A mother's love & the land of lost children
On first hearing, the story of Philomena Lee seems too shocking to be credible. And yet Philomena, a soon-to-be-released film starring Dame Judi Dench, which was awarded rave reviews at the recent Venice Film Festival, is a portrayal of harsh, unjust and absolutely heartbreaking reality.
The true-life story behind the film begins in autumn 1951, when 18-year-old Philomena Lee met a young man at Limerick Carnival in Ireland. He bought her a toffee apple and the convent schoolgirl was introduced to a hitherto unknown aspect of adult life.
‘He… he was handsome,’ she revealed to journalist Martin Sixsmith, who tells her tragic story in his remarkable book, The Lost Child Of Philomena Lee. ‘And he was nice to me… Nobody ever told us about babies. The sisters never told us anything…’
She fell pregnant and when it became obvious, she was shipped straight off to a convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary. Philomena was just one of thousands of unmarried mothers sent to convents in the 1950s and 1960s, shunned by families whose Roman Catholic upbringing had taught them that single mothers were moral degenerates. Philomena was sworn to silence by the nuns, who told her that she would be sentenced to eternal damnation if ever she revealed her ‘guilty secret’.
The reasons for forcing this silence were not exclusively religious, however. Evidence has since emerged that the Irish Government, bowing to the authority of the powerful Catholic Church and the Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, paid the church £1 per week for each woman in its care. What’s more, if a woman’s family could not afford to pay £100 to release their daughter following the birth of her child (and the majority, of course, could not afford such a hefty bail), she would then be kept on at the convent for three years and expected to provide free labour.
What is even more cruel is that the woman would remain with her child for this period, forming maternal ties that would soon be mercilessly severed. For Philomena, like all the women in her situation, was forced to sign an oath, which read:
'I relinquish full claim for ever to my child and surrender him to Sister Barbara, Superioress of Sean Ross Abbey. The purpose is to enable Sister Barbara to make my child available for adoption to any person she considers fit and proper, inside or outside the state. I further undertake never to attempt to see, interfere with or make any claim to the said child at any future time.’
Philomena gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Anthony Lee, on 5 July 1952, and in the winter of 1955, he was taken from her.
‘None of us wanted to give our babies up, none of us. But what else could we do? All my life I have never forgotten him,’ she revealed. Her last memory of Anthony was seeing him clutching his favourite tin aeroplane, peering through the rear windscreen of a black car as it pulled away.
What followed were decades of silence and suffering. Although Philomena married in 1959 and went on to have two more children, she never stopped yearning for the son she had been forced to give up.
‘All my life I couldn’t tell anyone. We were so browbeaten, it was an awful thing to have a baby out of wedlock… It was so ingrained deep down in my heart that I mustn’t tell anyone.’
She returned to Roscrea numerous times during the next 30 years, begging the nuns to give her some information, but they resolutely refused. However, it wasn’t until Christmas 2004, with her sorrow released by several glasses of sherry, that Philomena broke down and revealed the truth to her daughter Jane.
Horrified by her mother’s ordeal, Jane enlisted the help of journalist Martin Sixsmith in a bid to track down her half brother. Sixsmith had very little to go on – not least because the Church’s incriminating paperwork from the period had mysteriously disappeared – and yet the more he investigated, the more it became apparent that the Church’s practices between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s had been tantamount to an illicit baby trade.
The Church considered the children in its care to be its property and would simply sell them to the highest bidder. Couples would pay a donation to the Church (which was essentially a fee) and receive a child. Archbishop McQuaid’s dictates did not stipulate that these couples’ suitability had to be checked; the only requirement was that they were Catholics.
The only lead that Sixsmith had was that Philomena’s child had been taken to the US. The circumstances of Anthony’s adoption, which Sixsmith was to discover when he uncovered one woman’s diary entries, were especially unpredictable.
The diarist was American, Marge Hess, who had flown to Ireland in search of a child. She already had three sons with her husband, Doc, but they keenly wanted a daughter. She was offered a three-year-old girl from Roscrea convent by the name of Mary McDonald; but when she went to pick her up, little Anthony Lee came running up to give her a kiss. Bowled over by this show of affection, Marge adopted both children and took them back to St Louis, Missouri.
Philomena today
Anthony Lee became Michael Hess, and grew up to be a successful lawyer. He was also a key player in the Republican National Committee, and George Bush Sr, on becoming president, made Michael his chief legal counsel. But despite his outward success, Michael was a deeply troubled individual. He was a gay man in a homophobic environment, and went to great pains to keep his sexuality hidden. His feeling of not fitting in was compounded by his orphan’s sense of displacement, brought on by fragmented memories of his first three years. He journeyed to Ireland in an attempt to find his mother but, just as with Philomena, the nuns turned him away. Michael’s torment drove him to an existence marked by drink, drugs and sexual abandon, which eventually led him to contract HIV. With his health rapidly deteriorating, he made a final visit to Ireland and pleaded with the mother superior of Roscrea convent to let him be buried there, just in case his mother returned to look for him.
Despite a lifetime of desperate searching on both sides, Philomena and her son were never reunited. Michael passed away in 1995. Philomena, now 80 years old, visits the grave of her son, but will never escape the despair of her loss: ‘It is the biggest regret of my life and I have to bear that,’ she revealed to Sixsmith, who went on to write his book, which inspired the film.
Early reviews of Dame Judi’s performance as Philomena are glowing, and, if nothing else, the film will raise awareness of the thousands of mothers and children whose lives have been similarly blighted by separation. Says Philomena: ‘I’m sure there are lots of women to this very day – they’re the same as me; they haven’t said anything… Oh Lord, it makes my heart ache.’
The Lost Child Of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith is published by Macmillan, priced £8.99.
Philomena, starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, is on general release from 1 November.
The true-life story behind the film begins in autumn 1951, when 18-year-old Philomena Lee met a young man at Limerick Carnival in Ireland. He bought her a toffee apple and the convent schoolgirl was introduced to a hitherto unknown aspect of adult life.
‘He… he was handsome,’ she revealed to journalist Martin Sixsmith, who tells her tragic story in his remarkable book, The Lost Child Of Philomena Lee. ‘And he was nice to me… Nobody ever told us about babies. The sisters never told us anything…’
She fell pregnant and when it became obvious, she was shipped straight off to a convent at Roscrea in County Tipperary. Philomena was just one of thousands of unmarried mothers sent to convents in the 1950s and 1960s, shunned by families whose Roman Catholic upbringing had taught them that single mothers were moral degenerates. Philomena was sworn to silence by the nuns, who told her that she would be sentenced to eternal damnation if ever she revealed her ‘guilty secret’.
The reasons for forcing this silence were not exclusively religious, however. Evidence has since emerged that the Irish Government, bowing to the authority of the powerful Catholic Church and the Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, paid the church £1 per week for each woman in its care. What’s more, if a woman’s family could not afford to pay £100 to release their daughter following the birth of her child (and the majority, of course, could not afford such a hefty bail), she would then be kept on at the convent for three years and expected to provide free labour.
What is even more cruel is that the woman would remain with her child for this period, forming maternal ties that would soon be mercilessly severed. For Philomena, like all the women in her situation, was forced to sign an oath, which read:
'I relinquish full claim for ever to my child and surrender him to Sister Barbara, Superioress of Sean Ross Abbey. The purpose is to enable Sister Barbara to make my child available for adoption to any person she considers fit and proper, inside or outside the state. I further undertake never to attempt to see, interfere with or make any claim to the said child at any future time.’
Philomena gave birth to a healthy baby boy, Anthony Lee, on 5 July 1952, and in the winter of 1955, he was taken from her.
‘None of us wanted to give our babies up, none of us. But what else could we do? All my life I have never forgotten him,’ she revealed. Her last memory of Anthony was seeing him clutching his favourite tin aeroplane, peering through the rear windscreen of a black car as it pulled away.
What followed were decades of silence and suffering. Although Philomena married in 1959 and went on to have two more children, she never stopped yearning for the son she had been forced to give up.
‘All my life I couldn’t tell anyone. We were so browbeaten, it was an awful thing to have a baby out of wedlock… It was so ingrained deep down in my heart that I mustn’t tell anyone.’
She returned to Roscrea numerous times during the next 30 years, begging the nuns to give her some information, but they resolutely refused. However, it wasn’t until Christmas 2004, with her sorrow released by several glasses of sherry, that Philomena broke down and revealed the truth to her daughter Jane.
Horrified by her mother’s ordeal, Jane enlisted the help of journalist Martin Sixsmith in a bid to track down her half brother. Sixsmith had very little to go on – not least because the Church’s incriminating paperwork from the period had mysteriously disappeared – and yet the more he investigated, the more it became apparent that the Church’s practices between the end of the Second World War and the early 1970s had been tantamount to an illicit baby trade.
The Church considered the children in its care to be its property and would simply sell them to the highest bidder. Couples would pay a donation to the Church (which was essentially a fee) and receive a child. Archbishop McQuaid’s dictates did not stipulate that these couples’ suitability had to be checked; the only requirement was that they were Catholics.
The only lead that Sixsmith had was that Philomena’s child had been taken to the US. The circumstances of Anthony’s adoption, which Sixsmith was to discover when he uncovered one woman’s diary entries, were especially unpredictable.
The diarist was American, Marge Hess, who had flown to Ireland in search of a child. She already had three sons with her husband, Doc, but they keenly wanted a daughter. She was offered a three-year-old girl from Roscrea convent by the name of Mary McDonald; but when she went to pick her up, little Anthony Lee came running up to give her a kiss. Bowled over by this show of affection, Marge adopted both children and took them back to St Louis, Missouri.
Philomena todayAnthony Lee became Michael Hess, and grew up to be a successful lawyer. He was also a key player in the Republican National Committee, and George Bush Sr, on becoming president, made Michael his chief legal counsel. But despite his outward success, Michael was a deeply troubled individual. He was a gay man in a homophobic environment, and went to great pains to keep his sexuality hidden. His feeling of not fitting in was compounded by his orphan’s sense of displacement, brought on by fragmented memories of his first three years. He journeyed to Ireland in an attempt to find his mother but, just as with Philomena, the nuns turned him away. Michael’s torment drove him to an existence marked by drink, drugs and sexual abandon, which eventually led him to contract HIV. With his health rapidly deteriorating, he made a final visit to Ireland and pleaded with the mother superior of Roscrea convent to let him be buried there, just in case his mother returned to look for him.
Despite a lifetime of desperate searching on both sides, Philomena and her son were never reunited. Michael passed away in 1995. Philomena, now 80 years old, visits the grave of her son, but will never escape the despair of her loss: ‘It is the biggest regret of my life and I have to bear that,’ she revealed to Sixsmith, who went on to write his book, which inspired the film.
Early reviews of Dame Judi’s performance as Philomena are glowing, and, if nothing else, the film will raise awareness of the thousands of mothers and children whose lives have been similarly blighted by separation. Says Philomena: ‘I’m sure there are lots of women to this very day – they’re the same as me; they haven’t said anything… Oh Lord, it makes my heart ache.’
The Lost Child Of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith is published by Macmillan, priced £8.99.
Philomena, starring Dame Judi Dench and Steve Coogan as Martin Sixsmith, is on general release from 1 November.