the ground when it made contact with my head. When leaving for work and school one morning, he put the plug in the bathroom sink and turned the taps on as we left the house. I came home to no ceiling in the dining room and the ground floor flooded. The next serious event was when he tried to set the house on fire by throwing lit matches beneath a wooden dresser. Thank God the smell of smouldering carpet alerted us to this danger. By now I was feeling that the only way out of my nightmare life would be to end it all. It was a serious consideration and my only beacon of light at this time was the thought of my daughter growing up without her mother. We had thrown our all at A to help him and why shouldn’t she be given the same? I did not want her to be brought up in the chaos we were currently living so I eventually packed some essentials and moved in with my parents. I felt my husband needed to experience my day to day life. He was a very hard working man but life at home and a pressurised job, although part time, I felt was harder.
Most friends and family had long since stopped helping with child care and it soon became obvious that my husband was unable to cope and I refused to return home. It was truly an awful time but the only thing I am eternally grateful for was that A had not been adopted. Thank God for the court Guardian who recognised that things weren’t right. This enabled A to be returned to the care system. A friend packed his belongings and my brother took him back to Nazareth House, where he had come from to us originally. My brother’s abiding memory of this time was the carefree way A left him. Happy and singing-as if he’d got what he’d wanted. He didn’t feel it was bravado.
The Catholic Children’s Society offered us marriage guidance\counselling to see if anything of our relationship could be salvaged. At the first session I was told I’d clearly made up my mind that my marriage was over. This wasn’t the case and neither of us felt that this was not the way forward for us. We eventually muddled through and were together until my husband died very suddenly 8 years later. He had a congenital heart condition that he was completely unaware of. As his birth mother had also died very suddenly from a heart attack, I contacted the Coroner who had dealt with her inquest to see if there was any hereditary cause of these heart attacks. Her heart attack was likely to have been caused by lifestyle. She was a heavy smoker and had issues with alcohol in the past.
Life went on and my daughter was checked to see if she had inherited any heart problem and it appears she is fit and well.
Fast forward to 2018 when I was sitting at home with my daughter one Saturday evening- a rare occurrence -when she said she’d had a weird message from a woman who said she thought her partner could be her Dad’s brother. She said “Dad had a sister, not a brother didn’t he?” I had never told her about the unpaid bill he had received 25 years before, naming a possible brother. I asked her to message the woman back and ask if her partner had been named M before being adopted. He had, and with the wonder of Facebook and my daughter having an unusual first name and surname, we had found Paul’s brother. His brother now named C, had searched for his birth mother and sadly she had passed away before he found her. However, he uncovered other family members and one of them remembered meeting Paul at his birth mother’s funeral -and his wife remembered my daughter’s name! We went on to meet up and are still in touch. The physical resemblance between brothers is amazing-both tall and gangly, good at running and football fanatics. I find it unnerving sometimes and C says outside of his own children, my daughter is his closest blood relative. Like my husband, he too had a failed early marriage and he was a member of AA having had issues with alcohol like his birth mother and to some extent, my husband too. He had a happy adoption but again like my husband he had always felt different and had an overwhelming need to find his birth family. He has taken things a step further than my husband did, by going to trace family in Ireland where their mother was from and changing his surname to her maiden name. As an aside, she had left out the O’ (typical of Irish surnames) of her surname on both boys birth certificates, making her harder to trace.
It was also around this time, that A contacted her too, and I felt scared. I was afraid he would find out where I was now living and he would come to my home and harm me. I was awful to find that all these years later I was afraid of him. He was now about 40 years old. He had some questions about his early years that he asked me, through her and I was able to fill in some gaps. Very telling I think, that he didn’t contact me directly. He had asked SS for this info but his file had been “lost.” He was even unaware of his correct year of birth. I realise that he could probably have found this himself, but I think it was beyond him. He disclosed that he had been fostered by another family after he left us, again unhappily. He was the youngest of 3 birth children who resented him. Things ended in violence when the foster parents had a break away and he was blamed for the fallout. I also learned that he was the second child of TEN siblings. He was the middle child of 3 when he lived with us. He apparently was the only one who regularly saw his mother and helped her out and also that he had been sectioned many times due to poor mental health. I think those signs were there as a young child. He had fathered a child at the age of 19 but the relationship hadn’t lasted and he rarely saw the child. He was now not with anyone.
My daughter and her partner also decided to go down the adoption route to have their family. I tried hard to dissuade them in view of my experience but I was assured things had changed. Today allegedly, you have to be given the full details of the children’s’ history and both were professionals with extensive experience in dealing with children and their difficulties. They felt they had everything to offer a sibling group.
After the training and vetting period, they were duly matched with a sibling group of 3.
The relationship with the foster parents was ok to begin with but soon went downhill. The transition plan wasn’t followed and the children arrived at their new home with barely a week of getting to know each other. They were told that these people were their new parents. The eldest child told my daughter that she wasn’t their best mum as their other mother was the best. Heartbreaking. Such poor preparation had taken place.
Within a few weeks, a serious safeguarding issue became apparent and the family was desperate for help. This help was not immediately forthcoming as a member of the SS team was on holiday.
To be brief and to maintain confidentiality, SS tried to divide the children between local family members and for therapy to take place. Other suggestions were off the scale of normal and left the parents open to vulnerability with their professional bodies. The way forward could not be agreed and the safeguarding issue was never dealt with. The children were removed after 8 weeks.
So, what have I learned about adoption?
Even after being adopted at 6 weeks old into happy, secure and loving families, my husband and his brother overwhelmingly had the need to find their mother. They were not interested in the details of why they had been adopted; they just wanted to know the woman who had given birth to them.
Do not tell children to call their adoptive parents Mum and Dad. Let it be their choice, in their own time. May be the time will never come as it may seem a betrayal to their birth families.
Accept that children will nearly always want to meet their birth families. The genetics will be evident. The physical resemblance, although they had different birth fathers, between my husband and his brother is extraordinary as is the familial tendency to be heavy drinkers. Personality wise too, the similarities are huge. They were adopted into a working class and middle class family respectively so possibly had different career expectations growing up. Neither was particularly academic, both excellent runners and football fanatics. They ended up driving for a living and along with their mother, were very outgoing and sociable with a great sense of humour. Both had early, failed marriages- I think possibly they were trying to create a family of their own. A also did this, but without getting married.
Adoption is far too rushed today. Families aren’t given the time to settle and as usually the adults are desperate to make the child/ren officially theirs, I think SS are happy to get child/ren off their hands. There is a lot to be said for long term fostering. If adoption is then the thing all parties want, fine. I will always be grateful that I was able to call a halt to my situation without legal repercussions.
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