Читать книгу The Adoption Machine - Paul Jude Redmond - Страница 11

CHAPTER ONE

The Age of the Institutions

Captain Thomas Coram challenged eighteenth-century perceptions that babies of poor families were worthless, and believed that all babies had equal human rights. Before his Foundling Hospital opened in London in 1739, childcare for most babies from deprived backgrounds was virtually unknown in Britain and Ireland, except for charitable initiatives undertaken by people associated with local churches. Babies and young children were often considered a mixed blessing, as they placed a burden on poor families and contributed no income for the first several years of their lives. Orphans and ‘bastards’ had no value in society. It was only when children started to become useful, at around seven or eight years of age, that they became valued by society. Parents were forced through necessity and grinding poverty to be extremely practical in very hard times.

Unwanted babies were dumped in public places and on church doorsteps and generally ended up in the local workhouse. If the parish did not have its own workhouse, they were sent to the nearest available one for an agreed weekly or monthly fee. The only alternative was to employ local wet nurses for a few years and then send the children, by then aged three or four, to the workhouse. On rare occasions, the lucky ones were informally adopted by their nurse or a local family. The care available to abandoned babies was unregulated and varied hugely from parish to parish, and mortality rates were appallingly high. Not long before Captain Coram stepped in, one English workhouse received 2,000 children over a period of twenty-eight years and none survived.1

Coram decided to change the babies’ names upon entering his hospital, and the result was a loss of identity with no names to connect those children to their history or heritage. The first boy and girl to arrive in the hospital were baptised and renamed after the Captain and his wife, Thomas and Eunice Coram.2 Tens of millions of people lost their names and identities due to this practice.

Captain Coram started a revolution in childcare and, although social change was slow, the changes he initiated took hold. Two of the governors of the Foundling Hospital were instrumental in founding another new type of institution in Whitechapel in 1758 – London’s Magdalene Laundry.3 It was far smaller in size and scale than the hospital and had a completely different function. It was for so-called ‘fallen women’, a catch-all term for prostitutes and unmarried mothers who found themselves pregnant and with no hope for themselves or their babies.

Ireland in the Eighteenth Century

A law providing for a House of Industry in Dublin was enacted in 1703. This was essentially a workhouse by any other name and was erected in Dublin’s south inner-city on what is now the site of St. James’s Hospital. Several more buildings were added to the original workhouse and the site eventually covered fifty acres and evolved into St. James’s Hospital. Abandoned babies and children, who ended up in the House of Industry, were sent outside to be nursed until around age five and were then returned to the workhouse from where they could be apprenticed out from the age of twelve. In 1730, the authorities renovated and divided up the workhouse with a large section set aside for babies and children, which was named the ‘Foundling Hospital’. They adopted the European custom of installing a ‘baby wheel’ (a revolving device on which babies were placed in order to gain entry to a building) and a bell to alert the doorman to a new baby’s arrival. Like Coram’s Foundling Hospital there were no questions asked, but the similarities end there. Dublin’s Foundling Hospital was swarming with vermin, highly unsanitary and no better than the workhouses. Around 57,000 children were resident in Dublin’s Foundling Hospital up to 1818. Of the 51,000 children who entered the hospital between 1796 and 1826, over 41,000 died. Between 1790 and 1796, a further investigation by the British Parliament discovered that 12,768 children had been admitted to the Dublin Foundling Hospital and 9,786 had died. Another 2,847 had simply vanished from the system entirely, and there was no record of them. It is believed that only 135 survived. If the vanished are presumed to have died, and they almost certainly did, then the inclusive mortality rate of those seven years was 99%.

Seven years after the first Magdalene Laundry opened in London in 1758, a similar project was launched in Ireland. Dublin’s laundry was founded in 1765 and it took two years to prepare the building and finances for its official opening. Lady Denny’s Magdalene Laundry opened in June 1767 at 8 Lower Leeson Street, a converted Georgian house of four storeys over basement in Dublin’s city centre. Protestant women and girls under the age of twenty and pregnant were admitted to the new residential laundry.4 The daily routine of drudgery and poor food included regular daily prayers and preaching by clergy and lay Protestants. Several customs that developed in Britain’s Magdalene Laundries were adopted in Dublin during the early years; for example, the new arrivals had their heads shaved. This was originally intended to remedy the common problem of lice. Staff quickly realised, however, that bald-headed girls were less likely to leave the laundry owing to public stigma. Later, as attitudes hardened, shaving the girls’ heads became an integral part of their punishment for ‘sins’. The Good Shepherd nuns in Britain introduced another tradition that became part of the punishment aspect of future institutional ‘care’. They issued new residents with ‘house names’. This custom originally had good intentions of ‘protecting’ the girls and saving them from their perceived shame. However, the practice ultimately warped into another instrument of punishment. Erasing identities and self-esteem became a process that would humiliate and stigmatise hundreds of thousands of girls and women across the world for centuries to come.

Victorian Britain

From the 1830s to 1900, Victorian Britain was infected with a drive to build new institutions, now considered a magical answer to society’s problems. Dozens of social laws were passed and institutions were converted or built by the hundred, by both the public and private sectors. Industrial schools, reformatories and Magdalene Laundries sprang up across Ireland and Britain. New orphanages from the late 1800s were imbued with not just a specific religious ethos but with a well-defined class role. There are many descriptions of these orphanages by the religious or lay Catholics who ran them in Britain and Ireland, and the terms used include ‘from respectable families’, ‘of the upper class’, and ‘middle-class families’.

Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1837 was the same year that saw the introduction of important new social legislation. It became compulsory to register all births, deaths and marriages with the government, a public service that was previously the domain of the various Churches.

The institution of marriage and producing legitimate children were key components of the new social order. In the first thirty or forty years of Queen Victoria’s reign, single mothers and their babies and children were increasingly demonised by the newly ‘respectable’ society. They were hidden away from genteel, respectable people in the booming network of Victorian workhouses and Magdalene Laundries where they were transformed from half-pitied, half-despised sinners into ‘inmates’ and given uniforms to wear like prisoners. In some of the British workhouses, single mothers and prostitutes were for a time forced to wear distinctive clothing; prostitutes were assigned yellow dresses, while pregnant single women were issued with red or scarlet dresses. They were separated from the ‘respectable poor’, who were encouraged to regard themselves as a distinct class above single mothers and their illegitimate children. Ironically, forcing single mothers and their children out of society and into the workhouses reinforced the prejudices towards them: they were now a burden on the taxpayer and the public purse. It was a vicious circle of stigmatisation and shame.

Church Disorganisation in Ireland after Catholic Emancipation

When Ireland’s Penal Laws that discriminated against Catholics were revoked in 1829, what was left of the Irish Catholic Church was almost penniless and disorganised, and sought international help from its nearest Catholic neighbours in France. The orders of French nuns who arrived soon dominated the various religious institutions being established around Ireland. These included the Bon Secours (France), the Good Shepherds (France), the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (France), and later the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (originally French from 1866 and then British from 1905). From the 1840s, the French orders of nuns expeditiously established or took control of the industrial and reformatory schools, while Magdalene Laundries were set up in all the major cities where there was enough business for a commercial laundry to survive. The Irish Sisters of Mercy were founded just two years after emancipation and played an important role in the country’s new institutions.

One point that continues to confuse people even today is the difference between Magdalene Laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. Most of the confusion is because the Catholic version of a Magdalene Laundry was completely different to the Protestant model in one key respect: Catholic laundries did not admit pregnant women and girls or their babies. The Catholic nuns thereby redefined what was meant by a Magdalene Laundry. From the 1840s onwards, pregnant girls were sent to the nearest public workhouse. Single mothers who turned up at the Catholic laundries, or arrived in the custody of a priest or local official, were admitted, but the child or children were placed in a nearby workhouse or industrial school also run by a Catholic order. Sometimes the different institutions were on the same land and even run by the same order of nuns, but were separated by high walls. Mothers and children were separated and never allowed to have contact again, despite living only yards apart.

Women and girls in the Catholic laundries were essentially prisoners, and conditions grew steadily worse with time. What were originally intended as refuges became de facto prisons. ‘Fallen women’ had no rights. They were sometimes worked up to 100 hours over a six-day week. Constant hunger, exhaustion and despair were the lot of these women. Many were incarcerated for life and when they died they were buried on-site in mass graves, with no names or markers, let alone proper headstones.

The difference between the Catholic and Protestant laundries are still widely misunderstood by the public and some academics and survivor activists. There is a similar difference between early Catholic and Protestant models of Mother and Baby Homes to which we shall return shortly.

Hardening Attitudes to Single Pregnant Women

By the early twentieth century, single mothers were regarded as sinners, fallen women, strumpets, prostitutes, brazen hussies, Jezebels riddled with venereal diseases, tramps and sluts, while illegitimate babies were simiarly vilified as bastards, weaklings, runts of the litter and the spawn of Satan.

By 1900, public policy was to dispatch single pregnant girls to public workhouses where they were separated from the ‘respectable poor’ and treated appallingly. It is imperative to understand the attitude that developed over the years of Queen Victoria’s reign in both Britain and Ireland. The stigmatisation of single mothers by Irish society had a detrimental effect on their physical, mental and emotional well-being, and consequently a harmful effect on their babies. This may partly explain the high mortality rates among illegitimate babies. Treat a pregnant woman badly and her baby will be equally affected. Canon Law bars illegitimate adults from joining the Catholic priesthood and that injunction remains in place today, unless one receives ‘special dispensation’ from the Pope. The traditional prejudice of the Catholic Church towards illegitimacy contributed to poisoning Irish society’s attitudes and was reinforced by the new Victorian morality, which was becoming ever more prevalent in civil society across Britain and Ireland.

From 1890 onwards, however, there was a small backlash in Britain against the treatment of single mothers. Several groups were founded to support them and absolve their illegitimate babies of their sinful stain. The Protestant Salvation Army was the first group to open a dedicated home for single mothers and their babies in Hackney in 1887. This home supported new mothers in their decisions, whether their choice was to hand their babies over to the ‘system’ to be initially placed with families and later end up in the industrial schools, or to keep their babies and raise them alone. This small resistance movement in Britain had a long way to go in its battle against what were now mainstream attitudes.

In 1890, relatively rapid social and economic changes created yet another new type of Catholic institution that exhibited all the arrogance and harsh discipline associated with an increasingly confident Catholic Church. St. Pelagia’s Home, the first ‘Mother and Baby Home’ as we understand the designation today, was founded in 1890 when the Diocese of Westminster in London purchased two adjoining houses at 27 Bickerton Road, Highgate’.5

St. Pelagia’s also firmly believed that the permanent separation of single mothers and their babies was a vital punishment for being single but it is again important to note the fundamental difference between the Catholic and Protestant versions of Mother and Baby Homes. Although, in time, most of the Protestant homes would regress to systematically separating single mothers and their babies, the Catholic homes were founded on the principles of punishment and attempted to ‘reform’ or ‘save’ the residents, and this included severely limiting the time they spent with their babies and then forcibly separating them for life. In London, a Miss Gee ran the new Catholic Mother and Baby Home when it opened but, within a year, the Westminster Diocese had invited a small French order with a presence in Britain to take over.

The Rise of the Sacred Heart Nuns

Of all the religious orders that ran Mother and Baby Homes in Ireland, the Sacred Hearts are by far the most important. Their three homes were the second-, third- and fourth-largest of the nine that existed. Around half the women and girls who went to a Mother and Baby Home in Ireland went to a Sacred Heart home.

The order that became the Congregation of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was founded in 1866 by a French priest, Father Peter Victor Braun, while he was on assignment to Paris, and the original order was named the ‘Servants of the Sacred Heart’. They spread rapidly across Europe, being part of the reaction by the Catholic Church to the revisionism of the reformed Protestant Churches sweeping the continent and Britain in the second part of the nineteenth century. The English Province of the order was founded accidentally when the nuns fled France after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870, initiating their later breaking away from their original Mother House. The order rapidly grew in size, power and influence and by the 1890s Irish nuns dominated the English branch, notably Sisters Winefride (originally Bridget) Tyrrell from Monasterevin, Co. Kildare, and Sylvester Halpin (originally Mary Jane Halfpenny) from Lobinstown, Co. Meath. Another young Irish girl, Mary Daly from Skeyne, Co. Westmeath, joined the original order in France aged just 15. She was later transferred to England and rose to become head of the new order in 1927.

The Servants of the Sacred Heart accepted the invitation of the Diocese of Westminster to take over their new Mother and Baby Home, and they re-named it St. Pelagia’s. It is interesting to note that, although there is some confusion historically, there were essentially two Pelagias; one was a young maiden (virgin) who committed suicide rather than agree to a forced marriage, and the other was a reformed prostitute and actress who converted to Christianity.

The single mothers in the new home remained there for a year after their babies were born and were taught domestic skills such as dressmaking and cooking until they were discharged. ‘Domestic skills’ was a euphemism for hard work around the home or some enterprise such as making religious regalia for commercial sale. Aged one year old, when their mothers were discharged, the children were sent to a Sacred Hearts’ nursery in Chadwell in east London. The children were then placed with local Catholic families for periods of anything from several weeks to several years. These families were paid for their care. From there the children were sent to so-called orphanages, which usually meant a Catholic industrial school or similar institution. The mothers who had been discharged were expected to pay for their baby’s nursing out. This payment came to be known as ‘parental monies’.

In 1897, the Sacred Hearts opened a second Mother and Baby Home in Kelton, Liverpool, when Monsignor James Nugent invited them to run a large manor house he had rented for the purpose. Following the example of the Magdalene Laundries dotted around Britain, this home took in commercial laundry from the ships in Liverpool’s busy port to be hand-washed by the residents, thus ensuring the nuns a steady income from an unpaid and captive workforce of pregnant girls and single mothers.

Because of their rapid growth and success during the 1890s, the English Sacred Hearts were restless and eager to be freed from their Mother House in France and they finally broke away in 1902. Three years later, on 5 March 1905, the new order was formally recognised by the Holy See in Rome as ‘The Congregation of the Sisters of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.’ It is important to note that a ‘congregation’ is a second-class designation and considered inferior to an ‘order’. Winifride Tyrrell became the first Mother Superior General and was succeeded by Sylvester Halpin in 1908. The Sacred Heart nuns later opened two other Mother and Baby Homes in Britain, one in Scotland and their last in 1944 in Brettargholt, Kendal, in the Lake District. They arrived in Ireland in 1922.

There is one last piece of important legislation to consider before the previous century ended – the 1899 Poor Law Act. Although it is widely believed in the adoption community that the Adoption Act 1952 was the first piece of adoption legislation in Ireland, it was, in fact, the first piece of standalone adoption legislation. A section of the 1899 Poor Law Act legalised adoption by resolution. Generally, it was used in two ways; firstly, to adopt newborn babies and very young children and secondly, to adopt former foster children into the family once they had turned 16 years old. Weekly payments for fostering a child ceased on that date.

By 1900, industrial and reformatory schools had developed a negative reputation because the former inmates had none of the social skills necessary to function in civil society. Their health was destroyed by their regimented existence and poor diet. Britain reluctantly accepted that caring for children in large institutions was a failed social experiment and began to phase out the institutions that had shattered tens of thousands of lives.

In the early twentieth century, the rest of the English-speaking world, particularly in the United States, followed the British lead and began to phase out large-scale institutional care. Ireland was the exception. The Irish Catholic Church had fought long and hard to own and/or control all the different types of institutions spreading across the country and were not about to give them up. The Church fiercely resisted the new British policy, and following independence in 1922, moved swiftly to consolidate its control and ownership of the institutions.

Local Government Reports

In 1922, practically all welfare and public health matters were the sole responsibility of local authorities and, from the time that these forerunners of local county councils came into existence in 1872, a new government department headed by a cabinet minister issued an annual report. These Local Government Reports (LGRs) are a primary source for researchers into the Mother and Baby Homes up to 1945.

Section IV of the LGRs was entitled ‘Public Assistance’ and dealt with what would now be considered social welfare and some health-related matters. That section contained an annual report on ‘Unmarried Mothers’ and related issues, which varied from year to year, such as infant mortality rates and explanations and interpretations of new legislation. Some years contained facts and figures, others did not. By the mid-1930s, the sections dealing with ‘Unmarried Mothers’ began to shrink and, by the final year in 1945, amounted to just a couple of brief paragraphs with no useful or illuminating information.

Although the main-section narratives of the LGRs were written by anonymous civil servants, at least one and often two special reports were written every year by the ‘National Inspectors of Boarded-Out Children’: Aneenee Fitzgerald-Kenney and Alice Litster. Having served under the Senior Inspector, Fitzgerald-Kenney was the more senior; Marie Dickie had served since her appointment in 1903 and as a National Inspector from at least 1910. Litster was later also appointed National Inspector. Products of the sensitive and enlightened approach to childcare originating in Britain, their reports were mainly narrative, and significant parts were printed verbatim in the 1927/1928 LGR in the main section. The following year, their reports were relegated to the Appendices section and in smaller print than the main section.

Fitzgerald-Kenney’s and Litster’s Protestant backgrounds are vital to a full understanding of the ideological and religious battle waged in the sub text of the reports year on year. Anyone interested in the treatment of single mothers in Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s should read these reports, including Fitzgerald-Kenney’s and Litster’s individual reports in the Appendices from 1928. The complete narrative offers a fascinating insight into the Inspectors’ philosophy about single mothers and their babies. Their views on the care of children are clear and progressive, unlike the woefully out-of-date ramblings of the Catholic Irish civil servants.

While the language in the reports is very dated and would be considered offensive by today’s standards, the fundamental compassion shown by Fitzgerald-Kenney and Litster is clearly evident. They followed international best practice throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and regularly cited League of Nations research and recommendations. They firmly believed that a child’s best interests were served by being fostered out to certified and loving families who should be fairly compensated, followed up with regular inspections and proper record-keeping. Fitzgerald-Kenney and Litster fought a losing battle from the start. While they occasionally displayed prejudices (Litster was unsympathetic towards ‘repeat offenders’), they were in many ways decades ahead of their time in insular Catholic Ireland, which had reverted after 1922 to a system of incarceration for pregnant single women.

There is a distinct difference in the attitudes of the Inspectors compared to those of the Catholic civil servants who compiled the main report. The Inspectors consistently demonstrated compassion and understanding of the children’s situations, as far back as 1915 in FitzGerald-Kenney’s case: ‘[Boarding-out is] infinitely superior to the unfortunate system which condemns young and innocent children to the Workhouse as their home … The system of hiring-out is still an unsatisfactory one, and very low wages continue to be paid.’6

The transition to Irish independence must have been a profoundly disturbing time for the Inspectors, with an uneasy standoff between the old guard of senior civil servants and the new nationalist regime that assumed power after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921. This tension is discernible in the LGRs from 1922 to 1945.

In 1924 the new Department of Education noted that there were more children in industrial schools in the Irish Free State than in all the United Kingdom. Catholic Ireland continued to judge and punish single mothers and their babies, with Local Authorities, County Councils, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children’s Inspectors, the new police force, An Garda Síochána, and the courts committing an average of 1,000 children a year to the industrial schools, while women were poured into the Magdalene Laundries via the courts or other unofficial means.

It is clear from the LGRs that it was considerably more expensive to keep children in institutions than it was to place them in properly inspected foster homes, but the State continued to push women and children into institutions. The Children’s Act of 1929 clearly demonstrates a decisive choice the Irish State made only seven years after independence, significantly expanding the reasons children could be sent to industrial schools and streamlining the process of committing them. Britain closed its last industrial school in 1933 while Irish industrial schools and Magdalene Laundries flourished, and new Mother and Baby Homes continued to open.

There has been considerable confusion and misunderstanding about the statistics used in the LGRs. For example, the old workhouses were rebranded as ‘County Homes’. Commentators and academics have understood the references to ‘Poor Law Institutions’ to always mean ‘County Homes’. In fact, the figures given for ‘Poor Law Institutions’ always included the public Mother and Baby Homes (Pelletstown, Kilrush and Tuam) and sometimes included private Mother and Baby Homes known as ‘extern institutions’, which were subcontracted by the government (Bessboro, Sean Ross Abbey and Castlepollard). The LGRs are simply unclear at times and the figures used also changed in definition. The civil servants who compiled the reports either presumed people would understand, or they were deliberately obscuring the truth. Some basic errors in the reports also lead to the conclusion that many civil servants were lazy or incompetent, or both.

As a general guide, approximately 900–1,100 single mothers were in the various institutions at any one time during the 1920s and 1930s. These include the Workhouses/County Homes, a small number in the County Hospitals during their confinement, and the public and private Mother and Baby Homes. Overall there were approximately 1,500 illegitimate babies born in 1922, rising to over 2,000 by the early 1930s before decreasing to 1,700 at the start of the Second World War. During the war, that figure increased to over 2,600 in 1945, and we will examine the reasons in later chapters. The Protestant Bethany Mother and Baby Home is absent from all the LGRs, reflecting the State’s attitude that Bethany simply didn’t exist.

It must also be remembered that the facts stated in the LGRs reveal only a snapshot of a particular moment in time. Taking the figures on 31 March 1940 for Pelletstown, there were 135 mothers in the home on that date. However, 243 had been admitted during the previous year while 273 were discharged.