Peter Arundel and Elsie in Long Lost Family (UK), Season 2 Episode 3. Supplied image matches the PBS episode photo.
At 58, Peter Arundel walked back into the Lincoln building where he was born. It had been a mother and baby home then. His birth mother, Elsie, had spent the last weeks of her pregnancy there and had not been back since giving him up. On this visit, she was the one waiting for him.
Peter and Elsie’s reunion closes the third episode of Long Lost Family’s second UK series, which aired on ITV1 on April 26, 2012. The episode also follows Maureen Saville, a Liverpool grandmother who had spent years trying to find the mother who left when she was a toddler. The two searches turn on the same practical problem. How do you find somebody whose name has changed?
The cricket trial that made Peter ask where he was born
Les and Ada Arundel adopted Peter as a baby and raised him in Lofthouse Gate, West Yorkshire. He knew he was adopted from an early age. Where he was born became important in his teens, when Yorkshire County Cricket Club invited him to try out. The club’s eligibility rules at the time required players to have been born in Yorkshire. Peter had been born in Lincolnshire.
He waited until both his adoptive parents had died before actively looking for his birth mother. His adoption order gave him a starting point. She was listed as Elsie Bourne, formerly Phillips. Peter expected that the paperwork would lead him to the rest of his adoption file. He spent about 20 years searching without finding her.
Another surname led the team to Elsie
The programme’s researchers looked beyond the adoption records. A relative of the Bourne family in South Africa told them that Elsie’s husband had died and that she had remarried. Back in the marriage records, the team found an Elsie Bourne who had married a man named Brockbank. The details lined up, and the woman they contacted in Lincolnshire confirmed that she was Peter’s mother.
Elsie told Nicky Campbell that she had been 17 when she became pregnant. She recalled going to the mother and baby home in Lincoln under pressure from her family. When Nicky showed her a recent photo of Peter, she recognised her own father in his face. Later, Davina McCall showed Peter a photograph of Elsie. He went straight to the resemblance too, pointing out that they had the same nose.
Maureen got to see her mother’s face
Maureen Saville had grown up with her father, John, after her mother, Monica, left when she was 17 months old. She remembered her father once remarking on how much she looked like Monica. For years that comment had to stand in for a photograph. Maureen had never seen one.
She traced two of Monica’s later marriages and looked for a death record under the surname Rowland. The team found a fourth marriage, in 1993, and searched again. Under the surname Coleman, the records showed that Monica had died in 1995.
There was another discovery in the records. Monica had two children from her second marriage, Mike and Susan, who lived near each other in Somerset. They had also grown up apart from their mother after she left them when they were young. When Davina told Maureen that Monica had died, she brought a photograph that Mike had shared. Maureen finally got to look at the face she had spent years imagining. She later sat down with Mike and Susan, who could tell her what they remembered and understood why she had wanted to know.
Back to the place where they parted
Peter and Elsie chose to meet at the former home in Lincoln. While she waited, Elsie remembered how the mothers used to line up the prams on the lawn to catch the sun. Peter arrived with Davina, then went to meet Elsie on his own. They hugged. It had been nearly six decades since either of them had last been in that building with the other.
Peter had an adoption order and Maureen had a trail of marriage records. Both spent years following the names on those documents. In the episode’s most personal moments, a photograph gives each of them something the records never could. They can finally see where a familiar face comes from.
Sources
- PBS episode and transcript
- Genes Reunited’s original ITV1 series listings
- The Yorkshire Post’s 2012 interview with Peter and Elsie
