On My Adoption

In the 1960s adoption in England was still a private matter. Babies were passed over garden fences between relations or if you were the 'right sort' you could pay for a child.

This is the beginning of my story. The second part of the series that started with 'On Being Born'.

Phyllis Holman Richards was born into a family enriched by shipping insurance and was always determined to do well by her advantages. During the First World War, she set up home for wounded soldiers for which she was awarded an O.B.E in 1920. She later helped to set up the British Legion. Later she was an auxiliary nurse in London during the Second World War. One night during the Luftwaffe’s inexorable pounding of London during the Blitz, she discovered an abandoned baby in a telephone box. Unsure where to take the child, she found some friends who were childless and wanted to take him. The other story goes that she found a young woman giving birth in the telephone box, and so the myths go on. She was a pragmatic and caring woman and saw an opportunity. Holman Richards went on to set up a private adoption agency, finding homes for the unwanted children of problematic backstairs knee tremblers; an army officer on leave straying from barracks with a hopeful music hall dancer; a frustrated debutante and her dangerous racing car driver; the unwanted outcomes from inauspicious liaisons. Later in the 1950s she was once more publicly acclaimed, this time with a medal for bravery for intervening when a policeman was being attacked during a smash and grab raid near her home in Knightsbridge. Incredibly, at the time of the attack she had a broken rib and her arm strapped up.

However, despite her gallant and courageous nature, her freelance adoption activities were brought to book when here work came under scrutiny of the police. She had been making claims about her private adoption service which were not strictly within the law. Essentially prospective adopters were paying for their children by supporting the charity. And as the Adoption Act had recently been passed, more stringent checks were demanded and this moonlighting for her “friends” in the upper classes was brought to an end. The fearsome lady retired leaving her organisation to become an official charity, under proper regulation which was still going until the 1990s. But she did not disappear from public life before appearing on the popular television series This is Your Life where her magnanimously virtuous career was lauded. And not before her well-meaning but unchecked meddling moved me between two women neither of whom could ever rise to the challenge of motherhood.

Holman Richards had already placed a child with my adopted parents the year before I was born. Sometime in late 1965 my birth mother made contact with her. I have in possession of some of the letters written between them and the doctor and lawyer dealing with the arrangements. They were given to me twenty-five years later when a court order was issued allowing me access to the details of my adoption.

12th August 1965. Mrs Holman Richards OBE, Knightsbridge to Dr Caldwell, Barcome, Sussex

I had a long talk with the mother and her circumstances are certainly very extraordinary and distressing...I wonder if you can get her into a maternity home? I could certainly take the baby to a foster mother and get it adopted among my friends...She seems to be quite confused at times, and I did not feel that it was quite truthful for a woman of thirty to be so naive...I have advised her to discuss the matters between her husband and the father of the baby through solicitors, as she tells me that both men are unwilling to pay her expenses.

23rd August 1965 Dr Caldwell to Mrs Holman Richards OBE

I have now arranged for her to be confined in a nursing home in Hove. As you know she does not want to see the baby after it is born and I am not quite sure what the next step is. Her husband is, I think, being more reasonable than I had expected in that he is not taking any divorce proceedings against the wife and is continuing to accept the two children which he knows are not his. The father of the baby and these children has in the meantime departed to Australia...The whole story is as you say extremely odd.

26 August 1965 Mrs Holman Richards OBE to my mother

I have heard from Dr Caldwell...when you go to the nursing home, will you explain to the Matron that I will be making arrangements for him or her to go to one of my Foster Mothers, providing all goes well and I have from the Doctor that the baby is fit to travel. I suppose you have made arrangements with the Doctor and the Matron not to see the baby.

7th September 1965 Mrs Holman Richards OBE to my mother

I would be very grateful if you will leave the £7 for fostering fees with the Matron from whom I will take the baby next Sunday. I presume you have taken baby clothes with you, but would be grateful if the Matron will confirm this with me as naturally the Foster Mother will need two sets of clothing and a dozen napkins. I think you understand from our previous interview that you and I must keep in close contact as we are responsible for the baby until he is adopted.

15th September, 1965 Mrs Holman Richards OBE to my mother

I fetched the wee boy on Sunday and he is doing very well and I know my adopting friends will be delighted with him as he is such a good looking little chap.

I am amused that at a week old, I already had a monetary value. I have never had a successful relationship with money, either getting hold of it or holding on to it, so it’s good to see that from an early stage, other people were taking care of that. I should have liked to meet Mrs Bignall, the foster mother who cared for me in a south London flat in those very first days of my life. And it will be clear from reading these letters that the circumstances in which my mother was living were complicated to say the least. But that is her story, not mine.

For many adopted people or those who have lost connection with their families for other reasons, the search is often focused on looking for the people we gradually become aware that we did not know. And to some extent for me that has been true. I have sought out my birth family, my mother, my half-brother and sisters and their families. These relationships have all individually developed in their own ways. Most recently I have met my father’s daughter, another half sister.

I think I would have been the happiest little prince surrounded by such big sisters.

I never met my father, the man I look so very much like. He died in 1968 in Australia just a few years after I was born, of an aggressive brain tumour. He was 56. Younger than I am now, a journalist, war correspondent and broadcaster, a bit of an adventurer. He was married and I know he was a loving father. Whatever happened between my mother and him is now history, their history. There’s no judgement here on these people and what they did back then. Life is always complicated and I for one have made many mistakes in my life.

https://www.philipdundas.com/p/on-being-born?r=1ldpr2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=falseI plan to write about them here.