The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames

by Justine Cowan

  To mitigate the chaos of the hordes of women gathered outside its doors, the hospital instituted a lottery system in 1742. The system amounted to little more than a mother drawing colored balls from a leather bag. If she drew a white ball, her child would be accepted, pending the results of a medical examination. A red ball meant that the child would be wait-listed, in case a child whose mother had drawn a white ball failed the medical test. A black ball doomed a child to rejection.

  The lottery system didn’t last long. Criticized for relegating life-or-death decisions to a game of chance, it was followed by a second system termed the “General Reception.” A woman could drop off a child with no questions asked, or simply leave her infant in a basket hung on the hospital gate, ringing a bell to alert the porter before disappearing into the night. The General Reception had disastrous results. There was massive influx of children, 117 on the first day alone, and the numbers only increased. Soon the hospital was overwhelmed. Nearly 15,000 children were admitted during the four-year-long General Reception period; more than 10,000 of them died.

  After much trial and error, the Foundling Hospital created a set of admission procedures that were honed for efficiency and left little to chance. Adopted in the 1800s and implemented well into the following century, the Foundling Hospital’s “Rules for the Admission of Children” included precautions ensuring that children of legitimate birth would not be inadvertently accepted: “The children of Married Women and Widows cannot be received into the Hospital.”2 Couples too poor to care for their children or women who had been widowed or abandoned by their husbands would have to look elsewhere for assistance. Unlike those born out of wedlock, their children had a chance in life—a chance to receive an education, take on a trade, and become productive members of society.

  But even the women who met the basic criteria set forth in these rules would not find immediate relief. The admission process was lengthy. It could last weeks, even months, not for any reason related to the child but because it took time to determine whether the mother was worthy of the generosity of the Foundling Hospital.

  For Lena Weston, my grandmother, the process lasted eight weeks.

  IN 1931 LENA was unmarried, in her thirties, pregnant, and alone.

  As a young woman living in the interwar period following World War I, one of the deadliest conflicts in human history, she was part of a lost generation of women consigned to a solitary existence. The war had claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of British soldiers, leaving behind a grim cohort whose chance to marry would never come. Their husbands-to-be lost to the battlefield, unmarried women frequently wound up living with relatives. If the relatives were male, most typically brothers, the women would serve as housekeepers while their brothers ran the farms or worked outside the home. Entirely dependent upon their living male relatives for support, they developed few skills other than tending house. Those women who lived with their female relatives fared a bit better, such arrangements generally being more egalitarian, with the housework shared and no objections raised to the pursuit of a vocation outside of the home. In either case, however, the women were unlikely to end up with a proposal of marriage.

  Lena’s parents were deceased, and her sister, Lily, had immigrated to the United States, where she was living in the renowned Waldorf Astoria while working for the jazz composer Cole Porter. Perhaps following in Lily’s footsteps would have been feasible at some point, but by the time Lena entered her thirties, her only option was to join her brother on a farm in the county of Shropshire, a largely unpeopled land near the Welsh border, with a smattering of farms and the occasional castle. It was a landscape of vast meadows carpeted with dark purple wildflowers, of rolling hills whose wild escarpments were thick with untamed roses and rhododendrons. Most of the local inhabitants were farmers or laborers at a nearby ironworks, although there were a surprising number of landed families with knightly aristocratic roots. There were no cities to speak of, only quiet villages and hamlets. The closest escape from the Weston farm was the market town of Wellington, whose quaint shops lined a narrow lane bordered by brick-terraced houses and an old stone church.

  With only the steady rhythm of daily chores and Sunday sermons to fill the solitude of her days, Lena’s chances at finding intimacy, tenderness, and love would have been few to nonexistent. Unlike single men, who were simply “sowing wild oats” when they engaged in sex outside marriage, a woman who dared to seek companionship in the arms of a lover would be labeled promiscuous and shunned from proper society. Then there were the practical considerations—limited access to birth control, at least for women like Lena, and no legal path to abortion. The first birth control clinic in England was established in 1921 by the British women’s rights advocate Marie Stopes. Stopes was a prominent eugenicist, and her repugnant views on race left an irredeemable mark on her legacy. But her advocacy for reproductive rights was considered revolutionary, and she openly defied the church’s disapproval of birth control. Lena would not benefit from these advances, however; the clinic’s contraceptive services were available to married women only.

  Lena could have resigned herself to her fate: a life of solitude, endless days on a farm tucked away in the countryside, with only her brother to keep her company.

  But that is not what happened.

  The files that I brought home from London chronicled the sequence of events that had brought Lena to the Foundling Hospital’s doorstep. Where there were gaps, it was easy enough to imagine the subtext that went unspoken as Lena recounted her circumstances to the strangers who would determine the fate of her child. It was February 1931, and after selling eggs at the market, Lena had settled herself in for her customary cup of tea at a café near the center of Wellington. It was there that she met him. Perhaps she noticed him smiling at her from across the room, or tipping the brim of his hat to her. With only her brother to keep her company, Lena may have been unusually susceptible to the charms of a man. Or maybe that’s a bit of conjecture on my end. Maybe she knew full well what she was doing. Maybe it had happened before.

  Either way, that day in February would change the course of Lena’s life, and the lives of generations to come.

  The affair was brief, and the repercussions swift. After a bitter quarrel, Lena’s brother kicked her out, forcing her to make her way to London in search of institutional support. Single and with a child on the way, Lena had few options. A woman in her circumstances could petition for child support, but she would have to establish the father’s identity through legal proceedings. The process would take place in open court, exposing her to shame and ridicule. Society was not kind to women like Lena, considering them “fallen” and deserving of punishment, a view held even by those who advocated for women’s rights. Marie Stopes, who had campaigned for a married woman’s right to access birth control, herself condemned illegitimacy, asserting that the illegitimate child is “inherently inferior to the legitimate, through the fact that his mother has failed to maintain her self-respect and the respect of the father.”3 Maude Royden, a well-known feminist and Christian preacher, argued against providing benefits to unmarried women, which might encourage single parenting and promiscuity. Even John Bowlby, a pioneer in child psychology whose theories exalted the role of the mother in child-rearing, considered an unmarried mother to be “emotionally disturbed,” and her “socially unacceptable illegitimate baby” to be a “symptom of her neurosis.”4

  These deep-seated prejudices were memorialized in the laws of the time. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 went so far as to categorize unmarried mothers “in receipt of poor relief” as defective, grouping them in with “idiots,” “imbeciles,” and the “feeble-minded,” thus empowering government officials to institutionalize them and separate them from their children. So-called bastardy bills, designed to improve conditions for illegitimate children or allow for a path to legitimization, were frequently introduced in the House of Lords but consistently rejected. The Legitimacy Act finally passed in 1926 al
lowing unmarried parents to marry and retroactively claim their child as legitimate, but it did not apply to children who were the result of adultery. Similarly, post-1906 liberal welfare reforms ushered in a wave of progressive policies that provided a range of support services for seemingly everyone else—factory workers, the unemployed, children, the elderly and the infirm—but denied unmarried mothers maternity and unemployment benefits.

  Not until World War II, when illegitimacy rates soared, would the government adopt a more compassionate view of unmarried mothers. Those changes would come too late for Lena, who would be forced to wait out her pregnancy at the Constance Road Institution, a workhouse established in the nineteenth century to house “imbeciles and lunatics” and the “aged and infirm.” Closer to her due date, she was transferred to Dulwich Hospital, built by the Guardians of the Poor of the Parish of St. Saviour, where, on January 1, 1932, she gave birth to a healthy girl.

  Keeping the child had never been an option, not without her brother’s support.

  Within a day or two of her daughter’s birth, Lena wrote a letter that would be the first of several. The handwritten note was dispatched to an address on Brunswick Square that was already familiar to me by the time it came into my hands, some eighty-five years after she’d written it. The contents of the letter were difficult to decipher, the ink faded with time, the penmanship sometimes illegible. I brought the photocopied replica closer to my face, squinting to make out the words.

  Dear Madam,

  I am writing to ask you if you would kindly help me if you are able. Through my misfortune, I have given birth to a daughter here, and I cannot find the father, and worst I have no parents. If I was able to have someone to look after the child, I should be able to go back to work. I should be very glad if you could come and see me, if you please can find it convenient [illegible] explain to you and tell you.

  Yours faithfully,

  Lena Weston

  In reply, the secretary of the Foundling Hospital provided Lena with an application form and a copy of the Foundling Hospital’s “Rules for the Admission of Children”—the same rules that had been adopted more than a century before.

  The form contained some perfunctory questions about the child, its sex, and the date of its birth, but the remainder of the questions focused on the circumstances that had led to Lena’s pregnancy. Who is the father? What is his full name? Did you become engaged to marry him? Who introduced you to him? Does the father know of your trouble? Has he promised to provide for the child?

  In my research, I learned that the hospital’s primary purpose was to provide a home for illegitimate children who would otherwise fall through the cracks of the social order. It was understood, however, that the institution would serve a second and arguably more important purpose: that of restoring a fallen woman to her former standing. That she be prevented from becoming a prostitute, according to John Brownlow, secretary of the Foundling Hospital during the mid-1800s and a former foundling himself, was imperative. He was particularly concerned about the woman who had become the “unsuspecting victim of treachery,” and who, without the assistance of the Foundling Hospital, would become “delirious in her despair.”5 Brownlow felt compelled to help such a woman. “Preserving the mere vital functions of an infant,” he reasoned,

  cannot be put in competition with saving from vice, misery, and infamy, a young woman, in the bloom of life, whose crime may have been a single and solitary act of indiscretion. Many extraordinary cases of repentance, followed by restoration to peace, comfort, and reputation, have come within the knowledge of the writer of this note. Some cases have occurred, within his own observation, of wives happily placed, the mothers of thriving families, who, but for the saving aid of this Institution, might have become the most noxious and abandoned prostitutes. Very rare are the instances, none has come within notice, of a woman relieved by the Foundling Hospital, and not thereby preserved from a course of prostitution.6

  Helping a woman regain her dignity and virtue was a noble and essential purpose, and the rules of the institution reflected the gravity of the task. To have her child admitted to the Foundling Hospital, a mother had to prove to the satisfaction of the governors who administered the process that all requirements had been met.

  Each rule had been designed to determine whether a woman was of sufficient moral character that her reputation could be repaired, and that, if granted the great favor of being allowed to relinquish her child, she would return to her station in society. The rules on this score were unforgiving:

  No child can be admitted unless the Committee is satisfied, after due enquiry, of the previous good character and present necessity of the Mother, and that the Father of the child has deserted it and the Mother; and also, that the reception of the child, will, in all probability, be the means of replacing the Mother in the course of virtue, and the way of an honest livelihood.7

  Nor were ladies of great wealth spared the rigors of the process. Infants delivered to the hospital in fine lace bonnets or intricately embroidered gowns, with expensive toys clutched between their tiny fingers, would still have been vetted to the full extent of the rules.

  Once a child had been admitted, its mother could rest easy, knowing that the very existence of the child would be a closely guarded secret. The hospital’s clerk entered the name of the mother and the sex and age of the child in a central register, the only record of the mother’s true identity. The register, along with any other identifying tokens or documents, was placed in a billet that was to be “kept with great Secrecy and Care,” and “never to be opened but by Order of the [Hospital’s] General Committee.”8 The child would go by a new name, and in correspondence or in response to inquiries, he or she would be identified only by a letter and the date of admission. At first children were given the names of distinguished public figures to honor them, a practice that began in 1741, when the hospital’s first two charges were named after its founder, Thomas Coram, and his wife, Eunice. The naming system was abandoned when grown children began laying claims upon their namesakes, and the earls and dukes who had lent their names were forced to defend themselves against spurious claims of descent.

  On my first sort through the documents back in that small room across from the Foundling Museum, I’d noticed that Lena hadn’t named the father on her application form, instead listing him anonymously as a “commercial traveller.” When Val came back to check on us, I’d asked her curiously if he might have been a traveling salesman. My own frame of reference called up a particularly American notion of the trade—a humdrum man in a cheap suit knocking on doors, selling encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners. Maybe I could track down the identity of my grandfather by researching companies that had employed salesmen in the area. But Val gently disabused me of these notions, along with my hopes of finding out more. It was common for applicants to the Foundling Hospital to claim that the men who’d impregnated them were travelers passing through town, to hide their true identities.

  There was another clue in Lena’s statement of her case:

  My brother is my nearest relation. . . . I have written to him to ask if he could take the child and myself, but writes to say that he could not do with the child but would give me some assistance. . . . I am making this application to you asking for your help, if you would kindly take the child off my hands now that I can get work, and trust that some day I shall be in circumstances to have the child again. The tragic part—I do not know the father or much about him as I met him casually as a stranger stranger he never told me either his name or address, unfortunately only now realize my foolishness! Trusting that you can understand and help me through, this most awful fate.

  Lena’s handwritten strike through the word stranger was telling. Maybe she’d had a moment of indecision on that score because her “commercial traveller” was in fact someone she knew—not a stranger but an acquaintance, or perhaps a married lover. But her letters revealed nothing about the man’s identity.

  The file wa
s a jumble of loose papers in no particular order when I received it, and on my return from London I spent the better part of two weeks combing through its contents and carefully cataloging the documents. Years of work as a public interest attorney preparing for trial without the help of teams of paralegals had honed my organizational skills. Approaching the task as I would any legal case, I had painstakingly organized the documents using color-coded tabs. Chronologically, the next letter was a typed response from the Foundling Hospital back to Lena, dated January 7, 1932:

  Dear Madam,

  I am in receipt of your application form, but regret to inform you that your case cannot be entertained unless you are able to furnish me with the name of the man you allege to be the father of your child, the address where he lived or worked when you knew him and some corroboration to your story.

  Yours faithfully,

  Secretary

  As I read the typewritten letter, with its detached tone and seeming indifference to the plight of a distressed mother, I imagined Lena in her bed at Dulwich Hospital, possibly alone and almost definitely fearful. Perhaps she was clutching the child who would one day be my mother as she read this discouraging response. But the following letter in my chronologically organized folder gave me a hint of Lena’s character. Just three days later, she tried again: