Mother and Baby Homes: Britain’s Forgotten Past

Thousands of survivors walking among us carrying the secrets of their past, either within mother and baby homes or growing up in industrial schools. Hidden from society between 1920-1998, victims of rape, incest and broken down relationships, survivors share their story...

By Lauren Cole-Lomas

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

Heart pounding, beads of sweat dotting across her nose. Her hair: matted and glued to her face; Angela hammered her fists on the oak doors. Beyond the doors, echoes could be heard haunting the corridors, dancing up the perfectly polished staircase. Though her hands were cracked and raw from the laundry detergent, she relentlessly continued pounding at the door. Crying out her child’s name, her pleas fell on deaf ears.

Thirty years later Angela would collapse during church service. It was there on the cold cobbles outside the church on the 27th of January 1988 that she would draw her last breath. Angela was admitted to St Vincent’s Laundry, Cork, Ireland in 1961.

As a single, travelling woman alone with her children, they would be taken into institutions often referred to as ‘Mother and Baby Homes’. Many women ended up in this situation through naivety and lack of sex education. Mother and Baby Homes existed in the UK and Ireland in a time when, unfortunately, sex education and the contraception options available today, didn’t. In fact, according to the BBC contraception was illegal in Ireland from 1935-1980.

Photo by Janko Ferlic

Abortion was also banned up until recently in 2018. The concept seems harmless enough, a place for single mothers to be housed and supposedly kept safe. Many women had gotten ‘into trouble’ having sex out of ‘wedlock’ and getting pregnant sometimes through no fault of their own. Some women were single mothers, some were from travelling families.

Many women who ‘got into trouble’ would be sent to homes by their families, out of pure shame that they were pregnant and unmarried. Homes also went by the name of ‘Magdalen Asylums/Laundries’, for fallen women which implied sexual promiscuity or prostitution.

The full version of this article is available in Sorry Not Sorry's new issue out now.