https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/a-journey-to-the-past-to-discover-my-parents-story-41292018.html?fbclid=IwAR1puUXe3r35tG1YyP-1N9L41FlEuG1NRib1gjfcDwB_-6WFBbntPfztYVIA journey to the past to discover my parents’ story
Hidden history of my mother, referred to as ‘Child 1281’ in the industrial school she was sent to at the age of seven, and the father I never knew uncovered after 60 years
Edward Murphy
January 30 2022 02:30 AM
One fateful morning in May 1942, a fair, slight young girl with blue eyes was the defendant on the charge sheet at The Courthouse, Inns Quay, in Dublin. Her name was Kathleen Murphy and she was seven years old. She faced the charge of destitution. The judge, Mary McCarthy, ordered that “the said child shall be sent to a certified industrial school at St Anne’s, Booterstown” until her 16th birthday.
That child was my mother. She arrived at St Anne’s, a Catholic home for girls run by the then black-robed Sisters of Mercy, in a black garda van. She was escorted up the four broad entrance steps to the stout front door and then to a long corridor that led up to more steps to the rooms. As in the case of many others, a report before the court by the NSPCC stated that her mother was unable to support the girl; she had 10 other children and could not pay the rent. More than half of the children ended up in homes. The Ryan Commission report of 2009 uncovered traumatic experiences for many people taken in by the Church on request at that time. My mother, though, never spoke about her childhood. Recently and armed with my newly-acquired Irish passport I decided it was time to follow her footsteps. I had avoided doing so in previous decades. One reason was because of another big gap in my life: who was my Dublin-based father?
But recently, by a remarkably lucky twist of fate, a genealogical DNA result led me to his identity and I became determined to learn more about both of them. The records of my mother’s time as “an inmate” the official term at St Anne’s were thin. She was given the number 1281, but there were no photos of her as a child. By 1945, her log reported that she was “improving” in conduct and character. She had a reputation, though, for “answering back”. Nowhere does it say what the young Kathleen was thinking or saying or asking about, what she had created or learned, why all her personal medical records were redacted or why she stayed with the Sisters of Mercy until the age of 20. In later life, she wasn’t a great reader or writer, but she could knit the most complicated patterns without the need for a written guide, thanks to her time at St Anne’s. By 1950, aged 15, she was “clean, honest and a good worker” out on licence, helping in the Sisters’ laundry in Athlone and then, four years later, in Sligo. But that is where all official records of her end. Keen to see where my mother spent her formative years, I wanted to visit St Anne’s and the adjoining Church of the Assumption, which she and her fellow inmates attended as a matter of course. To my surprise and joy, the current small group of the Sisters of Mercy there agreed to the visit. They made my wife and I welcome, emerging one by one from their rooms into an old-fashioned dining area and providing a home-made lunch and an unexpected full tour. We saw the rooms where my auburn-haired mother spent all those years, with the narrow, towering windows in the glass-partitioned learning areas, and the former children’s dormitories. For me, they were a remarkable and cathartic few hours. Never did I think I would ever tread the same floors as Kathleen or be in the same rooms. One of the nuns had been at St Anne’s in the late 1950s, aged 18. She recalled babies being brought there by gardaí. Once, she remembered, there were no spare cots so the babies were put in orange boxes. In that quiet dining area I spoke about how my mother had been affected by her childhood and how that in turn impacted the lives of her own children. The visit helped to give me a sense of closure, although I worried about what her reaction would have been if she had known her first-born son had followed her to this place. We had travelled from our home in Yorkshire to Dún Laoghaire. The court document of 1942 said seven-year-old Kathleen had been living with her family at Carriglea Gardens. Before that, they were with other relatives in a small house at Desmond Avenue. We lit a candle in St Michael’s Church in the town and took many photos of the different locations. Some time in 1954, Kathleen went her own way, leaving the supervision of the Sisters. All that is known for sure is that by 1957 she was in the centre of Dublin, working as a cleaner. This is where my father comes in. He was living in Upper Leeson Street in a large Georgian house divided into apartments. How did they meet?
The only two people who know kept the secret. What I do know is that my mother became pregnant at 23 in the spring of 1957, and then departed Ireland for good. Perhaps she left because of the stigma of being an unmarried mother or the fear of having to give up her baby to a home. She travelled alone to north-west England, where I was born. Her own exhausted mother came to stay with her when I was very young, but she did not last long. She was buried in a pauper’s grave, in the same cemetery where her daughter would later be laid to rest. Eight years after moving to England, my mother married a different man. That union did not last long. My mother had difficulty in maintaining relationships of any kind. There were other children four more sons and a daughter. She died at the age of 70 in England in 2004. ‘Irish Kath’ was regarded by her friends as a sociable, chatty woman. The church was packed for her funeral service, with some having to stand outside on a snow-covered morning. We were too upset to speak, but fulfilled her dying wish for a cortege in which she was borne through the streets on a black, horse-drawn carriage. My mum’s dysfunctional, emotional roller-coaster disposition is core to knowing why the search for my father took so long. She lived for the day, never spoke of the past and did not see the point in looking back. She only gave part of the first name of my father and told me, when I was a student, that I looked like him. He had been a student at Trinity College, she said. She could not understand why I would want to know more. She had endured and survived with her family. Why couldn’t I?
But over the years I pursued different lines of enquiry. I enrolled on an ancestry site in the middle of July 2016 after being suddenly overcome by the thought that I should make a new attempt to reach out to him. (I was later to discover that he had died in mid-July, 2016.) My eldest daughter, a doctor in the south of England, was determined to find out the identity of her grandfather. Eighteen months ago, after logging on to another ancestry site, she found a DNA link to a relative entirely unknown to us, with a surname of Indian Gujarati origin. She contacted the family, who were understandably sceptical. Days passed they felt like weeks. Then she phoned me to say she had the full name of the man who was my father, whose first name chimed with what my mother had told us. She was told, though, that he might be dead the new relative was checking for us. As those days went by, I lived in hope. Another of my daughters found an old Who’s Who entry for my father. Sure enough, he had been a student at Trinity in 1957. The name, the location, the date, the DNA they all came together. The mystery was solved. Too late, though, to meet him. A distant, ethereal memory came to me of when I was about three years old. I cannot prove it, of course, but I pictured a dark, slim, well-dressed man coming to the property where my mother and I were living near Manchester. He left after they had had a conversation. I think it was him. Was it a false memory? Did he want to stay, to live with us as a family?
I will never know. But finally learning his identity, speaking to members of his family, talking with people who knew him and using Companies House business records, I was able to meet one of his university friends, who told me my father took a business degree and attended philosophy seminars in the tutorial room featured in the film Educating Rita. He left Trinity in 1958, moving initially to England. I now know about his subsequent business roles in East Africa, where his family had diverse interests. I know he was chief executive at various companies before becoming a London-based property consultant. I have even seen a picture of him with Bob Geldof, supporting a fundraiser. I have heard he paid a secretary more than the going rate when he discovered she was a single parent. From almost zero information about him, I am amazed that I have now met many members of his family, who can trace their/my paternal lineage back more than 1,200 years, originating on the Afghanistan and Uzbekistan border as warriors. They include doctors and business people working across the globe, one of whom was knighted. My mother never kept documents, mementos or correspondence. She never wanted to discuss her origins, so other specific aspects of their relationship will remain a riddle. I do know now that she sacrificed much more than I had ever realised to keep me with her, despite her own experiences or maybe because of them. At the age of 64, my trip to Dublin, in between Covid lockdowns, allowed me to walk the paths of the young man and young woman who were responsible for bringing me into the world. At dusk, I gave two roses to the Liffey for the souls of my mother and the father I never knew. The roses lingered together for a long time along the riverbank, near O’Connell Bridge, before slowly parting and floating on.
