Survivor of mother and baby home, 85, reveals heartbreak after she ‘didn’t get to kiss her ten-week-old goodbye’ when giving her up for adoption

An 85-year-old woman who gave her newborn up for adoption to a mother and baby home after falling pregnant as a teenager has opened up about the heartbreak of not even knowing if her daughter is still alive despite spending decades trying to track her down.

Appearing on tonight’s episode of ITV’s Long Lost Family, Jean laid bare the ordeal of not even being able to kiss her little one goodbye. 

Aged just 16 in the 1956, she was sent to the Good Shepherd Mother and Baby Home by her parents after she and her boyfriend Tony realised they were expecting. The institution was established by a moral welfare association connected to the Church of England.

It was one of the many homes designed to provide refuge for unwed mothers – some of which were years later embroiled in scandal after it emerged they produced high levels of infant mortality, misogyny and stigmatisation of some of society’s most vulnerable. 

After she gave birth, Jean and Tony reluctantly took their ten-week-old, Maria, to the London offices of the Southwark Catholic Rescue society, after realising they had no options for keeping her daughter, and having to baptise their child so she could be taken in.

‘I gave her to this woman who said we’d go and show her off,’ Jean said. ‘So I thought she’d bring her back and let us kiss her goodbye but she didn’t.’

The mother had spent years with no answers, but wrote to them when her daughter turned 18 to ask if they had ‘any news of her’. 

‘He wrote back and said no, but you’ll be reunited in heaven one day,’ she shared. ‘And I thought oh that’s a horrible thing to say to me.’

Caitlin Jones – Jean’s granddaughter – reached out to the programme to ask for help in their quest for answers.

‘I feel like it’s something that’s always hanging over you and you’re not complete until you find Maria,’ she told Jean in the episode. 

‘After all these years of not being able to find out, I just need an answer,’ she replied. ‘If she doesn’t want to see me, if she’s still alive, that’s OK, because I’ll know then that she’s alright.’

After months of tracking down documents including adoption records, the episode saw Jean reconnecting with her daughter, who now goes by Cathy and lives in Ilford, London.

‘I feel so sorry for what she had to go through – all of that I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy,’ Cathy told the show.

‘My own daughter is unmarried and has a daughter who lives with us and she’s a delight.

‘I think it was an absolute disgrace the way women were treated in those days and how they were made to feel.’

Tonight’s special episode followed three storylines all linked to mother and baby homes, with the series highlighting the estimated 200,000 unmarried women who were, between the 40s and 70s ‘placed in institutions, run often by religious organisations – and thousands of their babies were taken for adoption’.

‘Many of these mothers were teenagers when their babies were taken – usually when their children were about six weeks old,’ the programme shared.

‘Over the past 15 years Long Lost Family has helped to reunite women and children who were in these Mother and Baby homes and who often remain traumatised by the experiences they suffered.

‘Many of these women blamed themselves or their parents for what happened but increasingly another narrative is emerging – a sense that these were often forced adoptions with vulnerable women being coerced.’

One of the most famous mother and baby homes was Tuam, in Ireland – initially set up in a former workhouse that housed destitute adults and children since the 1800s famine era.

The building was turned into a home for mothers and babies in 1925 and was run by an order of Catholic nuns named the Bon Secours Sisters.

In 1961, Tuam was shut down after it was seen to have fallen into a state of disrepair and the remaining residents were transferred to similar homes. 

However, in 1975, two young boys discovered skeletal remains while playing in the area, with locals attributing it to bodies from the famine era. 

In 2012, Catherine Corless wrote about the poor living conditions inside the Tuam mother and baby home and published a journal, detailing the poor living conditions.

Reports found how infants suffered malnutrition and neglect, which caused the deaths of many, while others died of measles, convulsions, TB, gastroenteritis and pneumonia. 

A year later, Catherine attempted to collate the death certificates of nearly 800 children who died at the Tuam home, before it started to gain media attention worldwide. 

She also told the BBC: ‘A woman who got pregnant in the village was absolutely frowned upon, whispered about, talked about.

‘The priests were called the house and told the family that she could not stay in the village like that, being pregnant. 

‘So he would arrange for the woman to be whisked off to a home and even after they gave birth and spent a year in the home, they couldn’t even come back to the village.

‘Because many a time, and I quote some people, they were told she was a temptation, a bad influence, a ‘loose woman’.’ 

Catherine said she exposed the story to the media because ‘local people wouldn’t listen’ to her. 

Speaking of the treatment of the babies and children, she said: ‘They were treated like… I wouldn’t even say treated like animals because you treat your animals better. 

‘To put down all these beautiful babies and toddlers, wrap them out and put them down in a sewage facility and forget all about them it’s too horrific, I had to be a voice for them.’ 

Catherine herself encountered some of the children from the home and said she remembers them being ‘pale and skinny and not dressed very well’.

She added: ‘I remember the most of all, they were all huddled together at the back and we were told not to talk to them, mix with them or play with them.’

A source close to the investigation told the Irish Mail on Sunday at the time: ‘No one knows the total number of babies in the grave.

There are 796 death records but they are only the ones we know of.

‘God knows who else is in the grave. It’s been lying there for years and no one knows the full extent or total of bodies down there.’

In 2023, Catherine and the Guardian both attended the Tuam site – and she reflected  on the scandal which saw children treated as ‘commodities’.

‘They are two-feet down from where we are standing,’ she told the interviewer. ‘The bones have mingled together and water got in and thrashed them around. But they’re there… 

‘They didn’t have to account for the deaths. They didn’t want anyone to know. All this time those poor little remains were disintegrating…

‘The prettier babies were set up for adoption – it was a money-making racket. The sicker ones were put away and allowed to die.’ 

Speaking to the outlet, Roderic O’Gorman – now leader of the Green Party/An Comhaontas Glas – remarked on the excavation: ‘There has been nothing on this scale before in Ireland. This will be one of the most complex operations of its kind in the world.

‘The goal is to give a respectful burial to all the remains… I’ve always regarded Tuam as a stain on our national conscience. The fact that infant remains were treated so callously even in death is deeply disturbing.’

Local communities had, at the site, also erected a number – 796 – in memory of all known deaths.

A note from a former resident of the home read: ‘This is what Catholic Ireland did. Took the babies away from their mothers and when they passed away dumped their little bodies into a dirty tank. My God.’ 

The Bon Secours Sisters apologised in 2021 and said they had ‘failed to protect the inherent dignity’ of women and children in the home.

Daniel MacSweeney has been appointed the Director of Authorised Intervention at Tuam, and is in charge of running the current excavation operation. 

In June last year, consultations kicked off on proposals to establish an inquiry into the institutions.

The 2,865-page document published four years ago lifted the lid on years of abuse in homes for unmarried and pregnant Irish women.

Some of the institutions were owned and run by the local health authorities – the county homes Pelletstown, Tuam and Kilrush.

Others were owned and run by religious orders; for example, the three homes run by the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Bessborough, Sean Ross and Castlepollard (the Sacred Heart homes).

Many of the women suffered emotional abuse and were often subject to denigration and derogatory remarks, the commission of investigation’s report said. 

Studying the homes over a 76-year period through 1998, the CIMBH determined that 9,000 children died in them, or 15 per cent of those who passed through.  

The report says 56,000 unmarried mothers and 57,000 children passed through the homes examined.   Many of the women received little or no ante-natal care. 

The report gave no single explanation for the deaths, but said ‘the major identifiable causes… were respiratory infections and gastroenteritis.’

It also highlighted a total of seven unethical vaccine trials on children in the institutions between 1934 and 1973.

Meanwhile women of the period who gave birth outside marriage were ‘subject to particularly harsh treatment’ at the hands of families and partners.  

The CIMBH was established in 2015, after an amateur historian uncovered evidence of a potential mass grave of infants at one such home in the town of Tuam. 

Long Lost Family Special – The Mother and Baby Home Scandal is across two parts, and will be on ITV1 and ITVX on 3rd and 4th September at 9PM