THE programme Long Lost Family: The mother and baby home scandal (ITV1, Wednesday and Thursday) is a two-part special of the series that seeks to reunite birth-family members separated by adoption. Assisted by a team of experts, including researchers and social workers, the hosts, Nicky Campbell and Davina McCall, uncover the mostly forgotten injustice of an estimated 200,000 young women and girls forced into mother and baby institutions between the 1940s and 1970s.
The picture that it paints is that numerous religious groups, including the Church of England, operated draconian and punitive institutions, in which babies were forcibly adopted, often without the consent of their mothers. The picture presented is bleak: the moral shaming of girls who in many cases were legally children; babies segregated according to race and disability; adoption practices that amounted to working-class social engineering. Substandard, negligent maternity care, which led to higher-than-average infant mortality rates, and, in some areas, babies being buried in mass, unmarked graves.
That there are happy endings relieves the unrelenting sadness of the programme, such as the story of Jean, finally reunited with the daughter whom she was forced to give up 68 years ago. “Now I know why I’ve lived so long,” she says. For her daughter, Cathy, meeting her birth mother and her new extended family helps to provide an answer to that most profound and universal question, one that is especially poignant for the adopted: Who am I?
The quest for knowledge about one’s origins has proved especially difficult for people born into these institutions, because there has been no legal obligation to hand their records over. Those adopted have also found that their documents have disappeared on an astonishing scale, owing to a disproportionate number of natural disasters befalling the homes. It is hard not to regard this as church collusion, not for the first time, in cover-up and institutional obfuscation.
The Church of England, the Methodist Church, the Baptist Union, and the Roman Catholic Church have all issued statements that contain apologies. The Government, which is also implicated in the scandal, owing to evidence that it funded some of the homes, has yet to do the same.
On a lighter note, the ultimate in twee telly: a new series of soggy bottoms and sabotage, in The Great British Bake Off (Channel 4, Tuesdays). The first challenge was a Swiss roll, which, Prue Leith suggested, was “very hard to achieve”. As ever, when I am watching any kind of reality-TV challenge, I am absurdly confident about my own abilities: “I could do it blindfolded!” This is possibly what one contestant did, the unfortunate Hassan, who neglected to add flour, eventually creating a sloppy mess, which he gamely tried to roll, regardless. Under-baked or over-baked, it’s all a bit samey, but autumn television wouldn’t feel complete without it.