Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue (21 page)
Read Lemon Sherbet and Dolly Blue Online
Authors: Lynn Knight
Adoption did not have universal support but, in the aftermath of the First World War, there was a greater willingness to debate the issues. The birth rate was declining, mothers had lost sons; informal âadoptions' were on the increase. Moral distaste at the thought of War Babies was translating into women wanting to adopt War Orphans, the illegitimate baby segueing into the child whose father had died, a more uplifting prospect â and patriotic, to boot.
They enter our offices with the tremulous anxiety and excitement which are characteristic of motherly little girls going to a doll shop. They have some definite image before their eyes; most of them look for some of their own family traits in colour or form, and they want to see several children. With the establishment of the Hostels, it will, of course, be possible to allow adopters a wider choice than can be given now.
â Clara Andrew, founder of the National Children Adoption Association, NCAA booklet,
c.
1919
Of course, some war widows did struggle with children they could barely afford to raise, but the majority of children placed for adoption were illegitimate. The phrase War Orphan performed a neat elision: by airbrushing out the mother, it reduced the taint of immorality many found disturbing.
The road to legalised adoption was long and hard, tying up two committees of enquiry and involving considerable debate. (And even after the 1926 Adoption Act was passed, there were still difficulties to resolve; further legislation was needed to regulate adoption procedures.) While agreeing that there should be some legal foundation (and redress) for the large number of informal adoptions already taking place, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) was concerned for the vulnerability of children â in 1923 alone, the Society dealt with 38,027 cases, with only 922 prosecutions. The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (later, the National
Council for One Parent Families) wanted young women to take responsibility for their actions and not be offered the easy let-out adoption seemed to give. There was one point, however, on which everyone agreed: the women they dealt with should be
deserving
cases. To err once was forgivable, twice was not.
The 1926 Act laid the foundations for adoption as we know it today. The Act gave adoptive parents the same rights and responsibilities as birth parents, and adopted children the same rights as a birth child. A woman placing her child for adoption was relinquishing that child for good. This did not mean informal arrangements ceased altogether: agreements were still made among friends and families, and the Courts none the wiser, but the only binding adoptions were those verified by law. Until now, the only legal agreements were the wardships orchestrated by the Chancery Courts, usually involving complex estates, or those at the other end of the social scale, enforced by Poor Law Guardians taking children like Eva into their care.
By the time Annie and Willie learned of the NCAA, the Association was firmly ensconced in its offices at 19 Sloane Street and its âbabies hostel', Tower Cressy, in leafy Campden Hill: addresses entirely appropriate for an organisation whose lengthy list of supporters reads like an extract from
Debrett's
. By now, the NCAA had connections overseas and aspirations to make its work âImperial' (though it was not involved in the controversies associated with âexporting' children at that time). A Scottish branch existed in Edinburgh and in 1933 the Queen would open a further hostel: Castlebar, in Sydenham, Kent.
The Association received Ministry of Health funding, but money also came from donations and events like the annual Three Hundred Ball at Claridge's, where the well-connected outbid one another to
take home an evening gown or mah-jong set. Prospective adopters were, for the most part, less well-to-do than NCAA supporters. Giving evidence to the Hopkinson Committee in 1920, Clara Andrew reported that 15 to 20 per cent of those applying to adopt children were upper class; 25 per cent working class, and the rest, middle class, whom she defined as âincluding the professional classes, tradespeople, clerks and sergeants in the police'.
Until the 1926 Act was passed, adoption continued to be an extremely loose arrangement. It was âlike choosing kittens', Mary Gordon said, of her own âadoption' by suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, founding member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). Mary was one of four girls taken on with Mrs Pankhurst's characteristic zeal and autocracy during the First World War. Fired by a concern for âWar Babies', Emmeline Pankhurst, then in her late fifties, established a home for the girls, each about six months old, under the care of faithful retainer, Sister Pine. Christabel Pankhurst soon adopted one of them; the four were brought up together âoff and on'.
Composer and suffragette Ethel Smyth described Mrs Pankhurst's âunderlying idea' as âexperimental. As a keen student of the Montessori and other educational systems, she wanted to see what could be achieved by bringing up four children in ideal conditions towards fitting them to play a worthy part in the new world she saw opening up to women.' Originally, Emmeline Pankhurst hoped for sponsorship from wealthy supporters but, when this was not forthcoming, was undeterred.
In 1917, WSPU funds were used to purchase and furnish Tower Cressy, a five-storey Gothic house in London's Campden Hill. The original plan was to adopt more children, though the number remained at four. Mary Gordon recalled running down the steps at Tower Cressy to kiss Mrs Pankhurst repeatedly â âOh, Mother darling,' â until she and her fellow adoptees achieved sufficient spontaneity to satisfy a press photographer. On another occasion, Mary was shown a gold chain that had once belonged to her birth mother, and when she enquired about this some years later, Mrs Pankhurst replied, âFancy you remembering that.'
The girls were encouraged to âread and read' and to think for themselves, but were not cuddled or shown any affection, and were only presented to Mrs Pankhurst at four-thirty if they behaved (and even then, did not have her undivided attention); an exceedingly cool response by today's lights, but one that chimed with the experiences of many young women of Mrs Pankhurst's social class.
Like so many before them, the girls were enthralled by Emmeline Pankhurst. Mary Gordon adored her. She was âour God. She was everything to us. Nothing mattered but Mother.' If they earned it, she promised them, they would one day carry the Pankhurst name. âThat was our great ambition.' It was not to be.
Emmeline Pankhurst was now in her sixties, and in financial difficulties. Two of the girls were sent away. Until then, they and Sister Pine had accompanied Mrs Pankhurst on lecture tours and other travels, but Sister Pine left her employ and, in Mary's words, fellow adoptees Kathleen and Joan, then aged about ten, âcame on the market' and were re-adopted.
This was not that rare. Children were re-adopted as easily as they were returned to Industrial Schools. After Mrs Pankhurst's death, Mary herself was re-adopted, having already been sent to live elsewhere. Her adoration remained undimmed, however. She described her childhood as âmarvellous'. On her thirteenth birthday, shortly before Emmeline Pankhurst died, Mary visited her for the last time. On that occasion, she was hugged and kissed, and wept over: âShe was delighted to see me again, her last chick.'
The young mothers who came to the Association for help were recommended via the usual sources â doctors, clergy, health visitors, Poor Law Guardians, welfare workers, and so on; sometimes, friends or relatives applied on a child's behalf. Mothers were required to supply âa very complete history of the case', as well as referees, a doctor's certificate, a birth certificate and a photograph of their child. No child was admitted unless judged to be âsound
in health, or likely to become so with care and proper feeding'. (Susan Musson of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Child advised adopters to âinsist on the strictest medical examination' of the child in case of âphysical or mental taint.')
Between 1919 and 1928, 1,200 children passed through Tower Cressy, a large number of whom, but for NCAA intervention, would, according to its own literature, âcertainly have come on the Rates'. By 1932, the number placed in private homes reached nearly 4,000. They ranged in age from one month to five years old, although the majority placed for adoption were aged less than twelve months.
In a Voluntary Social Services handbook from the period, the NCAA was defined as placing âdestitute or orphaned or friendless or neglected children with people who are prepared to adopt them for love alone', the final phrase, with its quiet insistence on no money passing hands (though some adopters subsequently made donations) distanced adoption from the far more lurid taint of baby farming. Though the notorious cases of this practice belonged to the past, prosecutions were still taking place into the 1920s and beyond.
The children discussed by Clara Andrew's Case Committee were not necessarily âfriendless' or âneglected' but, in the days when stigma and economic necessity combined to make it practically impossible for women to choose lone parenthood, those who became pregnant out of wedlock (and with no prospect of marriage or family support), had little choice but to surrender their child. Many unmarried mothers must have felt that nothing had changed since the eighteenth century, when desperate women paced London's streets before handing over their babies to Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital.
Of all the tokens left by mothers at the Foundling Hospital, and now on show in London's Foundling Museum, the tiny beaded purse is, for me, the most resonant. Its silk has practically perished, but the beading is intact and steadfastly spells a woman's initials. Worldly goods may vanish, it seems to suggest, but my love for you will survive.
I don't know what message this mother would have written for her child (if she were able to do so), but, whatever her sentiments, she did not envisage that, more than 200 years later, this intensely private item would be a museum piece, under glass. The child for whom the purse was stitched with loving care never saw it.
Mothers left tokens â and there are many of them â with Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital, to prove a connection with their child should circumstances allow them to be reunited in the future. However, few mothers were able to reclaim their infants; the tokens remained with the institution. Even when the children grew up and left the Hospital's care, they did not receive them. A minuscule ring or coral bracelet (telling reminders of how slight eighteenth-century women were) would have been something for a child to keep in later life. Instead, they suggest heartbreaking stories. Many tokens express poverty as well as love. The handmade ones, such as the flower-shaped ornament fashioned from card and decorated with a scrap of lace, are perhaps the most poignant. What loving thoughts went into the creation of that sad flower? Perhaps the crudest of all is the necklet spelling one word, âale', and thereby suggesting a double tale, a factor in the mother's undoing and a token left by a woman with nothing else to give.
*
In the tree-lined suburbs of North London between the wars, many detached houses had a live-in servant who served corn-beefed hash and chocolate âshape' at luncheon before retreating from view. Jessie Mee was among their number. For all the anxiety surrounding âthe servant question' at this time, women like Jessie were employed in middle-class homes until the Second World War.
In 1929, the year she enters my family story, Jessie Mee was working as a cook, and so already had some years of service under her belt (a belt pulled tight across a neat, plain dress) by the time she came to Hazelmere Avenue. Her employer was a widow, a Mrs Sedgwick, whose husband had died two years earlier. The Sedgwicks purchased their Finchley plot in 1925, after having lived in America for some years. With its mix of professionals with young children and older couples like themselves, the Avenue made a nice spot for their retirement. Each house asserted a touch of individuality, be it stained-glass windows, mock-Tudor beams or rustic porch. This was a comfortable middle-class area.
Mrs Sedgwick's needs were unlikely to have stretched beyond a cook and a daily help, and unless she did a great deal of entertaining, Jessie's responsibilities were far less onerous than those facing many cooks. She had her own kitchen â and a modern one at that, the kind with a serving hatch, a window on to the garden and white walls, not a damp treacle-brown coloured basement â but standing in a kitchen all day was a lonely occupation all the same. The Avenue was all houses and there were just houses in the streets nearby. There was no call to run to the shops. When provisions ran low, Jessie telephoned the grocer or the butcher with Mrs Sedgwick's orders and awaited their delivery boys.
Unless you could afford to train as a cook, the usual way to
learn was by starting on the bottom rung as a kitchen or scullery maid, like those poor girls in Industrial Schools, although, unlike them, young women from stable working-class backgrounds grasped some of the ropes at home. By caring for younger siblings, they learned discipline and a sense of responsibility at an early age, along with domestic chores. Even before they started paid work, many working-class girls were well on their way to becoming biddable servants.
