LIVES RUINED BY LOSS OF BABIES

The Journal, 15th January 2000

She refers to it as the 'adoption industry'. Pat Basquill, whose daughter was taken from her against her will as an unmarried mother in the Sixties, believes this will be the year that the Government finally embarks on a public enquiry. She spoke to Rosie Waller.

PAT Basquill was breast feeding when they came to take away her daughter. The baby was nine weeks old, Pat herself just 15 but the maternal bond was intense after spending more than two months loving and caring for her little girl.
Looking back she still finds it hard to choose words to describe how she'd felt. "Like I had been through a shredding machine," she ventures. "Like my flesh had been torn from me or I'd been attacked from the inside out, because that baby was part of me."
Two women entered, the room; one, standing behind Pat put her hands on her shoulders while the other took hold of the baby and prized her from Pat's arms. It was over in seconds. Pat's final contact with tiny Elaine was to hear her screams as she was carried down the echoing corridor of Elswick Lodge in the West End of Newcastle, one of a number of North-East mother and baby homes of the Sixties.
Afterwards one of the staff told her it was no good snivelling and to get everything tidied up to leave.
Pat had hoped she would somehow manage to convince the authorities that she could bring up the child alone. "I would have done anything to keep that baby," Pat says. "I pleaded just to have her placed with foster parents and afterwards I found myself a job and a babysitter and a flat, but by then they said it was too late. It just needn't have been like that."
But back then, adoption was all too inevitable. Throughout her stay at the Church of England run Elswick Lodge, which pompously described itself as an 'unmarried mothers home', babies were being taken from young mums all around her. That's what the girls were there for, hidden away for the later months of their pregnancies and then left to nurture and bond with the children they would be allowed to keep only until a proper, married woman stepped in to adopt them.
"One of the friends I made there killed herself after they took her baby. She was nearly 15, that's all," says Pat. "She had no support from her family and there was no way she was going to be allowed to keep
him.
"She had spoken to me just before she actually did it, but I was pregnant and very young, and I was going into labour at the time and didn't realise she was going over the edge. She had taken the signet ring off that her boyfriend gave her and I've had it ever since.
"If ever I find James I will give it to him."

Home of shame: Elswick Lodge where unmarried mothers were sent to give birth.

Pat, now 54, has dedicated her adult life to tracing the birth parents or children of those affected by adoption. "Most I find within six to eight weeks. Some take a lot longer - and you always get the one or two that are bloody heartbreaking and you just can't find them," she says. "James has been one of them. I've looked for years."
Ten years ago, Pat forced herself to return to Elswick Lodge from Stockport in the North-West, where she has made a life for herself.
The building in Park Close has become a centre for people recovering from addiction and mental health problems since the mother and baby home was disbanded nearly 30 years ago.
"The staff were very kind. I explained why I was there and left the poster I had made just in case any residents knew of people who were born there who anted to trace their birth mothers.
"Six months later a young man phoned me. It wasn't James - but I gradually realised I was speaking to the last baby I had held in my arms there. When they took your child off you they would ask you to be ready to leave in half an hour, and I had gone to help this man's mother tidy up. We were both in tears as the penny dropped.
"I've never managed to find his mother, sadly. We've advertised abroad and checked every record. She's the one girl above all others I would desperately like to trace."
Pat also dedicates her time to fighting the law.
"I'm involved in lobbying Parliament about the adoption abuses of the past, when coercion was used and consents were not lawfully taken. We're pushing for a public inquiry into what went on, and we're now hopeful that we'll get one. The Government can no longer ignore the issue as more and more evidence emerges."
In Australia, where similar adoption systems were maintained, a public inquiry is now underway.

Here in Britain, around 750,000 unmarried mothers had their babies taken from them during that time in the 50's, 60's and early 70's. Pat believes the figure is higher - these are simply the ones who have gone on to register themselves in some way.
"I asked if my baby could go to temporary foster parents, anything. I was told I wasn't entitled. But 30 years later I discovered you were entitled to a great deal of help. That has been very hard to deal with.
"I was also tricked into signing the adoption papers. They told me that by doing so my baby wouldn't go into a home. I did it to protect her.
"Thousands of girls like me were forced to sign away their babies. We have documents people have given us on which their signatures have been forged. There is plenty of other evidence of injustice. I believe the Government will be forced into action very soon."

Expecting: Pat Basquill at five months pregnant, pictured with brother Ian.

Sad ending to Pat's hunt for daughter

PAT traced her daughter.
She approached her through an intermediary, which she advises anyone in a similar position to-do.
"As an intermediary myself, I'm used to having the door slammed in my face when I make a contact on behalf of someone else. But it's too hard to take if it's yourself who's involved. Usually within two weeks there's a phone call. 'I'm very sorry', they say. And the process begins."
Finding Elaine - who was renamed Julia by her adoptive family and is now nearly 38 years old - was the weirdest sensation in the world, Pat says. "I'd last seen her as a nine week old baby. Suddenly I was talking to an adult."
There were phone calls and Pat gave her the book of pictures and memorabilia she had made for her daughter over the years. Eventually one of her other daughters visited Julia and persuaded her to hand over a photograph of herself for her natural mother, but there has never been any contact.
Pat has now lost any hope that there will be.
"But every story from those days in Elswick Lodge is heart breaking," she says.
• If you would like Pat to help trace a birth parent or child, or would like to talk to her about injustices you have suffered, you can contact her at the Natural Parents Support Group on: (0161) 483 7324.

'I would have done anything to keep that baby. I pleaded just to have her placed with foster parents and afterwards I found myself a job and a babysitter and a flat, but by then they said it was too late' - Pat Basquill

THERE were hundreds of homes like Elswick around the country during the Sixties.
Up until the late Forties, Pat explains, the bad blood theory ensured that nobody actually wanted a baby but would wait until a child had developed a little before risking adoption, when they could measure its intelligence.
"While it still threatened to bring disgrace on a family, many babies born out of wedlock were incorporated into the family or brought up by the grandparents," she adds.
"Obviously people talked and it could be difficult. But suddenly we came into the late Fifties and you've got more and more couples wanting to adopt, but who now wanted a new baby as the bad blood theory became unfashionable."
This is when the system Pat refers to as the 'adoption industry' began in earnest.

'There were injustices carried out that the government can no longer choose to ignore.'

"They were zooming in on vulnerable unsupported girls to feed it, the ones whose parents, like mine, said 'she's not bringing that baby home because the
neighbours will talk'.
"There was no IVF in those days and social workers needed babies for couples who couldn't conceive naturally. I don't blame the individuals. I blame the system. There were injustices carried out that the Government can no longer choose to ignore, and a great many lives ruined."
Generally, there were about 20 to 25 mothers in Elswick Lodge at a time. Some had had their babies, others were waiting. Pat herself spent four months there.
"The general attitude was that you weren't a real mother because you didn't have a ring on your finger. May God forgive the things that took place there. I never will.
"I was 15," adds Pat, "and there was one younger girl when I was there. The oldest one was about 30. She'd been a nanny for a very well-off family in Northunberland. It was a friend of that family she actually ended up getting
pregnant to. But she wasn't good enough for them, and she ended up in
Elswick Lodge.
"Afterwards she took a job looking after other kids, I thought that must be the ultimate nightmare."
Pat went on to marry and have five other children after Elaine, all of whom are now grown up. But she says, one baby can never replace another. "Especially not one you've looked after for nine weeks and struggled so desperately to keep," she adds.
"But I'm fortunate. A lot of natural mothers don't have any more children. They feel unworthy, defective. That was the stigma. I gave my baby away to a stranger."

Reader's Letter:

Lodge anger
AS PAT Pasquill can testify, it wasn't enough to reside in the "Christian atmosphere" of which Elswick Lodge once boasted. Young and frightened pregnant girls were surrounded by a self-styled religious environment and the moral guardians who took away their babies for adoption.
Had Pat's ordeal occurred 70 years earlier we might have made allowances for the approach of the easily shocked Victorians and yet Elswick Lodge's methods at the time Pat's baby was born, 1962, had apparently evolved little, if at all from those long gone days. Pat's attempts and subsequent failure to establish a relationship with her daughter who, sadly, refuses to recognise her mum, speaks volumes about the longterm emotional damage Elswick Lodge has inflicted on Pat and many others.
To hear of young girls who believed sex to be safe simply because they were not married may sound laughable now but one wonders just how such innocence wasn't treated with sympathy. The threats which the lodge made to its young mums regarding the less than hopeful future of their children, which forced them to sign adoption papers, appear to have been devious in the extreme. Faced with such a situation it isn't hard to imagine those terrified girls signing adoption papers when the alternative, or so they were told, was their children being doomed to a lifetime in an institution.
Emotional scars can so easily outlast physical ones and I wish Pat great success with her book, which highlights many similar cases, and in her fight for a bit of long overdue justice. - ANNE EDWARDS, Warbeck Close, Tudor Grange, Newcastle.

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008