Notes Introduction 1. Guardian, 17 June 1999 – John Hutton, the health minister, was quoted as saying there should be ‘radical improvements in adoption services. We will not hesitate to take the necessary action in the future to ensure that looked-after children do not become the innocent victims of misplaced theory or ideology’. And a prospective adopter wrote to the Evening Standard, 4 September 2003: ‘No first-time natural parent on this planet is, or will ever be, examined and intrusively checked on their parenting capability, as adopters are.’ 2. Jenny Keating, ‘Struggle for Identity: Issues Underlying the Enactment of the 1926 Adoption of Children Act’, University of Sussex Journal of Contemporary History, issue 3 (2001), http://www.sussex.ac.uk/history/documents/3._ keating_struggle_for_identity.pdf. 3. They could apply to see their original birth certificate when they reached the age of majority but a court order was necessary. During this period very few legally adopted children would have reached the age of majority except for a few whose de facto adoptions were made official by the 1926 Adoption Act. 4. See Chapter 6. 5. Murray Ryburn, ‘Secrecy and Openness in Adoption: An Historical Perspective’, Social Policy and Administration, vol. 29, no. 2 (June 1995), pp. 151–68. 6. Ibid., op. cit., p. 166. 7. See Erica Haimes and Noel Timms, ‘Access to Birth Records and Counselling of Adopted Persons Under Section 26 of the Children Act, 1975’, Final Report to the DHSS (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, May 1983); John P. Triseliotis, ‘Obtaining Birth Certificates’, in Philip Bean (ed.), Adoption: Essays in Social Policy, Law and Sociology (London: Tavistock Publications, 1984). 8. E. Wayne Carp, Family Matters: Secrecy and Disclosure in the History of Adoption (London: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 28. 9. Similar practice in the UK in the 1950s is described in Kathleen Kiernan, Hilary Land and Jane Lewis, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth-Century Britain: From Footnote to Front Page (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 102–10. 10. In contrast Scotland’s first Adoption of Children Act, passed in 1930, gave adoptees the right to see their original birth certificate from the age of 17 (see Chapter 5). 11. For more information see J. Rockel and Ryburn, Adoption Today: Change and Choice in New Zealand (Auckland: Heinemann/Reed, 1988), pp. 9–10. 12. See Audrey Marshall and Margaret McDonald, The Many-Sided Triangle: Adoption in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001). 13. Papers in the collection of Patricia Wreford King. Notes, 30 April 1937. 213 214 Notes 14. A. M. Homes, ‘Witness Protection’, in Sara Holloway (ed.), Family Wanted: Adoption Stories (London: Granta Books, 2005), p. 21. 15. Marshall and McDonald, op. cit., pp. v–vi. 16. Julia Feast, Michael Marwood, Sue Seabrook and Elizabeth Webb, Preparing for Reunion: Experiences from the Adoption Circle, New edn (London: The Children’s Society, 1998). 17. For example: Feast et al, op. cit.; Sarah Iredale, Reunions: True Stories of Adoptees’ Meetings with Their Natural Parents (London: The Stationery Office, 1997); Sara Holloway (ed.), Family Wanted: Adoption Stories (London: Granta Books, 2005); Amal Treacher and Ilan Katz (eds), The Dynamics of Adoption: Social and Personal Perspectives (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2000). 18. George K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians 1850–1940 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); see Chapter 6, ‘Artificial Families’, pp. 272–315. A couple of the recent popular accounts of adoption have an element of historical background: Sue Elliott in her story of her reunion with her birth mother, Love Child: A Memoir of Adoption, Reunion, Loss and Love (London: Vermillion, 2005), and Hunter Davies in Relative Strangers: A History of Adoption and a Tale of Triplets (London: Time Warner Books, 2003), which is however more a human interest story of the reunion of triplets born and adopted in 1932 than an actual history of adoption. 19. In particular, G. Roberts, ‘Social and Legal Policy in Child Adoption in England and Wales 1913–1958’ (PhD thesis, University of Leicester, 1973). Roberts looked in detail at the development of adoption legislation and the changing attitudes to social policy and administration which lay behind the legislative changes. She was able to interview some of the people involved in the independent adoption societies in the early years of adoption and was unconstrained by the data protection legislation which affects everyone now working in the field of adoption or dealing with adoption records. 20. The Horsbrugh Report 1937 (see Chapter 6) said that ‘none of the chief adop- tion societies appears to possess on its staff trained social workers’. (p. 11) 21. Margaret Kornitzer, Child Adoption in the Modern World (London: Putnam, 1952). 22. Alexina McWhinnie, Adopted Children: How They Grow Up: A Study of Their Adjustment as Adults (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967). See Chapter 5 for more detail about her survey. 23. John Triseliotis, Evaluation of Adoption Policy and Practice (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 1970), pp. 2–7. 24. Eleanor Grey, in collaboration with Ronald M. Blunden, A Survey of Adoption in Great Britain, Home Office Research Studies 10 (London: HMSO, 1971). 25. See McWhinnie, op. cit., and John Triseliotis, In Search of Origins: The Experience of Adopted People (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). 1 Setting the Scene: The Historical and Legal Background 1. Richard Soloway, Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 9. Notes 215 2. Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Wally Seccombe, ‘Starting to Stop: Working-Class Fertility Decline in Britain’, Past and Present, no. 126 (1990) and Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (London: Verso, 1993). 3. Soloway, op. cit., p. 168. 4. Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Vintage Books, 1962, translated from the French by Robert Baldick). 5. Jane Lewis, Women in England 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1984), p. 10. 6. Ellen Ross, ‘Labour and Love: Rediscovering London’s Working- Class Mothers 1870–1918’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 79. 7. Lewis, ‘The Working-Class Wife and Mother and State Intervention, 1870–1918’, in Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love, op. cit., p. 103. 8. Census for England and Wales, 1901 and 1931, quoted in Diana Gittins, Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure 1900–39 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 34. 9. For discussion about the emphasis on domesticity during the interwar years see, for example, Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 1880–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989); Gittins, op. cit.; Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love, op. cit.; Lewis, Women in England, op. cit.; Deirdre Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars 1918–1939 (London: Pandora, 1989); Judy Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900–50 (London: Macmillan, 1995); Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1914–1959 (London: Macmillan, 1992). 10. Pugh, op. cit., p. 83. 11. Gittins, op. cit., p. 56. 12. Cynthia L. White, Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970), pp. 96, 100. 13. Ibid. 14. Gittins, op. cit., p. 51. 15. Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’ in F. M. L. Thompson, (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, Vol. 2: People and their Environment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 66–7. 16. Between 1919 and 1939 almost four million new houses were built. In the building boom years 1933–8, an average 334,000 houses were produced each year. John Burnett, A Social History of Housing 1815–1985 (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 249. 17. Giles, op. cit., p. 68. 18. Alan A. Jackson, The Middle Classes 1900–1950 (Nairn, UK: David St John Thomas, 1991), p. 36. 19. Burnett, op. cit., p. 237. 20. Naomi Mitchison, ‘The Reluctant Feminists’, Left Review, vol. 1, no. 3 (1934), pp. 93–4, quoted in Dyhouse, op. cit., pp. 186–7. 21. Giles, op. cit., p. 120. 22. Joanna Bourke, Working-Class Cultures in Britain 1890–1960: Gender, Class and Ethnicity (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 84. 216 Notes 23. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary on Historical Principles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 3rd ed, 1973), p. 1809. 24. Geoffrey Crossick, ‘The Emergence of the Lower Middle Class in Britain: A Discussion’, in Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977). 25. Lucinda McCray Beier, ‘We Were Green as Grass: Learning about Sex and Reproduction in Three Working-Class Lancashire Communities, 1900–1970’, Social History of Medicine, vol. 16, no. 3 (2003), p. 474. 26. Anderson, op. cit., p. 36. 27. Ibid., p. 475. 28. ‘The Registrar-General’s Statistical Review of England and Wales for the Years 1938 and 1939 – Text (London: HMSO, 1947), pp. 192, 195. 29. Mr T3P, Social and family life in Preston, 1890–1940. Elizabeth Roberts Archive, Centre for North-West Regional Studies, Lancaster University (ERA). 30. Hugh McLeod, ‘White Collar Values and the Role of Religion’, in Crossick (ed.), op. cit., p. 72. 31. Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle, Janet Fink and Katherine Holden, The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy, 1830–1960 (London: Longman, 1999). 32. Katherine Holden, ‘The Shadow of Marriage: Single Women in England 1919–1939’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Essex, 1996). 33. Anderson, op. cit., p. 28. 34. Christina Hardyment, Dream Babies: Child Care from Locke to Spock (London: Jonathan Cape, 1983), p. 123. 35. Ibid., p.