Author Topic: Anstey Harris: Author on her journey to trace Scottish birth parents  (Read 396 times)

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https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/23311172.anstey-harris-author-journey-trace-scottish-birth-parents/

Anstey Harris: Author on her journey to trace Scottish birth parents
11th February

ANSTEY Harris is telling a story about how she attended an anti-nuclear protest at Faslane last year, clutching photographs of her deceased birth parents and approaching fellow marchers to ask if anyone had known them.  “I felt like a war orphan,” she says. “I felt instantly guilty about feeling so sorry for myself I remembered that all around the world, war orphans are asking survivors in rubble if they’ve seen their parents.  I felt awful for comparing my own situation an adoptee from 1965, born in an unmarried mothers’ home and removed from my mother in the first few weeks of my life to theirs.”

The Dumfries and Galloway-based author, now 57, is a child of the forced adoption scandal that saw hundreds of thousands of unmarried mothers in the UK coerced into giving up their babies between 1949 and 1976.  Her trip to join campaigners at the Gare Loch last autumn was the latest twist in a long and winding road to uncover the truth about her identity, one that has been peppered with confusing cul-de-sacs and frustrating dead ends.  It is these experiences that have inspired the plot of Harris’s latest novel, When I First Held You, which centres on fictional anti-nuclear activists Judith and Jimmy who meet and fall in love in 1960s Glasgow.   When their squat is raided and Jimmy sent to prison, a pregnant Judith is made to enter an unmarried mothers’ home and give up their child for adoption. The couple are reunited more than half a century later and attempt to unpick their painful past.  There are distinct echoes of Harris’s own story. Her birth parents Christine Harris and Ian Sutherland met in the 1960s at demonstrations against the UK’s nuclear deterrent Polaris a predecessor of Trident being based at HM Naval Base Clyde.  Both were members of the Scottish Committee of 100, an anti-war group that used mass non-violent resistance and civil disobedience to campaign for nuclear disarmament.  Harris doesn’t know much about the couple’s relationship, other than her birth parents dated for around three months. Her mother Christine was 19 when she became pregnant and left Glasgow for her family home in Macclesfield, Cheshire, soon afterwards.  At Sefton General Hospital in Liverpool, Christine gave birth to a baby girl and named her Unity. Mother and daughter would spend less than a fortnight together. “I was in a children’s home from when I was a couple of weeks old up until I was about nine weeks old,” says Harris.

Her adoptive parents John and Hazel Baker renamed her Anstey. The couple already had a son but were unable to have any more biological children for medical reasons. Her childhood was spent near Dover in Kent.  She believes being separated from her birth mother at such a young age had a lasting impact. “Separation anxiety disorder it is a trauma that happens to babies like me,” she says. “I was a spectacularly naughty child.  I was a very bright child but very naughty especially compared to my family, who are very calm and quiet. The first school I was expelled from, I was eight.”

Harris always knew she was adopted but it was only when her adoptive mother passed away in 1993 that she began to contemplate the possibility of tracking down her birth parents.  “I felt I couldn’t do that while my mum was alive because she would have been hurt,” she recalls. “My mum died when I was 28. Then I was snowed under raising my own children and I didn’t go to university until I was in my 30s.”

In 2000, Harris’s then boyfriend convinced her that she would regret not taking the opportunity to find her birth parents. “He told me, ‘If you do it and you don’t like it you can walk away. But if you don’t do it, you will have these questions hanging over you forever.’”

And so, an epic journey began. Almost immediately, though, her efforts ran into difficulties. “I applied for my file from social services, which is the standard way to start your search,” says Harris. “But all that was left of my file was one form. Everything else had been lost.  The adoption agency had been absorbed into The Children’s Society and when they moved offices, they lost a few files one of the files they had lost was mine.  My social worker, who was looking for my records, went to the almoner [a social worker] at the hospital where I was born. I was told there had been a fire in the records department in 1970 and, again, a section of the records was lost, including mine.  But I have since been contacted by a huge number of adopted people, who were told the same thing about their records being lost in a fire or a move, then later found out that wasn’t true. So, I intend to go back and try again.  This sheet of paper is all I have. That’s it. It says ‘Unity Harris’, which was my birth name, along with my date of birth and where I was born. Under religion if baptised, it says, ‘Not RC Quaker outlook preferred.’ That is a jotted note. It is an instruction from my birth mother.  All there is in the section about my father is ‘Ian Sutherland, writer’ and ‘organiser, Scottish Committee of 100.’ From this form, I managed to trace my entire family. It took a lot of ingenuity.”

One of the early heart-breaking discoveries Harris made was that her birth mother Christine had taken her own life in 1970, aged only 25. She tracked down the inquest records to gain some background, including confirmation that her mother had worked as a nurse.  She got a telephone number for Christine’s mother Mary via a former neighbour of her birth family. “It was difficult for Mary to acknowledge me,” she says. “She couldn’t arrange to meet me because nobody in her family knew I existed. But she did send me a lot of photographs.”

Harris was later able to connect with Christine’s siblings Tony, Judith and Susan who welcomed her with open arms. Susan died last year, but Harris remains close with Tony and Judith.  Tracing her birth father proved trickier. “This was the early days of Google and looking for someone called Ian Sutherland in Scotland was quite a task,” says Harris.

By then she was living and working in Canterbury. “I wanted to learn more about the Scottish Committee of 100 and visited the university’s Peace Library. A lot of the names aren’t recorded. The CND got rid of minutes from meetings because they were ashamed of the Committee of 100.  "They believed in non-violent direct action, which CND couldn’t condone. Essentially, they [the Committee of 100] were Extinction Rebellion. One of the names that cropped up again and again in reports was Isobel Lindsay.”

Harris contacted former sociology lecturer Lindsay a Scottish nationalist, peace activist and signatory to the Committee of 100 saying she was doing research for a degree dissertation and trying to find Ian Sutherland, who had been involved in the 1960s protests.  Lindsay was initially unable to help. A few minutes later Harris picked up the phone and called again, this time telling Lindsay the real reason for her enquiry. The author remembers the wave of shame washing over her as she explained her earlier lie.  I said, ‘Sorry, I didn’t tell you the truth. Actually, I am an adopted person and I have reason to believe that Ian Sutherland is my father and I really want to meet him.’ And Isobel said, ‘Has it not occurred to you that he has a right to meet you as well and that he might want to meet you?’”

Those sage words have stayed with Harris. “One of the things that adopted people have is this guilt about being who we are,” she says. “We don’t dare go straight to a family, knock on someone’s door or announce ourselves because we feel like it is not our right.  We feel like it is the right of that family to have peace and keep secrets. But actually? Balls to that. It is our right; it is about us too.  It had never occurred to me that someone might want me. My identity is as a relinquished person. It never occurred to me that Ian might want to know who I was too. Isobel said she would do anything in her power to help me find him and that’s what she did.”

Lindsay put her in touch with the Scottish activist, libertarian socialist and Solidarity member, George Williamson. “He was an architect and such an interesting man,” says Harris. “He was very much part of the Scottish Committee of 100.  I went to see him at his house in Leeds. He had this huge scrapbook with cuttings of every time he and his wife were arrested. George makes a cameo in my book.  There is a scene where Jimmy throws an egg at the Prime Minister Harold Wilson. It was actually George Williamson who did that and went to prison for six days.  George put me in touch with a bunch of other people. One of them was a guy called Ian Mitchell, Mitch, who was knowledgeable and funny and cool. He was the person who told me most about my father. Mitch and Ian Sutherland were best friends when they lived in this squat.  They were thick as thieves and adored each other. Then one night, they were talking about Karl Marx. Everybody else went to bed. And when they got up in the morning, Mitch and Ian Sutherland were sworn enemies and never spoke again.  I remember George said to me, ‘Right, we need to get hold of Mitch because if Ian Sutherland is alive, he will know where he is.’ I said, ‘Oh, are they good friends?’ And George said, ‘No. That is the level to which he hates him. If Ian is alive, Mitch will know where he is.’  Mitch was great. He said the last time he had seen Ian he had been involved in CAMRA [the Campaign for Real Ale]. Later, I was Googling and came across a book called The Bevvy: The Story of Glasgow and Drink by Ian Sutherland. That’s when I knew I had the right person.”

Harris was able to contact her birth father and meet him in 2002. Initially, she says, he suggested it was “very unlikely” that she was his daughter but invited her to Scotland in the hope that he might be able to help with the search.  “My birth father was 19 when he and Christine dated. He said he didn’t know she was pregnant.” However, any doubts about her parentage vanished at that first meeting. “When I went up to see him in Glasgow, Ian said it was ‘irrefutable’ because I look so much like his sister.”

Sadly, says Harris, she wasn’t able to glean as much information as she had hoped about the former journalist and photographer who had contributed to more than 150 publications during his career, including The Herald, Press and Journal and New Society.  “He’d had a massive, life-changing stroke in his early 50s,” she explains. “So, by the time I met him, I don’t know how much of him I met. Or what version of him I met. Whether I met the real person behind the social veneer. It is hard to tell.”

Ian Sutherland died in 2016. Harris remains hopeful that, if any other relatives are still alive, she will one day get to meet them. “I would love to meet his sister,” she says.

“Because the first thing that Ian said when I met him is that I look exactly like her. He said his mother was from Tiree. He was absolutely adamant that everyone on Tiree looks just like me. When you are adopted, you don’t look like anybody. That is nice to be able to think about and to also reclaim my heritage.”

Harris already had plans to visit the Hebridean island this summer to do some research and thanks to a recent post on the Facebook page Tiree Memories she has in the last fortnight managed to get in touch with members of her birth father’s family.  "It is very early days,” she says. “I know to take things slowly because I understand how startling it must be to come into this situation.”

Fate has also played a helping hand. Harris recalls how a chance encounter led to her discovering her late birth mother Christine was Scottish. While attending a book event in Liverpool three years ago she did a newspaper interview about being born in the city and her subsequent adoption.  I got an email from a guy called Terry McLoughlin who told me his mother Rose had been in hospital [giving birth to Terry’s elder brother] with Christine when I was born,” she says.

“When I went to meet them, they told me that in their family they call me ‘Jamie’s twin’. Because their mother never talks about the birth of her first baby without talking about the little baby who was being given up for adoption in the next bed. She never forgot me.  Rose told me she was sitting downstairs at 11pm, reading this newspaper interview I’d done and thinking, ‘That’s a sad story’, then realised that the baby was called Unity. She screamed and shouted upstairs to her husband Frank, who was in bed, saying, ‘It’s her it is baby Unity.’”

 When Harris travelled to Liverpool to meet the McLoughlin family, there was a poignant moment. “The only thing I get emotional about in all of this is finding out that Rose has prayed for me every Sunday of my life,” she says, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Rose said, ‘All I know about your mum is she was Scottish.’ I replied, ‘She wasn’t Scottish, she was from Cheshire.’ And she said, ‘No, she was Scottish, definitely. She had a strong Scots accent.’ I went back to my birth family and asked them, ‘Was Christine Scottish?’  And her younger sister Susan said, ‘Oh, yeah, I suppose. Because we didn’t leave Edinburgh until she was 15 …’ I learned Christine moved back to Glasgow with the Committee of 100 when she was 18. So, her accent would have been strong. You could never know that from records.”

Rose McLoughlin is mentioned in the author’s note of When I First Held You. Isobel Lindsay, like George Williamson, makes a cameo in the novel itself.  Judith meets another old lady by the side of Loch Lomond,” says Harris. “I wanted to put Isobel in the story because she belongs there.”

Belonging is something that Harris can relate to. She and her husband, Colin Cross, who is a violin maker, moved to Scotland in 2021. Harris says it felt like a homecoming. Alongside penning her books, she runs retreats and workshops at Write South West Scotland near Castle Douglas.  Her Scots roots are something she is immensely proud of. “Scottish culture is so different to English culture,” she says. “It is so much more valuable and valued. People are aware of social history, social responsibility and social roles.  I love being part of that and being Scottish. I love living in Scotland. I feel like I have come home. I treasure that background and genetic link to the land where I live. It means the world to me.”