Angry mum branded as scum fights for justice

Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 24th July 2000

by Chief Features Writer, EMMA ANDREWS

It was a nightmare with no chance of escape. For 30 years thousands of teenage single mothers in Britain had their babies forcibly taken away for adoption. The experience has shattered the lives of many of these, now middle aged, women - they want justice, no matter how long it takes.
TEENAGE mum Pat Basquill was breast feeding the day they came to take her baby daughter away.
"One moral welfare worker put her hands on my shoulders to restrain me and another snatched her from my arms;" said Pat.
"My little Elaine was screaming and I was hysterical. I loved her with all my heart, but she was only mine for nine weeks. It felt like I was losing a part of me."
Ashington girl Pat was just 15 when she fell pregnant and was sent to a mother and babies home in Elswick, Newcastle. "I was forced to sign the adoption papers,' she said. "I was told that if I didn't my baby would spend the rest of her life in an institution, unloved and uncared for and I couldn't let that happen. "You were told there was absolutely no alternative. I know now that wasn't the case at all." Pat, like thousands of other birth mums, is angry. But she says angry is good. "Angry is healthy, angry means the fight for justice will go on.
"We were made to feel that we were criminals, that we were the scum of the earth, when we were young girls who had made a mistake and should have been given help to look after our babies. Instead we were abused and misled. "We don't want pity. We want justice for ourselves and our children:"
In 1946 an act was passed giving unmarried mothers the same levels of benefit as widows with children - but the birth mums weren't told. Procedures were also put in place for foster carers to look after the babies until the birth mums were ready to take on their own child - but they weren't told. National assistance, welfare support and housing benefits were also available - but again, the birth mums weren't told.
"It was adoption by duress," said Pat. "It is illegal now, it is morally abhorrent now and it was then, but we were at the mercy of an unforgiving, judgmental society."
There are more than 750,000 women in Britain with stories like Pat's, according to new research by the Natural Parents' Support Group.
Six of them are preparing cases against their local county councils for professional misconduct and negligence.
If successful, these cases could open the floodgates to thousands of other claims detailing how, in the years after the Second World War until 1976 when the law was changed, young single mothers were routinely and regularly coerced into giving up their babies. The first survey of these women, carried out by the Support Group, has found that 77 per cent felt the adoption of their child had been obtained through deceit, coercion or false information. Around 95 per cent did not know other options were open to them and a further 1.5 per cent thought abortion was the only alternative to adoption. Pat has spent years researching what happened to these vulnerable young girls for her book Moral Cleansing in which she interviews 500 birth mums.

MADE TO FEEL BAD: Pat Basquill was shattered when, as a single mum, her baby was taken away for adoption

HER book has yet to be published but has won the support of Germaine Greer and MP Dr Peter Brand whose quote, from a debate in the parliamentary select committee on health, is featured prominently.
"The emotional, economic and other pressures that were put on parents to give up their children for adoption are horrifying;' he said. "We owe these woman an apology for not protecting them.'
A former Geordie now living in Manchester, solicitor Sandra Sinclair, has taken on the plight of the 1960s birth mums with one of the six test cases which is to be heard at Manchester Crown Court.
"This isn't about money," she said. "What we are pushing for is national recognition and awareness of what happened to these single mothers in the 50s and 60s. We want a public inquiry.
"This experience has haunted these women all their lives. Nothing can take away their pain, but public recognition will at least ensure that their plight is taken seriously." When 15-year-old Pat told her father she was pregnant he hit her over the head with a glass. "I was seven months pregnant by then but my parents hadn't noticed a thing," said Pat "They must have been totally blind. I was a skinny little lass weighing about seven stones. I hid my bump with baggy jumpers and cardigans and held my skirts together with safety pins.
"I was desperate, terrified and in a state of shock. I couldn't find the words to tell my parents but in the end my father found out when he read a letter I had written to my boyfriend John."
The father of her baby didn't want to know. "The bairn's your problem, not mine" he told me.
"We were standing in Morpeth Market Place and it was 1961. I had never hit anyone in my life but I couldn't help it. I smacked him hard across the face. I was wearing a ring he had given me and it caught his cheek, leaving a scar. At least I left him with one reminder.
"He was so charming, tall, dark and handsome. But he was an Irish Catholic and I'm Protestant and I was just 15. It was doomed right from the start.
"I was so innocent I thought that sex with John was completely safe because we weren't married. I thought you could only get pregnant if you were a wife.
"John should have known better. He was 19, and far more worldly wise than me."
Life at Elswick Lodge in Park Road, Newcastle, was frightening and cold. "The expectant mums were forbidden to talk to any of the new mums at the home - that was part of your punishment, to be left in ignorance about what lay ahead.
"I haemorrhaged the night my daughter was born. I can still remember the blood on the walls and this terrible screaming and then realising it was me. In spite of all this agony I loved my little Elaine from the day she was born: February 5, 1962:"
Pat has since traced her daughter who wants nothing to do with her. "She blames me, and she won't listen to what I have to say," said Pat. "Ironically, it is her father she is fascinated with yet he is the one who abandoned her without a second thought.
"She is my daughter and yet she is a stranger. I will never forgive the system or my parents for what happened to me and my child."

Give Pat a ring

• Pat now lives with her husband Keith and their extended family in Stockport where she runs her own tracing agency called Trackers which traces both birth parents and adoptees.
• If you want to talk to Pat, or help her with her book, please call her on (0161) 483 7324.
• Pat is currently trying to trace women who were committed to mental institutions as teenagers for the crime of being pregnant out of wedlock.
• She believes many were sent to hospitals across the region including, St George's in Morpeth, in the 30s, 40s and 50s, before the law was changed in 1959, and promises to talk to anyone in confidence. "These women were accused of illicit sexual activity or being morally deviant," she said. "Once they were committed, it was very hard for them to get out. Many became totally institutionalised.
• "They deserve for the truth to be told about what happened to them."

AGONY: Campaigners are now fighting for justice for single mothers whose babies were taken from them during the 50s and 60s

Questions are still unanswered

AN ARTICLE written in 1961 by Newcastle Diocesan Council for Moral Welfare, who ran Elswick Lodge from 1920 to 1969, saw nothing wrong with what was happening to the young women who were admitted.
"Those who go there find themselves in a Christian atmosphere where their personal problems and needs are given full consideration;" it said.
That's a view the mothers of Elswick Lodge would clearly disagree with.
A spokesman for Newcastle City Council said it was a very long time ago but all efforts were being made to respond to the unanswered questions about Elswick Lodge and the way young women were treated there.

Editor's Comment:

Not forgotten
THE moral climate in Britain in the 1950s and the early 1960s owed more to Victorian attitudes towards sex and "sin" than it did to the reality of the day.
Among the casualties were young unmarried mothers like Pat Basquill - who saw her baby virtually prised from her arms because she was 15 and deemed incapable of rearing a child.
Pat is now digging over old ground that many would prefer left undisturbed. Times have changed, they say, and the decisions were made for the right reasons as those responsible saw them.
Pat disagrees, and so do we. Decisions that have scarred so many people, both mothers and children, cannot be pushed aside and labelled merely history. Pat and thousands like her, and their children, deserve justice.

Copyright © Patricia Basquill, 2002 - 2008