Almost 70 mass unmarked child graves discovered by ITV News investigation into mother and baby homes

[IwantToRetire]

Nearly 70 babies are buried in mass unmarked graves after dying in a Salvation Army-run institution for unmarried mothers in Newcastle, an ITV News investigation has discovered.

Hopedene Maternity Home operated between 1950 and 1973 in the Elswick area of the city and has been described by families affected as a "place of cruelty" and "like a prison".

Between 1949 and the mid-1970s, thousands of unmarried women were sent to state and religious institutions across Britain - where infants were taken from their mothers for adoption simply because they were born outside of wedlock.

Others died through poor care. Our year-long investigation into this scandal has already exposed allegations that sick or premature children were left to die as they weren’t deemed "desirable" for adoption.

Last year, we revealed nearly 200 infants who died at eight mother and baby homes are buried in mass plots in ten different cemeteries across England.

https://www.itv.com/news/2025-08-21/itv-news-investigation-discovers-almost-70-mass-unmarked-baby-graves

I’m grateful to ITV for asking these questions. In England anyway I had no idea of the abuse and poor practice being on the same lines as the Irish scandal homes. But that was naïve, of course it was an attitude that was here too and the same religious groups were running mother and baby homes here too. There were laundries here too where you had to work right up to the birth. Babies were removed without consent, women were told if they didn’t give their baby up for adoption they’d be arrested.

The shocking thing is that it could have been different but the misogynistic patriarchy and religious power ran too deep- post war the government deliberately excluded these mother and baby homes from the new NHS instead leaving them to be run by church charities who didn’t adhere to modern standards of the day.

This would have pervaded all aspects of care and so essentially women were having home births at these places without the medical support of the day. Plus they were given as much shame as the homes could inculcate into them. The government made sure there wasn’t a welfare state to help these women live independently with their babies.

And the adoption records weren’t kept by the charities running them, they weren’t kept properly or were destroyed and what survives wont be digitised because too expensive to do. And ITV shows only so far shows people who had happy adoptions. Actually the standard of being allowed to take a baby was so low, just being married and Christian, so lots of unhappy abusive adoptions happened too. Thank god times are different in some ways now, it’s awful looking back and the effects of this punishment of girls and women and their babies go on for generations.
this blog asks good questions https://corambaaf.org.uk/real-apology-mistakes-past-must-include-action-make-sure-situation-has-really-changed-writes-ellen

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/09/forced-adoptions-time-running-out-for-uk-to-apologise

Other things to remember many families the grandparents took care of babies, raising them as their own child, and as a sibling of the young mother.

This is also why if doing family trees have an open mind about babies apparently born to 40 something parents.

The Salvation Army’s focus was the salvation of your soul. Food etc was secondary to that which was most important - your soul. Their compassionate focus being that you didn’t suffer eternal damnation.

It is easy to criticise these organisations at the time against modern values but there wasn’t a welfare state. The state’s alternative at the time was Workhouses which though abolished in 1930 carried on under different names until the 1948 introduction of the welfare state. I imagine the Salvation Army’s offer was considerably better than entering a workhouse.

The treatment of the mothers was shocking even given the "standards of the time". Sending children away (many whom had parents capable of looking after them) has been deemed unacceptable and led to an official apology.
There should have been more of a investigation into the institutions. As usual it's a mix between government and Christian organisations. If alive those accountable should be prosecuted if found to have broken the law. The trauma suffered is still affecting people today.

I disagree to some extent. Yes there was no state provisions prior to 1948. But the treatment of unwed mothers was about shaming women and their children. Keeping them in their place.
The Salvation Army made money from the homes. The people workkng it in where often sadists and had an opportunity to be cruel. They used their "good work" as propaganda to promote Chrisitanity and used religion to induce fear and shame.
The sending of children to the colonies was basically slave labour and increasing the number of whites in those countries.
Abhorrent.

I think one thing we don't appreciate is how long that 'shame' lasted.

I remember reading about the author Bernard Cornwell. He traced his birth mother. When they met she said she had known who he had grown up to be because he used her surname and she had seen his picture on books, apparently he looks/looked very much like his father.

His birth mother did not get in touch because she didn't want him to think she was after something.

Cn you imagine knowing who your child is as an adult and being hesitant to contact them?

Cn you imagine knowing who your child is as an adult and being hesitant to contact them?

I could not imagine NOT being hesitant to get in touch.

My father was in one of these “homes” in England as an infant, run by the Sisters of Nazareth not the Salvation Army. He was apparently in a very poor health condition at 3 months old (described as filthy and starving in a family letter). I applied to Sisters of Nazareth for any records pertaining to him but they say they have nothing to suggest he was even there. It appears to have been a traumatising experience for both his and his mother - though she wasn’t in the home, but eventually rejoined her family after giving birth elsewhere.

There is a book called The Orphanage by Frances Reilly about the physical and sexual abuse that occurred at the Nazareth House Convent in Belfast run by the Sisters of Nazareth.

It's tragic to find out about new examples like this of how women and children were/are treated in patriarchal societies, but perhaps revelations like this will cause people to re-think that it was only the nasty Irish and only the evil Catholics - e.g. the misleading '800 babies dumped in a septic tank' line that went around the world - who did things like this.

Totally agree. This was and still is- because of the effects down the generations- also an English problem.

We had all the same misogyny, racism, ableism going on and the same blame and shame approach to girls and women pregnant outside marriage from all branches of the church here.

It’s heartbreaking how these women and their babies were othered and then neglected or harmed in such recent times. People close to me have been affected by this too, so it feels very close to home.

There's a building in a town near me, now a hotel but built as a 'Ragged' school. If you look round Manchester, Salford, and probably most cities/towns that grew during Victorian times, and look up you'll see the names of former institutions. For the blind, the deaf, the destitute, mentally ill. Now repurposed or derelict. I'm sure some of them were wonderful places, refuges, but I bet others were absolute horror shows or they'd swing between depending on who was in charge. I don't know how long they stayed open but I suspect some were still going well into the 20th century.

Isn't there a foundling museum in London? All the little trinkets, buttons, ribbons that the mothers left with their babies. All they could spare, to let them know they were loved, hoping they could be reunited.

ITV have barely scratched the surface.

Cary Grant's mum was placed in an institute by his father. I think he was told she was dead? He got her out when he found out. Iirc he says he found a woman who was institutionalised but sane.

Lots of the time it wasn't just about 'shaming' it was about hiding the birth, having the child adopted.
Then in theory allowing the young mother to put the child behind her and get on with her life. Like nothing had happened.

My mum remembers a couple of girls / young women suddenly disappearing 'shes gone to her Aunts for a bit'
With the benefit of hindsight shes fairly sure they were actually packed of to Mother and baby homes to have babies in secret 🙊

This is what happened to my grandmother and father. There was certainly a lot of “shame” involved though - neither had a happy, normal life afterwards.

Isn't there a foundling museum in London? All the little trinkets, buttons, ribbons that the mothers left with their babies. All they could spare, to let them know they were loved, hoping they could be reunited.

Foundling hospitals had a death rate of about 50% of babies placed in their care - a huge improvement on the almost 100% death rate that the alternative arrangements offered.

Homepage - Foundling Museum

In societies which rejected 'fallen women', the streets and poverty and death were the likely future for them and their babies. It's hard to imagine it now, but originally the Magdalene Laundries were set up in the 18th century as 'refuges' for prostitutes who would otherwise probably have died in the gutter.
And the Mother and Baby homes were set up as more healthier and more humane alternatives to the awful workhouses.

The road to hell was paved with something resembling good intentions...

And the workhouses were set up themselves as a way to support the indigent.

Even when you consider how dreadful the workhouses were, people chose to enter them. They weren’t prisons where you were sent. It just shows how awful the alternative options were.

Thats it exactly workhouses and poor houses were there to support people on hard times.

Same with the big orphanages, Barnardos and Quarriers without them kids were on the streets. Im sure there were probably others too.

Have any of you heard/remember the song, "My Old Dutch"?

It has the lines:

We've been together now for forty years,
An' it don't seem a day too much,

It is actually written about the work house, an elderly couple are bout to enter the work house and they will be segregated by sex, so they will never see each other again.

I suspect that a % of these young mothers were abused in their homes by close relatives, leading to congenital problems in the babies. Best to allow sick babies to meet their fate and dispose of the evidence of abuse. 😩. The truth will eventually come out.

It makes me realise how unusual my own family was. My aunt got pregnant at the age of 16 in the 1940s - the father was a married man in his late 30s.

My grandparents stuck by my aunt, placing the blame on the married man who'd seduced a teenager. They helped raise my cousin, so my aunt could work and save money. She ended up marrying a lovely man who accepted my cousin as his own, had another couple of kids, and they were utterly devoted to each other until their deaths.

I feel so sorry for the women and girls who were rejected by their families and society in general, and forced into homes where they (and their children) were treated as less than human.

Thought I would add this here rather than start a new thread.

How many decades too late is this?

Church of England to apologise for role in historical forced adoption
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2e4eqqq7lo

The families of these young women also had a part too play. They all seemed to believe it was 'for the best'.

Yet other families absorbed the babies into the family (grandchildren raised by the girls parents)