Relative Strangers: A history of adoption and a tale of triplets - Softcover

Davies, Hunter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0316860581 ISBN 13: 9780316860581

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group, 2003

Synopsis

Relative Strangers is a history of adoption in Britain, and the true-life tale of the seventy-one-year-old Hodder triplets. The book tells the unique and moving story of how the triplets, adopted as babies in 1932, were reunited in June 2001 - the first time the three of them had been together since their birth. Their life stories and how they found each other again are interspersed with the story of adoption, which began as a legal phenomenon in the UK in 1926. The book also describes the twenty-five-year legal battle fought by NORCAP (the National Organisation for the Counselling of Children and Parents) to change the adoption laws, which helped to bring the triplets, and other adoptees, together again. Hunter Davies is one of Britain's most sympathetic and thoughtful interviewers, and the author of over thirty books. He has interviewed the triplets at length and has had access through NORCAP to other case histories, which are themselves profoundly affecting

About this title

About the Author

Hunter Davies has written three modern classics - A Walk Around the Lakes, The Glory Game and the authorised biography of The Beatles. A former editor of the Sunday Times Magazine, he is one of Britain's great newspaper interviewers.

From the Inside Flap

At 7.45 on May 18, 1932, Kate Hodder gave birth to a baby girl at Birchfield House Infirmary near Sevenoaks in Kent. Three and a half hours later, a baby boy was born. And then, forty minutes on, a second girl was delivered.

But the joy at the birth of triplets - a very rare event in the 1930s - was to prove short-lived. Kate died the following day. Her husband Wills was soon struggling to cope with their six previous children, so the decision was made to offer the triplets up for adoption. It was a separation that was to last for many years until remarkably, aged sixty-nine, the three triplets - Helena, David and Gill - were reunited.

The Tale of the Triplets is their astonishing story. It charts their three different upbringings, and the struggles and detective work that brought them back together together - a search that ended up in London's High Court. It offers a compelling account of their reunion - of what it is like to meet a sibling after almost seventy years apart.

But as well as this extraordinary personal story, The Tale of the Triplets is also a book about adoption. For the first time, Hunter Davies chronicles the history of this most personal of subjects: the crusading work of Thomas Barnardo; the changing attitudes and laws of the twentieth century; and pioneering groups such as NORCAP today; culminating in the new Adoption Bill of 2002.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316860581
• ISBN 13: 9780316860581
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240