For the Welfare of All Concerned 1945–1961
Just as the laissez-faire attitudes towards relationships in the First World War were mirrored by events of the Second World War, so was a rise in the divorce rate. However, during and after the 1939–45 war, the rise was much more dramatic than before.
Divorce rates had steadily risen over the interwar period and by 1939 had reached 8,254. Over the course of the war, rates rose steadily apart from a slight dip in 1941 and finished in 1945 at 15,634. In 1946 it had risen to 29,829, but in 1947, by the time most servicemen and women had been demobbed and were trying to rebuild their relationships, the divorce rate was an astonishing 60,254.
The 1939–45 war had revolutionised the way many people viewed their lives and their relationships and divorce was becoming less of a stigma, but also they were becoming less tolerant of the idea that all marriages should be adhered to, regardless of how one felt about it. Although the divorce rate fell steadily after this high, it began to rise sharply again in the 1960s, and in 1969 had reached 51,310. Divorce as a way of resolving marital conflict was now a regular feature of adult life, and with divorce came the single parent.
The Brave New World of the Welfare State
One beacon of light in the austere post-war years with their continued rationing, housing shortages and families striving to adjust to civilian life again, was the implementation of the National Health Service which began on 5 July 1948. For the first time, health care and other services were free to all regardless of social or monetary status – including maternity and antenatal services. This was to have important long-term significance for all women as time went by.
The National Health Service was only part of the revolution in the care of the nation during the post-war years, originally conceived by the Liberal politician William Beveridge, and implemented by the post-war Labour Government. The 1948 National Assistance Act formally abolished the hated and feared Poor Law system and replaced it with a social security system that would be much more familiar to the reader of the twenty-first century. The Act established a safety net for people who had not or could not pay National Insurance contributions (a system set up by two previous Acts of Parliament in 1946) and its categories included the homeless, the disabled and – crucially – unmarried mothers.
Under the Act, local Councils would now establish mother and baby homes for unmarried women before and after the birth of their baby, and some went further and also set up hostels for working mothers, to continue the help until the single mother could be independent and still support her baby.
As well as the National Health Service, legislation was being brought in after 1945 to support families with children. The Family Allowances Act of 1945 introduced regular payments for children, but not the oldest child.
Another Act of Parliament made its appearance in 1948: the Children’s Act. Based on the highly influential report of the Child Care Committee chaired by Dame Myra Curtis, its focus was the treatment of children who were ‘deprived of a normal home life’ and who had been placed not only in public institutions, but also those run by charities. The report Dame Myra oversaw was criticised for being too dismissive of the most negative witness statements the Committee heard, but it did highlight various adverse aspects of children’s care in institutions, such as the cold and informal way they were received into a children’s home, poor and inadequate staffing, and inadequate accommodation and equipment.
According to the report, a lack of empathy, time and attention to the emotional well-being of these children was at the heart of the problem and could lead to behavioural issues and even poor development. The children the Committee members looked at came from a wide spectrum of backgrounds – juvenile offenders who were in local authority care; those with disabilities of all kinds; war orphans and evacuees who, for whatever reason, could not return home; and children who were under local authority care because they had been put into foster care, or put up for adoption.
This last group was growing, of course, because of the increase in illegitimate births during and immediately after the 1939–45 war. The Children’s Act itself placed responsibility for the care of such children under the age of 17 firmly with local authorities, and also set the pattern for trained social workers to take on the work of looking after the children in care. Overall control was to rest with one government ministry. Finding homes and families for children was therefore considered vital wherever possible, and in her book, Adoption in the Modern World, published in 1952, Margaret Kornitzer quoted the following extract from the report which with great seriousness of tone, sets out this standpoint:
We wish to emphasise the extreme seriousness of taking a child away from even an indifferent home. The aim must be to find something better – even if it takes the responsibility of providing a substitute home. The methods which should be available may be treated under three main heads of adoption, boarding out and residence in communities. We have placed these in the order in which they seem to us to secure the welfare and happiness of the child.
Consequently, children who had no family home of their own would now, for preference, be placed in foster homes rather than in institutional care in order to give them the closest possible experience to a ‘normal’ family life, and there was to be a greater emphasis on adoption where appropriate. Local authorities were to keep close watch on children fostered out to paid fosterers and also took responsibility for the registration of adoption societies. As a result, the number of children ‘boarded out’ or fostered rose steadily over the next 15 years, an increase of 17 per cent.
The Children’s Act was in some ways very typical of the post-war optimism and drive towards an overall support for family and children, and there was a new determination to see children as individuals even though they were part of a ‘system’. There has been debate as to whether it was successful. However, the intention to see children placed in family homes, to treat them with respect and due regard for their own personalities, must have alleviated the lonely wait of some children hoping for a new family to come and adopt them.
In 1950, a new Adoption Act was implemented to amend and improve the existing legislation. Henceforward, a probationary period of three months had to be completed before the adoption order was granted to the adoptive parents, and a birth mother could not consent to the adoption of her baby until the child was at least six weeks old – to give the mother time to think through the consequences of giving her baby away.
In addition, the birth mother was now required to give consent to specific applicants (although they were not identified by name unless they wished to be so; normally a serial number was used on the paperwork instead). Another loose end was tied up with the regulation stating that an adopted child was to inherit only from their new parents just as if they were the parent’s natural child. The investment made by the establishment in adoption through these two Acts gives a strong message that adoption was a process worth supporting.
The 1950s began as a decade of austerity and ended as a decade for some of slowly increasing prosperity and optimism. The new National Health Service was transforming the lives of poor and low income families, opening up a wide range of health services for women who had often lived for years with, for example, the ill-effects of bad teeth, poor vision, and ongoing problems caused by childbirth. The NHS also made it possible for all women to be attended by professionals paid for by the state, and to have free antenatal care such as check-ups and dental treatment.
Most women who gave birth before the advent of the National Health Service relied on relatives, neighbours, and only what professional health care could be afforded. Now, a woman giving birth at home could rely on the expert help of a fully qualified midwife, and if needs be she had a free bed waiting for her at the local maternity hospital.
However, it was also an era of continuing ignorance about the facts of life and parents did not help matters by keeping their sons and daughters in that state. In Lancashire, one young woman about to get married in the mid-1950s asked her mother what she could expect on her wedding night, as she knew nothing about the mechanics of sex and about how babies happened. ‘All I will say is, what goes up, must come down’, her mother cryptically replied. Needless to say, the new bride became pregnant not long after her honeymoon.
Little wonder that many young unmarried women found themselves pregnant after an affair, if they were not equipped with knowledge or supplies that could protect them from conception, and the debate over the moral, theological and cultural impact of widening access to contraception continued to rage.
In 1949 the Chairman and President of the Family Planning Association engaged in a debate about the subject with the church-based Mothers Union who questioned the morality of family planning. The Chairman wrote of relieving of pressure on families, especially the mother, who was compelled to have babies one after the other – sometimes, even, one per year – which would inevitably undermine the quality of life of the whole family unit.
The Royal Commission on Population also joined the public debate, stating their conviction that if safe and correct forms of contraception were not available, ‘other means would be used; and some of them eg. criminal abortion, the prevalence of which even now is distressingly high, are very undesirable’. The Catholic women’s organisations blamed not only the spread of contraceptive use, but also the rise of divorce for undermining traditional family life. By contrast, the Chair and Secretary of the Bradford Marriage Guidance Council stated, ‘Is right ever achieved by withholding knowledge? People to-day are wrecking their nerves or their health, and sometimes disrupting their marriages because of wrong or ignorant use of contraceptives, or because of attempted abortions.’
For the organisations and public bodies, which took a pragmatic approach to family limitation, it must have seemed like a very slow path to changing the hearts of those morally opposed to it. Nevertheless, it is telling that there is no mention at all at this point in the public debates, of the single woman, or of the unmarried mother, who was probably the most vulnerable of them all. That would have been a step too far at this point in the dialogue, even though privately many commentators knew how important it was. Unsurprisingly there were still more than enough babies and small children available for adoptive parents to choose from.
The Adoption ‘Boom’
After 1945, adoption numbers rose dramatically in response to the wartime illegitimate baby boom, and then stayed buoyant up to 1949 with more than 17,000 babies or children adopted per year. After that, numbers up to and including 1961 were an average of 12,635 per year, nearly double the figure for 1939. Twenty years after the Adoption Act came into being, the notion of adoption as a positive move was becoming firmly established. However, there were times when babies and young children available for adoption were in short supply, and Margaret Kornitzer noted in the early 1950s that some adoption societies had waiting lists of several years for adoptive children.
In April 1951, there were 55 registered adoption societies in England and Wales, some localised and others more wide-ranging in their influence and activities. One of the new participants in the adoption scene was Dr Barnardo’s, who in 1947 finally registered as an adoption society, much later than just about all the other organisations of its kind. The NCUMC had also come round to the idea of adoption in the 1950s, presumably their reluctance to adopt children was overcome by the general conviction that it was now the best thing to do for all concerned in some instances.
Mother and Baby Homes Post-1945
Mother and Baby Homes were still a popular – indeed, in many cases, inevitable – choice for pregnant single women, for a variety of reasons. They provided a place of safety if the woman’s family had turned their backs on her; camaraderie with other women in the same position; some supervision of the pregnancy; discretion; and the opportunity to place the baby for adoption at the appropriate time. If the mother decided to keep the baby, some support with building a life with the baby may be offered too.
Other reasons for mothers agreeing to go into such a home included fear of the stigma their pregnancy would inflict on their families, and it gave them the opportunity for space away from their family in which to make a genuinely personal decision as to what to do after the baby’s birth. They were, in a sense, ‘cottage homes’ for the women, although the accommodation came in a huge variety of shapes and sizes according to what buildings each organisation had been able to acquire, or had had donated to them.
Some homes were on the edge of town, where greater discretion could be assured, but others were surprisingly central to everyday life. One such Church of England Mother and Baby Home was in Chatham Street in Stockport, Greater Manchester. Chatham Street is in Edgeley, a very typical late-nineteenth-century suburb of Stockport, not that far from the town centre. Here, many streets of terraced houses are interspersed with slightly larger villas, of which this home is an example. It is a very typical residence of its type built in about 1900: semi-detached, bay windows to the front, with no extensions or extras to accommodate more than what looks like the original three/four bedrooms – bearing in mind that the warden would have to have a room too. It has a brick-walled garden of sufficient size for hanging out washing and it is roughly half way along the middle of a long street – in one direction you can see the rooftop of the Town Hall, and in the other direction is a T-junction with a row of shops – these days, in need of refurbishment but no doubt 50 years ago they were useful local amenities.
Also, opposite the row of shops is the parish church, which is no doubt where the mothers went, as the home was run by the Church of England (which probably also explains its location). A little further away, about ten minutes’ stroll – maybe more if you are heavily pregnant – is the high street for Edgeley with plenty of early twentieth-century-style shop buildings. Opposite the Town Hall was the Infirmary, which is where the girls would have had their babies – a very short taxi ride or car ride away.
What is intriguing about this home is how central it is – almost as if the mothers were being ‘hidden in plain sight’, right under everyone’s noses. There is nothing out-of-town about it and given the very close proximity of the neighbours and the close-knit nature of such suburbs, all the nearby residents must have known what the house was being used for. It is a poignant experience even today walking up and down the street, wondering what it would be like for those mothers-to-be, watched and commented on by neighbours as they went for afternoon walks or to the shops for bits and pieces, then later on quietly arriving home with their baby. Other neighbours would have seen the terry napkins and baby clothes on the washing line; still more locals may have wondered about the ‘respectable couples’ going into the house to see, or collect a baby.
Another Mother and Baby Home in Vernon Street, Derby (originally in Gerard Street) strove to make the environment as homely and comfortable as possible. In 1950, Miss Brien, the temporary superintendent of the home, was campaigning for new or improved furniture and fittings. The home had recently had a second bathroom fitted, and had two large south-facing rooms for the girls, one a sitting room and the other a bedroom; a third room was reserved for new mothers just back from hospital. The nursery had a sink, gas ring and suitably decorated walls. The home was run by the Derby and Derbyshire Association for the Help and Protection of Girls, and its role was to take in the mothers-to-be a month before confinement, and to allow them to stay on with their babies for a few weeks after the birth. Apart from any other help, the ethos was to allow the women to escape the stress, humiliation and pressure of their families and to mix with other mothers in the same position as themselves.
For mothers who wanted to keep their baby, they would assist in finding a job and put them in touch with other agencies who would help them. If the mother wished to put up her child for adoption, or place it in a children’s home, they helped with that too. At the time of Miss Brien’s incumbency the home was appealing for gardening tools, accessories such as mats, linoleum and mirrors, and a writing desk, plus comfortable chairs or help with re-upholstering the old ones. The home was trying hard to improve the environment for the mothers and their babies, and make it a place of refuge rather than punishment, and one can only hope that it succeeded.
A little later on, in the mid 1960s, the author Jill Nicholson undertook a survey of mother and baby homes on behalf of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, and the results of her research make fascinating reading, if only because it reveals that in their basic form, nothing much had changed in these homes since the late 1950s. Ms Nicholson found that one in six of all extra marital pregnancies (up to 12,000 a year at the time of the study) were supported through these establishments, even though most of the residents had some contact with their own families – for example, two-thirds of the mothers had had some contact with their own mother after being admitted to the homes.
In addition, women in the north of England received a more sympathetic response from the local community than elsewhere, which would have helped the mothers at the Stockport home, for instance, in the closely built suburban streets of Edgeley. Some homes had their own maternity units, which saved the younger mothers from having to be alongside married women, and this shielded them from adverse comments from people in hospitals.
Most homes were provided by church bodies, but the residents did not feel on the whole that religion was ‘pushed’ on them, even though the author encountered some among the staff who regarded child-bearing outside marriage as a sin. However, many residents were expected to attend church and prayers which, for the non-religious, was at least an opportunity for a break from routine. One faith-based aspect of the homes that residents did find of help was the visits of a chaplain, as presumably it gave the opportunity for one-to-one conversations about the mother’s situation. Most of the homes only took the mothers for about six weeks before and six weeks after the birth of the baby, so there was little time for the one-third of the mothers who would not be returning to their families to decide what to do and, even with the help of welfare workers, to arrange accommodation for herself and her new baby. The vast majority of the women were unmarried and were having their first baby, and they had jobs when the babies were conceived. Sadly, only just over a quarter of the putative fathers kept in touch with the mothers, and approximately another quarter did not know about the baby.
There does seem to have been friction within the homes – sometimes groups of residents would polarise and there would be tension between them, and sometimes it was between the residents and the staff, mainly the matron or manager. It is possible this was a simple but strong difference in the understanding of the raison d’etre of the home. Primarily of course, its priority had to be the welfare of the residents and their babies, and staff may have had strong views on how that could best be safeguarded. This could be seen as overbearing by some residents even though it was done ‘for their own good’. The mothers were facing not only a life-changing event – the birth of their baby – but time spent learning to look after the baby, while for many, at the same time, they had to face the equally life-changing decision to give up their new baby, with all the distress that would entail.
Most residents were experiencing their first pregnancies, but it seems that some staff at the homes came across as overly controlling towards the care of the baby, rather than supportive. Some mothers merely wanted a place of safety in which to have their baby, and they resented being lectured about their sinful behaviour as happened in some homes. They certainly did not want to be subject to rules and regulations such as set visiting times, where or if they could smoke, and onerous levels of compulsory chores and housework (although most women were happy to do their fair share). There seems to have been confusion over the way the different adoption societies worked, and a lack of people to confide in – this was not an era that necessarily recognised the value of counselling.
In many homes, material conditions such as decorations and furniture had improved little since the 1950s. Often the mothers had to share rooms – most likely the case in the Edgeley home, for instance – and often the furniture, décor and overall ambience was dreary and dated. Privacy for personal hygiene, such as washes, and breastfeeding the baby, was at a premium, but to be fair, the accommodation for resident staff was no better.
As in Eleanor’s story below, chores and housework were generally done in the morning, and afternoons and evenings were for free time or for doing craft, knitting and so on, although surprisingly none of this free time was used for mother and baby, or similar classes, and as a result, some of the mothers were woefully ignorant of what would happen when they went into labour. Apart from housework, the residents often helped to make the meals, which were generally adequate.
Once the baby had been born, mothers were not always given help with their mothering skills and complained that they did not have enough time to bond with their babies outside of feeding times; some homes did not permit women to take photographs of their soon-to-be-adopted babies. Some mothers complained of being patronised or over-criticised by welfare workers or the matron of the home.
However, one of the biggest advantages, it would seem, of these homes was the camaraderie that could develop between the mothers, which would have gone a long way to making up for the perceived inadequacies of the mother and baby homes. It should, in fairness, be pointed out that there were some excellent mother and baby homes with modern facilities, kindly and attentive staff and a liberal ambience.
Guiding the New Parents
The number of adoptions stabilised at about 13,000 per year in the 1950s, while in that decade the number of registered births outside marriage remained between 30,000 and 40,000, only rising sharply at the end of the 1950s.
Fundraising continued to be a vital source of raising cash for the adoption societies and it was something The Children’s Society was particularly adept at. Plate 6 shows a postcard specially printed for the society to be used as a thank you note for a donation and posted in 1955. The group of happy, well nourished children fills the front of the postcard to remind the public how their money will be spent, but the children are not so well presented as to make the potential contributor think that the society had enough money to ‘spoil’ their young charges. A message from the secretary is printed on the reverse of the card: ‘May I on behalf of our 5,000 children say “thank you” for your kind gift? Your sympathy and interest in our work is much appreciated and most encouraging in these difficult times’ – this final comment no doubt being a reference to the post-war difficulties affecting Britain in the 1950s.
At the same time, as state intervention was helping all children and continuing to consolidate its role almost as a surrogate parent in many ways, so adoption almost became an ‘industry’, with well over fifty adoption agencies in operation at this time. Experts were writing and publishing at length about the process and its consequences, as well as penning helpful guides for prospective adoptive parents to support them through this life-changing journey.
Margaret Kornitzer was a highly respected expert on the subject and wrote many pieces of quality research and advice about adoption, but one of her best known was written for The Children’s Society in about 1950. It was a booklet called A Baby is Adopted and the cover shows a photo of a typically cute, ‘ideal’ baby with obligatory quiff (see Plate 8), a baby who could happily have graced the pages of any of the popular women’s magazines of the day. In the endorsement at the front of the booklet written by Dr Carruthers Corfield, Chairman of the Executive Committee, he enthuses about the ‘moving history’ which ‘should be read by all those wishing to adopt a child and … [which would] show would-be adopters the wisdom of enlisting the sympathy of a society whose aim is to take the very greatest care that the child is fit in every way for adoption’.
The booklet follows a fictional couple as they prepare to adopt a baby and in doing so, it shows the reader what has to be done and considered in the process. Once the rather cloying style of the narrative has been put aside, it contains some sound advice for prospective adoptive parents, but it also features a contrasting story about a young woman who circumvents all the legal adoption procedures and privately adopts a child she hears about through acquaintances. She wants a baby because she is lonely when her husband is out at work and because, she says, ‘I suffer from my nerves.’ She is portrayed as impulsive and indeed selfish; she has an ‘interest in clothes and dancing’, and is shown as wanting a child for her own ends and not for the purpose of loving the child for itself. It is an unmitigated disaster as the baby turns out to have a congenital problem and dies; she is not a child who at the time would have been put forward for adoption by an adoption society, had the correct route been taken.
There is also a gentle warning in the booklet about prejudice – the young woman who privately adopts the child tells her friend (the would-be legal adopter) that her baby is ‘quite legitimate. I don’t think I could bring myself to consider anything else, you know.’ When challenged about the illegality of what she is doing, she retorts, ‘If I’m not fit to adopt a child, I don’t know who is.’ The message is clear: anyone who will not be patient and follow the protocols of legal adoption; who wants a child for selfish or inappropriate reasons; or (and this is a relatively new development) holds a prejudice against illegitimate children as being somehow inferior to any other child, was not a suitable adoptive parent.
The stable married couple who do the right thing and adopt a baby legally and all above board, and are united in their desire to do this, do indeed take on an illegitimate child – however, the story does make it clear that the mother of the baby was a respectable girl who had made the one mistake, and was now hoping to marry a decent young man (not her baby’s father) and make a fresh start.
However, the anxiety about public perceptions of adopted children is also reflected in the booklet – when the couple in the story finally get as far as the court hearing where their adoption of a baby is confirmed, the judge tells them about all the paperwork required, and also about the short birth certificate that can be issued for a baby. This was first used in 1947 and one of the reasons it was introduced was because of the revealing nature of the long adoptive certificate issued by the court, which broadcasts the adoption loud and clear. The short version enabled an adopted person to go through their life without having to reveal that they were adopted; however, it also enabled adoptive parents to conceal the fact that their child was adopted, even from the child themselves.
The Appendix at the rear of this book reproduces the Appendix provided in the booklet, which gives a detailed list of the procedures and responsibilities involved in adopting a child. All the expected issues are there: health concerns of both adopters and child; a reference to the mental health of the child (so that potential behavioural issues were raised early on in the process); a concern for the moral and spiritual welfare of the child with the insistence on married adopters and baptism; and a determination to legally oversee and complete the adoption so that the last door between birth and adoptive families is closed, often for good. Adoptive parents could also now remain anonymous, if they so wished. It would seem that by the 1950s, there was a sense that adoption was becoming respectable and above board.
This rise in the respectability of adoption as a means of family construction brought added pressures on the would-be parents. They were expected to be paragons of parenthood in every way, and those who had ‘failed’ – other than in failing to conceive their own child – were viewed with suspicion. In 1949, the Western National Adoption Society (WNAS) confirmed that applications should be refused from would-be adoptive couples where one or both of them had been previously divorced – presumably the rationale was that such a failure in a relationship would make the couple more prone to leaving an adopted child in a precarious position – especially at a time when fewer women worked after marriage.
The Mayor of Bath commended the adoption society and their work in a speech at their annual meeting: ‘I think you are doing a great deal, almost out of all proportion to your strength and support, to create the right conditions for the nation of tomorrow to grow up normal and balanced. For a child to have the right parents is a great thing, and I think that you do your best to see that the children have as ideal parents as your adoption system allows.’
In the following year when the most recent Adoption Act began to have an impact, one key change was the approval of a serial number rather than a name to identify the adopters, so that the birth mother and her family would not know their names. This meant that once the adoption was complete, the shutters had come down on the birth family and they had no way at all of finding out where the child was. However, as a safeguard for the birth mother, she could no longer consent to the adoption of her child until the baby was six weeks old.
The Act also allowed the mother of an illegitimate child to adopt her or him, but some courts took a less than enthusiastic approach to this, regarding it simply as a way to ‘cover up’ the illegitimate status of the child. As the NCUMC pointed out in a letter to The Times on 4 May 1957, all that mattered was the welfare of the child, and if that was best served by keeping birth mother and child together, then obstacles should not be placed in the way. The NCUMC was still helping thousands of unmarried mothers each year – in 1950/1 the figure was 5,675 new and ongoing cases, and at that time just after the war it was also acting as an agency forwarding money to the German babies of British soldiers.
The 1950 Act may have reinforced the notion of secrecy, but there was a body of opinion that adopted children should be told as soon as possible that they were not the natural children of their parents. In his speech to the Western National Adoption Society (WNAS) in 1949, the Mayor of Bath had supported this move, stating ‘They should know the true position as soon as possible. To tell them when they reach maturity is a tremendous shock. Children should be advised; there is no reason to doubt that their affection will not continue.’
There is a contradiction here, as many adopted children, once told, have an intense curiosity about their birth family; one little girl adopted in the 1950s asked her adoptive mother over and over about how she came to be adopted, and never tired of hearing the story. She later went on to trace her birth mother after struggling for years with negative (and completely unfounded) feelings that she had been ‘got rid of’ because she was ‘a naughty girl’, even though her adoptive mother did not imply anything of the kind. Little wonder that some adoptive parents hid the truth despite the new advice to the contrary, feeling that it would cause instability in their much longed-for and carefully planned family.
Other interesting statistics emerged from the annual report of the WNAS in 1949. Over the previous year, 102 children had been placed in adoptive homes, of which so far, 79 were legalised. The society had had 328 enquiries offering a baby for adoption, but over half of these birth mothers did not formally come forward because they had changed their minds, had been refused as unsuitable, or had arranged a private adoption for their baby. Seemingly, despite the best efforts of the authorities, informal arrangements were still being made. The society therefore had more potential parents than it had babies, and had to temporarily close its waiting lists, asking applicants to wait for three months before applying for a boy, and six months for a girl.
The almost watertight exclusion of the birth family was to prove a growing issue as the decades progressed. As the number of adoptions increased, more studies were to show that children – even those adopted as babies – sometimes later developed an intense fascination for the birth family they had never known. In the absence of the facts, they might imagine a completely erroneous picture of the mystery family, especially the birth mother. One adopted person recalled:
I had an image in my head of a really rough family, that my mother had a brood of other children after me, and that I would have absolutely nothing in common with them and wouldn’t want to know them. Looking back I can admit two things. One is that I was being a complete snob! And – how wrong I was. The family was the complete opposite of everything I had imagined.
It was not just expectations – a growing body of opinion was now theorising that to exclude birth relatives completely was not a good idea after all. This point of view had been present all along, but was now being taken much more seriously. Secrecy had been a priority with many of those involved in the early days of adoption, mainly for the benefit of the adoptive family, but also, they felt, for the child’s welfare, to give the newly crafted family the opportunity to settle in together without fear of any ‘interference’ from the birth family.
However, at the same time as this secrecy was being encouraged, psychologists were putting forward the theory that such absolute separation was not in the best long-term interests of the child – especially someone adopted as a young child as opposed to a baby. Theorists such as John Bowlby (1951) researched the concept of attachment and concluded that babies and very young children attached to a single figure – such as a parent – and that this relationship acted as a prototype for all future social relationships. This relationship should be continuous for the first two years of life, and if this attachment was disrupted, it could have negative social, cognitive and emotional consequences. Bowlby referred to this disruption as ‘maternal deprivation’. Some experts saw proof of this study in the intense grief some evacuated children suffered at the beginning of the 1939–45 war, but other still staunchly saw a move to a stable, comfortable home as all a child needed to re-establish their lives.
Whatever the ratio of opinion in the 1950s, Bowlby and his colleagues had provided some compelling food for thought and if nothing else, it would further encourage an adoptive family’s determination to take a child as young as possible. It is therefore not surprising that in the 1950s, as in other decades, statistics reveal that the most popular choice of adoptive child was a baby, in that it was a blank canvas upon which the adoptive parents could paint their dream of a perfect child. Where the older child was concerned, there was a growing body of opinion that not only should the child be encouraged to talk about their adoption, but that the complete moratorium on the birth family was not constructive, and that at the very least, the child should be allowed to know something about their birth family and not just about the fact of adoption.
However, 3 per cent of adoption orders in the early 1950s were for children aged 15 years or older. A very small number of other children were born abroad – such as refugee children (although technically it was very difficult to adopt these), and another small percentage were children of colour. Of the children of colour, it was estimated in 1945 by the League of Coloured People (a British organisation working towards racial equality and equal civil rights) that approximately 550 of these children were allegedly the children of American soldiers of African-Caribbean or other non-Caucasian origins.
It was extremely difficult to find adoptive or foster parents for these children – this was an era of unbridled racial prejudice. As Margaret Kornitzer sadly commented in her 1952 book, ‘The League of Coloured People is anxious to see more of these children adopted, particularly in the most urgent cases, which are made more urgent because so few high-grade foster mothers will take them.’ Due to the low incomes of many people of colour living in Britain at that time, few could come forward to adopt a child, so most of the children of colour went to Caucasian adoptive families with all the cultural detachment that entailed.
Eleanor’s Story
In Cheshire in the early months of 1954, Eleanor, a young woman in her twenties, found herself pregnant following a sexual assault. Her brother-in-law went to the culprit’s house to confront him, but he had already fled. Eleanor also went there herself when she discovered she was pregnant, but was told he was still not there and was married anyway. It was clear that she would not be able to obtain any support from him.
The first problem she had to face was the sceptical response of her mother, who blamed her for ‘encouraging’ the assault. Abortion was still illegal, and would remain so until the 1960s, so that was not an option for her legally or morally. There was no choice but to go ahead with the pregnancy.
Although this was post-war Britain, the shining ‘New Elizabethan’ era of optimism and fresh beginnings after two world wars, in many ways life was the same as it had always been. In many families money was desperately short and thousands of people were still living in substandard housing, and the moves towards a better society for all seemed to be dragging their heels. The same could be said about attitudes towards single mothers, as Eleanor was to find out.
She booked herself into the Church of England Mother and Baby Home near Nantwich and as the pregnancy progressed, gave up her clerical job and moved to south Cheshire. It was a long way from her home and family, as was the practice – single mothers-to-be were placed away from family for the sake of discretion for all concerned. This was particularly important if the pregnancy had been concealed, and the decision to have the baby adopted at birth had already been made, as it meant that the woman could return to her family and neighbourhood and start afresh as far as she was able.
The routine was common to many such establishments – the expectant mothers did chores in the morning, and then could rest or do their own thing in the afternoons. At first, Eleanor would walk into town every day in her free time, but before long the pregnancy began to take a toll on her. She was admitted to the Barony hospital six months into the pregnancy with pre-eclampsia, a condition dangerous to both mother and unborn baby, and had to submit to spending the rest of the pregnancy resting in bed. It was on admittance to hospital that she was stunned to learn following an x-ray that she was carrying twins. The next few months passed painfully slowly, but not without incident, as Eleanor recounts:
I had no visitors at all, no family and certainly not the biological father. The lady in the bed next to me had her husband visit regularly and they felt sorry for me because I had no-one – I had told them my husband was working away to explain why I was totally alone. Once the lady’s husband brought me some flowers so I didn’t feel so neglected. Then, one of the nurses told the lady that I was unmarried, and neither the lady nor her husband spoke to me again – they put me in coventry. I felt so humiliated and ashamed.
What is telling about this anecdote is that not only the patient and her husband, but the nurse, thought badly of Eleanor because she was not married, and sadly this was not an isolated incident; many of the nursing staff behaved in a cold and offhand manner towards Eleanor because of her position.
The twins – a boy and a girl – were born at term but after a dangerously difficult labour, and while recuperating from the ordeal, Eleanor had choices to make. Giving up the children wasn’t an option for her – she was determined to keep them and make a life for the three of them. She spent six weeks at the Mother and Baby Home recovering from an ordeal that nearly killed her and her babies, with around half a dozen other single mothers and the female welfare worker who looked after the home and the mothers. The manager of the home was unmarried, Eleanor was later to observe wryly, and had never had her own child. ‘But she still used to boss us around and tell us what to do with our babies!’
At the end of this time, the twins went from the Mother and Baby Home into foster care until Eleanor could get back on her feet, find work, and establish a home she could take the babies back to. There followed a traumatic few years of desperately trying to do this, with the clandestine help of her older sister. At one point she found lodgings near her workplace, where she was settled for while. However, she then made the mistake of confiding in a work mate – a ‘friend’ – her story of the twins and her endeavours to build a life for the three of them.
The same day, on returning to her lodgings, she was confronted by the staunchly religious landlady and told she had to be out by the end of the week, as the landlady stated she ran a respectable house and did not want women like Eleanor in it. The so-called ‘friend’ from work had told the landlady Eleanor’s secret. Meanwhile, Eleanor strived to maintain contact with her children, travelling long and convoluted journeys on public transport to see them whenever she could, building rare and precious memories of days out to North Wales and suffering the heartbreak of always having to say goodbye after each visit.
Finally, what looked like a ray of hope came along – Eleanor’s married younger sister, who had young children of her own, offered to have the now toddler twins live with her, as she had just acquired her first home. At last, an end to visiting to the twins in the care of strangers seemed to be in sight – Eleanor’s sister would take them in, while Eleanor built her life and found a suitable home for a fresh start. Unbelievably, tragedy struck again – Eleanor’s sister collapsed and was admitted to hospital with meningococcal septicaemia and passed away, only weeks after she had taken in the twins. Eleanor moved into the house and looked after the twins and her sister’s three sons for as long as she was able:
I took the twins to the shops in the morning, and in my hand I had a few pennies for our food. I would stand there looking at the coins and wondering how it could best be spent. Sometimes it would buy a quarter pound of minced beef, that was for the three of us. Usually I didn’t eat and I lost so much weight, people said to me, ‘Oh aren’t you lovely and slim – how do you stay like that?’ I didn’t tell them I was like that because I had no food.
Thoughts of the future began to haunt Eleanor. How would she clothe these growing children? What about shoes for the winter? The house had no hot water and was dilapidated and bleak. The safety net her sister had provided had been cruelly snatched away. This was not the life she had dreamed of building for her children. Solutions within the family did not seem workable to her, for a variety of reasons.
Almost at breaking point, Eleanor took the agonising decision to put her children up for adoption. As was sometimes the case, a couple offered to take one of the twins, but did not want both. They were turned down: ‘They were to go together, or not at all,’ Eleanor stated. Eventually, a childless couple came forward who seemed ideal. The husband had a steady job as an accounts clerk, and the wife had her own shop – highly respectable, a steady income, nice suburban home, and willing to take both children. The probationary period (see the Appendix) went well. Satisfied that this couple could give her twins a life that she could not provide, Eleanor signed the release papers.
After the adoption was complete and the adoption order issued, the children left the court with new surnames and new adoptive parents. One of the twins recalled the settling-in period:
We had lots of presents and fuss from the new family, it was overwhelming, in fact it was too much, and our new Mum liked to show us off. Once, we went to the regular wholesalers to get stock for the shop, and one of the staff said how like my new Mum I was. I think they said it to please her as they must have known we were adopted. I was nothing like her! I had strawberry blonde hair and her hair was jet black. But she went straight out and got her hair dyed the same colour as mine. She so wanted people to think we were her natural children.
The twins only recalled one occasion when there was any follow-up contact with the adoption society:
I remember we had been adopted about six months and we were playing in the garden. Our adoptive Mum called us in to the kitchen where she was talking to a lady in a smart skirt suit, carrying a briefcase. The visitor asked us a few questions like ‘Do you like living here?’ and ‘Are you happy?’ and of course we said yes. Then Mum sent us back out to play. That was it! I don’t remember any other follow-up for my brother and me. You didn’t get any help as adoptive children in those days, and I needed it. I blamed myself for so many years for being the cause of the adoption and for putting my brother through that.
In the meantime, Eleanor was suffering the terrible grief of a mother forced to say goodbye to her children for good. In the late 1950s, contact between birth and adoptive families was not allowed, so the parting was designed to be irrevocable. She faced the heartache of giving her daughter’s toy pram to the local nursery. All the twins’ papers and mementos had been sent with them to their new family, so she had nothing of that kind to treasure. She described the moment of parting as ‘The most terrible moment of my life. I put my arms around them, and I said “Mummy loves you.” Then they were gone.’
Eleanor was to see the twins one more time, however. A few months after the adoption, she accidentally saw her twins in a shopping area, hand-in-hand with their proud new adoptive mother. The shock was terrible; Eleanor desperately wanted to follow them, ‘Just to look at them. But what was the point? I couldn’t have them back. So I made myself walk away. It was horrible, horrible.’ She did not see her children again for 54 years.
After she and the twins were reunited (Eleanor was traced by her daughter), she said:
I thought about my twins every birthday, Christmas, in fact every day we were apart. In the 1960s when the drug culture began, I worried because the twins were teenagers and I hoped they were not involved in anything like that. I thought about asking a famous TV show that granted wishes, to look for the twins, but I was frightened they would blame me for having them adopted and refuse to meet me. After they went, I was ill for a very long time. Losing them nearly destroyed me.
This story illustrates numerous issues, some of which are typical of many adoption-related stories, and some which are not. Eleanor had applied to the courts for an affiliation order against the biological father of her twins, and although it was granted, he was never traced. She does not appear to have had any support in the form of financial advice regarding help she may have been entitled to from the state. She faced the humiliation of being regarded as a feckless and ‘loose woman’ by some people in the community – even certain family members accused her of having ‘encouraged’ the assault which resulted in the pregnancy, which begs the question, how far had society’s perceptions of the single mother really advanced since the Victorian notion of the fallen woman?
Many charitable organisations would still only help the first-time single mother, and marriage was still the ultimate goal for many women. Post-adoption support for the adoptive family, both parents and children, was often rudimentary at this time, and it would be years before this was adequately addressed. As the 1960s approached, many single mothers must have felt as marginalised as their counterparts were a century before.
Changes on the Horizon: The 1960s and Beyond
However, by 1960, some attitudes were indeed starting to change. The post-war baby boom children were growing up with very different ideas and expectations to their parents and grandparents. Their baby care regime had not been quite as rigid as it would have been in the interwar period and post-war parents were sometimes more indulgent towards their children than their own parents had been to them.
Never having known a lack of health care, and growing up with every educational opportunity theoretically within their grasp in families with more lenient parenting than before the war, they entered adult life with a greater sense of optimism and modernism. A separate teenage culture – which had started in the war with jive and the influence of Hollywood style and slang – was developing, a development that accelerated as the 1960s approached. With its own music, lifestyle and mode of dress, this teenage culture spawned new ways of thinking about social issues.
In 1958, Alan Sillitoe’s gritty novel, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, was published. It includes a grim description of a “gin and hot bath” induced abortion by one of the female characters, who is married with other children, but not willing to risk her husband finding out that the baby is not his. The L Shaped Room, published in 1960 by Lynne Reid Banks, focuses on a pregnant single woman who is turned out of the house by her judgemental father. The story is a sympathetic take on the young woman’s plight, and it kept the profile of this put-upon group in the popular media. A film version released in 1962 was very popular but must, at the same time, have caused many young women to resolve never to allow themselves to end up in that position.
Stan Barstow’s novel A Kind of Loving (also published in 1960) looked at a similar predicament from the father’s point of view, although the man in this story is compelled to marry the mother of his baby. Barstow’s and Sillitoe’s novels – classic ‘kitchen sink’, that is, highly realistic, no holds barred stories – were filmed and brought the issue of unwanted pregnancies, back street and dangerous abortions and illicit sex right into the public eye. After the relative gentility of films in the late 1930s up to the 1950s, culture was changing dramatically. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was repealed in 1959, taking away the ability of the authorities to commit women regarded as promiscuous or morally defective to a mental institution. If not at a local and family level, attitudes overall were showing signs of softening.
Throughout this period, back street abortions continued to wreak havoc on women’s bodies, until the eventual passing of the 1967 Abortion Act which made abortion legal up to 28 weeks’ gestation. The campaign to bring in abortion legislation was not one based on women’s rights, but targeted more at the grievous public health problem caused by illegal abortion; no longer could a civilised society allow its women to be subjected to the butchery of the unscrupulous and unqualified.
In 1961, the NHS started to prescribe the contraceptive pill for married women only, at first. It is almost taken as a cultural given that ‘The Pill’ was a positive revolution for women, that it enabled them to take control of their own bodies, dictate when and with whom they had babies (if at all), and allow them to plan their childbearing around their other life plans – career, education, and so on. As the 1960s progressed, the pressure to release the pill to unmarried women grew and this was achieved in 1967. It was a remarkably reliable drug, which used extra hormones (synthetic oestrogen and progesterone) to prevent ovulation occurring and so stop conception.
The popular image of the mini-skirted swinger of the 1960s was still a dream to many girls in small provincial towns, but attitudes towards sex and sexuality were very slowly starting to change for everyone, should they choose to take advantage of it. By 1969, one million women – both married and unmarried – were taking the contraceptive pill.
Increasing numbers of girls went on to further and higher education and were able to take advantage of greater opportunities for advancement in the workplace; the campaigns for equality which women campaigners fought so hard for started to make a difference. Popular culture reflected the trend, although life remained difficult for the unmarried mothers who did become pregnant well into the 1970s. Eventually, the numbers of children born outside of marriage began to rise, while total numbers of live births registered fell in proportion. Middle-class couples began to reject marriage as an unnecessary or bourgeois concept, and as a result, what would have been regarded years before as illegitimate births were, by the 1980s, more often the children of stable partnerships who had simply not taken the step of getting married.
Demonization of the single mother – sometimes, the single father – became centred around the idea of the ‘scrounger’, someone who had illegitimate children in order to obtain financial security via state handouts and other benefits. A similar level of condemnation filled the newspapers and letters pages, not to mention certain political party conference speeches, but the rise and rise of the child born outside marriage became a permanent trend.
From 1961, the birth rate started to steadily fall while out of the total registrations of live births, the number of children born outside marriage rose. By 1990, 35 per cent of the 706,140 live births registered in England and Wales were babies born outside marriage, and that percentage has risen virtually every year since. Imagine the furore if that statistic had been released in Victorian Britain! At the same time, the numbers of children born either stabilised or declined and would have been immeasurably higher without the revolution in birth control of the later twentieth century.
Of these children born outside marriage, many more were in stable family homes or were with single parents who no longer felt the same pressure to give up their babies either to adoption, or to face life in an institution. As a result, the numbers of children adopted began to fall, but not until the mid 1970s – clearly the sexual revolution and the impact of the contraceptive pill took time to permeate the whole of society. Between 1974 and 1978, the number of adoption orders issued fell from 22,502 to 12,121, a dramatic reduction – ironically, the highest number up to this point was in 1968, at 24,831, right at the height of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ and a year after the contraceptive pill was made available to unmarried women. In 2011, the number of adoption orders totalled 4,777.
Society had changed beyond all recognition since the early days of adoption, but adoption as a concept – the notion that some children will always need a new family – remained a constant. There will also always be a need for the right people to take on the parenting role of children without families.
Postscript: Adoption as Quiet Revolution
Over the century of history charted within this narrative, adoption evolved from a dubious practice used to cover up the moral lapses of fallen women, to a reputable way of constructing one’s family while at the same time giving a ‘displaced’ child the parental guidance, love and security she/he needs. Adoption became legally defined and much less amorphous in its nature than before, but the transfer of children from one parent figure to another has gone on for thousands of years.
Family historians tend to research their family histories in the hopes that the people they study are related to them. Given the choice of researching a biological great-grandmother or a step-great-grandmother – perhaps the second wife of their great-grandfather – the vast majority would research their female blood relative.
Yet how sure can we be that all the children in a family are definitely as they are stated on a census return, for instance? More than likely, we are already happily investigating the lives of some people who have no genetic link to us at all – the child who ‘appears’ on a census, seemingly from nowhere, and so on. Like it or not, ‘chosen family’ is a part of all our histories.
Throughout the centuries, adoption has been quietly effecting a revolution within the concept of family as it is seen in England and Wales. It proves that a family unit can transcend genetics and survive the experience, and was undoubtedly one of the factors which led to the loosening of the boundaries of what we see as family and a liberalisation of what constitutes family today. Adoption has always been the quiet revolution, and adopted children the unwitting, unknowing and quiet revolutionaries in family history.
Achieving legal adoption was not the revolution; it was merely the acknowledgement of a process that had been going on for millennia.