Houses of Shame

The Guardian, 31st October 2007

Photograph: Ian Waldie/Getty

In the 50s, single parenthood was a scandal. Unmarried and pregnant, Maureen Paton's mother was sent to a series of 'refuges' and pressured to give her baby away. But she was one of the lucky ones...
Back in 1951, when I was born, my mother was living in what we would now regard as a singularly oppressive home. At the age of 40, she was being forced to sleep in a large communal dormitory, attend daily prayers, and help domestic staff with their duties.
This wasn't a prison, but a refuge for single mothers. Run by the evangelical Mission of Hope, Birdhurst Lodge in Croydon offered my mother temporary shelter from a bleak postwar world where women who got pregnant out of wedlock - even in circumstances of rape - were considered little better than prostitutes. They were often spirited off to brutal "unmarried mothers' homes", and there, in those days before IVF, when many infertile couples were desperate to adopt, they could find themselves pressed relentlessly to give up their child.
Impoverished single mothers have always been a favourite soft target for critics of the welfare state.
A new exhibition at the Women's Library considers the history of single parenthood, exploring the many reasons why women have become lone mothers, including relationship breakdown, widowhood and family separation as a result of exile. Although its findings challenge the stereotypes, it also looks at how heavily lone mothers have been stigmatised over the years.
And such attitudes still persist - back in July, for instance, David Cameron described unmarried mothers as a key sign of a "broken society".
I, for one, am grateful that we now live in a society where unmarried mothers have some genuine support. Technically, my mother was divorced rather than unmarried, but what really mattered to the moralists of the 1950s was that she was not married to the father of her child. My mother died a few years ago, but I recently spoke to her oldest friend Gladys, who said that she had received a "pitiful" letter from her in December 1950. "I'm nearly 40, I'm expecting a child and the man has abandoned me," she wrote. She had met my Irish father in Oxford while on the rebound from her disastrous marriage and, when it turned out she was pregnant, he went back to Ireland. Growing too big to disguise her pregnancy at work, my mother's GP advised her to hide in an Edwardian building called Clark's House in Oxford.
These days Clark's House is a probation hostel, but in 1951 it was a mother-and-baby home run by a religious charity known, rather forbiddingly, as Skene Moral Welfare. Every woman was assigned her own moral welfare worker, the church equivalent of a social worker. Depending on your point of view, they were either guardian angels or police officers.
As my birth approached, my mother transferred to Birdhurst Lodge to be nearer to her own foster family. (Yes, my mother had also been born out of wedlock and had an absconding father). And though the Birdhurst regime may now seem punitive, by the standards of the day it was benign. Not only was it against the Mission's policy to accept a fee from adoptive parents - thus removing the motive many homes had to encourage women to give up their child - but each mother was allowed six weeks after the birth, a crucial bonding period, to decide what to do next.
My mother was lucky not to have ended up in a more repressive place, such as a Magdalen home. These were run by nuns who referred to their charges as "fallen women" and would hand babies over to wealthy couples in exchange for a handsome "donation" to the convent. The nuns would then put the anguished mothers to work as "lifers" in the laundry, unless a relative agreed to come and collect them. Since it was often the family that had put them there in the first place - for reasons of "honour" - their chances weren't exactly brilliant.
Birdhurst may have been less brutal, but that didn't stop women facing harsh realities. As former Birdhurst employee Joyce Gautrey told me, the majority of women gave their babies up for adoption, because they felt they had no choice. Fear of being judged meant that most never felt free to explore their options.
The average stay at Birdhurst was not life, as with the Magdalen laundries, but three months. Admitted to Birdhurst in April 1951, my mother gave birth to me in early June, and left at the end of July. A register was kept of the "removals" - the ominous-sounding word for adoptions - and my mother told me that the women who gave up their babies "cried and cried for weeks afterwards".
After Birdhurst, my mother moved to a London county council-run hostel for mothers and babies and became friendly with another unmarried mother called Hazel, who was also older than the average inmate and equally determined to keep her little girl, Susan. Bereft of options, Hazel took what seemed the drastic but not unusual choice of an assisted £10 passage to Australia as a mail-order bride for a lonely sheep farmer. My mother agonised for years afterwards about whether she too should have risked skin cancer, snakes and Australian machismo for a new life in the sun. But an unexpected option had presented itself. When one of my mother's foster sisters made a first marriage in her late 50s, this remarkable couple offered my mother and me a permanent home. They became extra parents for me, though my mother never ceased to resent their "charity".
Gautrey recalls encountering women in a huge range of predicaments while at Birdhurst between 1946 and 1985. They included a 14-year-old, made pregnant in the 1960s by a group of village boys who had set out "to get a girl into trouble". The girl's parents rejected both her and the baby. Gautrey recalls how the 14-year-old mother was fostered afterwards by a "nice Christian family because she didn't want to go home to her natural parents - and that village". The baby was adopted. The only cases that Gautrey can recall of a mother keeping her baby without a struggle tended to be ones where the child was born disabled. In such cases, nobody rushed to adopt the child.
Mothers were even encouraged to buy a pack of baby clothes to hand over to the adoptive parents of their child. Gautrey remembers the custom fondly as being "the last thing they could do for their babies", but Patricia Basquill, a former inmate of a particularly punitive mother-and-baby home, saw it as the final humiliation.
In 1948, Basquill points out, the government had granted unmarried mothers the same benefits as widows, to ensure that they could bring up their children. Such was the stigma, however, that many unmarried mothers - mostly in their teens or early 20s - were too scared to go it alone. State support was also so meagre that most single mothers could only realistically afford to keep their babies if the extended family came to the rescue, quietly absorbing an extra child. (A notable example is Eric Clapton, who grew up thinking that the woman who was actually his mother was his elder sister.)
Even those prepared to tough it out were rarely read their rights. When Basquill's Ulster Protestant father discovered in 1961 that she had become pregnant, aged 15, by a Catholic boy, he packed her off to a Church of England home in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It was this that led Basquill to form Trackers International, an organisation that seeks justice for all lone mothers denied the right to keep their babies.
"We were treated like criminals and told we were entitled to no financial or material help and that if we left with our babies, we would be arrested as a moral danger to ourselves and others and our babies would be taken away from us," she recalls. "Two women held me down the day they came to take my daughter Elaine away for adoption and a third ripped her away from me while I was breastfeeding her." In a survey of women who became unmarried mothers between 1950 and 1975, Trackers International found that only 0.3% were informed of their rights, entitlements and any alternatives to adoption.
Until the law was changed, twins were often split up by homes and adopted separately. According to Gautrey, this was because not every adoptive parent felt that they could cope with two babies at once.
But Trackers International's research has found that many greedier homes deliberately split twins up to get two "donations", often never even telling adoptive parents that their new baby had been one of a pair.
Today renamed Christian Family Concern, the Mission of Hope continues its welfare work with mothers and babies. They dropped the adoption service in 1990 to reflect the modern emphasis on keeping the birth family together with the help of the public purse, if necessary. Quite right, too. When I was about eight, and out playing hopscotch, I remember our next-door neighbour loudly complaining that she didn't see why her taxes should pay for the education of other people's "brats". Even at that age, I could sense what an unfair thing it was to say. It had obviously never occurred to her that she didn't live in a self-contained bubble, and that one day, like any of us, she might find herself needing help from those other people's children.

The exhibition Sinners, Scroungers, Saints: Lone Parents Past and Present, developed in collaboration with One Parent Families/Gingerbread, runs at the Women's Library, Old Castle Street, London E1 7NT (020-7320 2222) until March 29.

'Women who got pregnant out of wedlock were considered little better than prostitutes.'

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008