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

Good point.

And in a way it wasn't just a family issue. It depended also on the community where you lived, or if the family was part of a religious group.

So sad for the women.

And also sad for the babies, those that survived. Many ending up as cheap labour for christian groups in Canada, Australia and South Africa.

This sort of thing seems to have gone on everywhere. I was just reading something today about a home for the non-violent insane in Canada that operated in the mid 20th century and apparently it was a similar thing. Just unmarked graves in the back.

An update from the excavations at Tuam: so far the remains of 69 babies have been found, in a burial ground, not a cess pit.
They were buried in white coffins.

Article

Tuam: Ongoing excavation uncovers remains of another 36 children - BBC News https://share.google/unLDSv4AdkJ79g4EP

What's interesting to me that there's damage to some of the coffins consistent with having been hit by a digger, not during this excavation but at some point since the late 1970s, and that the hole was then filled in again with building rubble and gravel. It looks as if someone was planning to develop that site for housing or whatever, hit the coffins, went 'Oh, shit' and covered them over again, apparently without telling anyone.

It's a good metaphor for the open secret nature of all Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes, in the UK as well as Ireland. It's not that people didn't know.

This was chilling

It added that in a small number of cases "two or three individuals were buried in the same coffin".

The implication that several babies died so closely together it was convenient to bury them together.

That could also be multiple births. Even today often multiple births (twins, very occasionally triplets) need special care post birth.
Lots of them just wouldn't survive.

Thanks for the updates on the recovery work at Tuam.

And knowing coffins were used make it less grim than it had seemed.

But if they were formal burials why isn't or wasn't the area marked as a cemetary. Or was it an informal burial ground?

There is a council housing development behind the Home graveyard - ex workhouse property was often used for public housing since the sites were already in public ownership.

I suspect the workmen preparing the ground for housing did the damage, saw what had happened, said oops, and looked for somewhere to conceal the evidence, and that is why some disarticulated bones ended up in the former sewage tanks.

At least the little skeletons in the coffins might be well preserved enough to enable comparison with the DNA sample relatives have given.

The historian in this town who studied the paperwork around the Great Hunger calculated that the graveyard behind our current hospital (the other common use for former workhouses) contained between 4,000 and 5,000 bodies, men, women, children who died in the 1840s. No grave markers.

It was marked 'burial ground' on the maps. My guess would be some local engineer found that inconvenient in the 1960s and ignored it.

The poor don't matter. We try to pretend now that they do, but it's hard to believe most of the time.

The Church has a great deal to answer for - mealy-mouthed apologies do not cut it. There must be accountability for the cruelty, sexism and above all allowing children to die. These things were evil.😨

That’s possible, I suppose, but surely workmen wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of disposing of coffins, if present, before getting rid of the bones inside in the sewage tank area? I was assuming they’d only seen and reburied the coffined bones.

I have a friend who worked on the initial excavation and gave evidence at the commission, and she doesn’t think there’s a realistic hope of obtaining much usable DNA from the ‘main’ burial, certainly not of being able to reliably produce sets of remains of individuals. Bones too small and decayed. Very delicate also in that some relatives want to bury the remains in their family plots while others think they shouldn’t be disturbed, and that the plot should be consecrated.

I think it was also a British Army barracks for a time and there were burials associated with it too.

As has been pointed out, the area is marked as 'burial ground' on maps, so it wasn't a secret, and the reason we know that 796 babies were buried there, over the years between 1925 and 1961 - mostly in the years before the introduction of antibiotics - is that the deaths were all officially recorded.

The unadorned truth is awful enough.

Gosh this thread popped up after I heard a podcast about a novelist who wove the Korean adoption scandal into her book. The State were the agents of child removal at a huge rate - 200,000 babies sent overseas for adoption. Children went missing off the streets as well as the illegitimate ones. “Mass export for profit”. Horrendous

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0mr9ppn33po

I'm confused now.

It has been a huge story for years about Tuam, and it is only down the the tireless work of one woman that the deaths and the names of some of these babies are now know. See https://odait.ie/who-we-are/background/

Perhaps the discussion about Tuam could go on the thread about that, particularly if there is an up date on that. See https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5357404-preparatory-work-begins-ahead-of-tuam-mother-and-baby-home-mass-grave-excavation-in-co-galway

(This thread was about what seemed like very similar situation in Newcastle)

Or if continuing on this one maybe indicate if the info being shared is about Tuam, Newcastle or even sadly somewhere else.

I've added some links about Catherine Coreless to the Tuam thread.