Phone Box Babies TV review: Revelations galore in shocking story of abandoned siblings

Irish Independent

2 days ago

It was the common sense and gentleness of the three babies concerned – now in their 50s and 60s – that managed to pull the audience through.
Also, Phone Box Babies is an RTÉ programme built on other programmes. First of all, the British programme Long Lost Family, hosted by Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell. We have all sobbed our way through Long Lost Family at one time or another, but never, probably, was the long-lost family so large. Here were three siblings who ended up looking for each other as well as looking for their parents.
Long Lost Family has an off-shoot, Born Without Trace – surely the saddest title of all time – which concerns itself with babies who were physically abandoned by their parents. In a previous episode of Born Without Trace, it seemed that a significant proportion of the babies abandoned in the UK in the 1960s had been born to Irish parents.
But David, John and Helen were not abandoned in Britain, they were abandoned in Belfast, Drogheda and Dundalk. In tartan shopping bags. On cold nights. They were carefully dressed and in good health and only a couple of days old.
And all three were found by decent people. In January 1962, David had been found by a doctor's wife on the outskirts of Belfast after he had been left in her car outside her house. She discovered him when she went out to the car to bring in her shopping.
In March 1968, Helen was found by a lorry driver, Donal Boyle, in a phone box in Dundalk. Donal was coming down from Belfast and he stopped in Dundalk on a very cold night for something to eat, and then remembered that he had to phone his landlady to ask her to leave a key out for him. As he went into the phone box, someone was leaving it, and that person got into a waiting car.
It was John's daughter Donna who saw David and Helen on Long Lost Family and saw that 'David's hands were identical to my father's. I thought John's the middle child here. And he was'
It was fascinating to see how emotional the finders of these babies – random strangers, after all – were about the children they had stumbled upon. Helen was reunited with Donal Boyle through Joe Duffy's Liveline, and in 2013 they met. Donal described it as one of the highlights, if not the highlight, of his life.
In May 1965, Paul Murphy, a young reporter with the Evening Press, had found John in a phone box in Drogheda. Paul went to visit the baby in hospital – and also to write a piece about it for the Evening Press, which was accompanied by a great photograph. After that, Paul said sadly, the baby disappeared. He never knew what had happened to him.
'Then, in 2013, the baby turned up,' he said. Paul had been thinking about John over the years: 'Like a father, like a brother.' When they met they embraced.
All three babies were adopted into loving families and each one was told that they had been adopted. 'I actually think that she made the right decision,' says David of his mother.
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'They would have called me a bastard,' says John in a separate interview; and who can say that he's mistaken in that?
It was quite chilling to see the siblings' adult relief at having escaped the Magdalene homes. It was David and Helen who were united by the Long Lost Family team – John was a later addition, only joining them when his daughter Donna, who had emigrated to Australia, saw David and Helen on Long Lost Family and saw that 'David's hands were identical to my father's…. I thought, 'John is the middle child here. And he was'.'
Meanwhile, Davina McCall was telling David and Helen who their biological parents were. Billy Watson, a Protestant living in Dublin. And Marcella Somers, a Catholic from Kerry, who worked then in Dublin. But that wasn't the problem. The problem was that Billy was married – and had 14 children.
Talk about a bombshell.
One of Billy's nine surviving children from his marriage, William Watson, was happy to meet them. What a lovely man William turned out to be. His wife Breege looked supportive without saying a word – I sometimes think that wives and husbands aren't given enough credit as these explosive family stories detonate into their lives.
Anyway, William explained that their father, Billy, had a band that played in Clerys, as well as around the country. He left the domestic duties to his wife.
Marcella emerged as a dynamic woman, who was a great friend of the much more conservative Rosie Doherty, the mother of the snooker champion Ken Doherty. Ken remembered Marcella well, from the time she had lived in retirement accommodation in his home place of Ranelagh, Dublin. Marcella was musical, and played the accordion.
In old age, Marcella had a doll, which she kept in her room and which she dressed carefully.
Marcella died in Kerry in 2017, before her newly discovered children could reach her. David, John and Helen laid flowers on her grave.
They don't think that they are the only children of Billy and Marcella to have been abandoned. There is talk of a fourth child, found in a phone box in Newry in 1963.