Tracking down babies they had to give away

Stockport Express, 11th June 2003

by Anne Arnold

IT is one of the most horrific nightmares imaginable - having to give up your baby. But thousands of women in the fifties and sixties were forced to do just that. A Stockport woman tells how her child was snatched away, simply because she was not married and how it spurred her on to set up a service reuniting these broken families.
IN 1961 Pat Basquill's life changed forever when she fell pregnant. A naive 15-year-old schoolgirl, she had never received sex education and thought only married women could conceive.
Her boyfriend John was a Roman Catholic miner who earned extra cash taking parts in illegal bare knuckle fights in the back streets near their homes in Northumberland. The lovers planned to marry on Pat's 16th birthday. But their dreams were futile. The man that Pat believed to be her father was a radical Ulster Protestant who hated "Papists".

Pat, now 59, said: "My father took us suddenly away on a holiday for three weeks after I found out I was pregnant. It was a secret from them.
"Then at the end of the holiday my father told us he had sold our house and we were moving to another part of the country."
So she wrote a secret letter to John, pleading for him to rescue her. But the letter instead ended up in the hands of her father. "That was when all hell broke loose," Pat said.
Her father beat her and said: "You have mated with a Papist and there is no way any Roman Catholic will enter this family."
She was taken to a family member's home. It was December and during the night the young woman tried to escape through the snow. She slipped and fell, and the next morning the milkman took her back to the house where a stranger was waiting for her with her father.
The woman said she was a family friend and claimed that John was in prison. The only option was for Pat to go with her.
"I swallowed it hook, line and sinker," Pat said. "And that's how I ended up in hell."
The terrified teenager was taken to Elswick Lodge, a Diocesan Unmarried Mothers' Home in Newcastle. The Victorian building housed 20 young mums. There was no heating and the windows were caked in ice each morning.
Each expectant mum was expected to work in the laundries until they went into labour. Food rations were meagre and the staff were, in Pat's opinion, indifferent and disapproving.
"It was beyond belief, like going to prison," said Pat. "It was a punishment for a moral crime."
Pat received no antenatal care, but after days of complaining of sickness she was allowed to walk with another girl to a local GP down icy streets.
The doctor told her she had been in slow labour for three to four days and she was taken by ambulance to a hospital 30 miles away. She was then forced to undress in a public corridor before being taken to a delivery theatre. As an unmarried mother, she was not given the option of pain relief. Whilst on the delivery table Pat suffered a massive haemorhage and a priest came to give her the last rites, as she was so near death.

For the next three weeks the terrified girl and her baby, whom she named Elaine Catherine, stayed in hospital recovering before returning to Elswick Lodge. Moral welfare officers there described adoption as the only option for Elaine, and even took the pair on a humiliating visit to the VD clinic at Newcastle General Hospital.
Despite Pat's vehement protests that she wanted to keep her baby, after five weeks Elaine was literally snatched from her by the social workers and given to adoptive parents. The hysterical mum was ordered to choose a farewell hymn for her baby and given just one hour to leave the home.
Within months she had got a job in Blackpool and sorted out a flat and cot, determined to get her daughter back.
She was summoned to sign the final adoption papers near Preston and told them she was going to keep Elaine.
"I was told that was not an option, either Elaine went to her adoptive parents or would be brought up in a children's home and told she was an orphan. This was adoption by duress and I had no option but to sign," Pat said.
Pat, who now loathes social workers, has since married and had three more children. She set up Trackers UK and has since reunited more than 2,000 adoptees with their birth mothers.
Pat moved to Stockport with her husband Keith 18 years ago and runs Trackers UK from her terraced home in Offerton. And her research has shown that Stockport had a hand-over house where babies forcibly removed from their birth mothers were taken to be viewed by adoptive parents.
After years of research in 1989 she got in touch with Elaine, now called Julia.
"It wasn't a happy ending," Pat said. "All she wanted to know was the religion of her father, because she hates Catholics. She said she didn't feel emotionally involved with me at all.
"And then she told me she was a social worker. We don't stay in touch."

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008