On Finding - and Losing - Fathers
Today the man I have believed was my birth father for most of my life would have turned 100. Last weekend we celebrated my mother’s 80th birthday, so yes - there was a substantial age gap there, and the two of them were never really an item.
However, he has had a huge impact on the trajectory of my life, and I feel like he deserves some recognition. Also, there is literally no one else who will probably do it. More about that later.
John Alan St.John Broderick was born in Paris, France on July 2nd 1924, just a few minutes past midnight. He was the first - and only - child of Albert Alan Thomas Houghton Broderick, and the Honorable Hester Winifred Astley, youngest daughter of the late Sir George Manners Astley, the 20th Lord Hastings.
John’s parents lived in France for a time. Albert and Hester are listed in French census records as ‘Sans Profession’ - but Albert was in fact a writer, translator and diplomat - and later in life an anthropologist.
Piecing together John’s life, and his family’s, has been quite a challenge, and has ignited my interest in family history.
My mother was not much help. Up until three years ago, all I had was a first name.
Growing up, I knew of John, but I did not know him. My mother met the man who would become my adopted father when I was around three years old, and I have no recollection of John.
For most of my life, I wasn’t really interested in knowing him, or more about him.
As far as I was concerned, he had not made any effort to be a part of my life, and I had more than enough siblings by my adopted father. Also, for some reason, I felt it would be hurtful or disrespectful to my adopted father to want to get to know my birth father. So I didn’t. Then my adopted father passed away in 2019, after several years of serious illness, and things changed.
I have four grown children. Three of them look very much like their father. One of them looks more like me. He started asking questions about my birth father that I did not have answers to.
It was time to ask my mother. This time she gave us a full name, and my son immediately googled him, and found him on The Peerage - A genealogical survey of the peerage of Britain. This came as a surprise to my mother. It turned out she knew very little about John, and she was quite vague about their relationship.
If I wanted to know more, I would have to do the research myself.
I reached out to a professional genealogist, who replied that he did not have time to take my case, but pointed me in the direction of John’s will which I could easily obtain from the British archives.
But I am jumping ahead.
First there was the teddy bear.
My mother and adopted father are low key hoarders. Especially my adopted father had a hard time letting go of things. Mostly papers and books. After he passed, my mother has very slowly been going through the accumulated stuff left over from a life of hundreds of unfinished projects. In the spring of 2021, she had hip surgery, and I travelled to stay with her for a few days, that then turned in to a few weeks. For the first time ever after her marriage when I was four, we had extended time together - just the two of us.
I tried to hurry the uncluttering process along while I was there, sifting through endless boxes and shelves, filled to capacity with ‘stuff’. Sneaking out to throw things away while she was resting, and continually asking her the question ‘do you really need to keep this?’
Among the debris was a rather large, rather tatty, yellow teddy bear. Yet again, I ask: ‘Do you really need to keep this?’ My mother blinks slowly and replies:
‘Well. It is actually the only link to John’.
I had not been expecting that. Suddenly that worn and scruffy yellow bear was the most precious thing in the house - to me.
Then we talked
At the time of my conception in 1967, my mother was an aspiring actress in Swinging London. She was clearly a part of the arts scene, and met John at the local pub in Kensington/Chelsea. He was twice her age, and a journalist - although she did not know that then. Upon finding herself pregnant, she eventually decided to keep the baby she was expecting, in spite of those around her who were encouraging her to have an abortion.
She wanted to travel home to her father who lived in Nigeria, but simply did not have the funds to do so.
‘I’m not proud of it’, she said, ‘but I knew John had money’.
‘So I contacted him and told him I was pregnant, that the baby was his, but that I did not want anything from him, except money for the airfare home to Nigeria’.
John thought that was too easy. He wanted to do the right thing by her. He wanted to marry her and be a father. However, she wasn’t interested.
He did end up paying for the plane ticket though, and I was subsequently born in Nigeria and given the name Joanna. A subtle nod to John.
My mother was prepared to stay in Nigeria. She got a job at a local school, and was ready to settle down. John stayed in touch.
Blue eyes and gappy teeth
‘If she has blue eyes and gappy teeth, she is mine’, he said at one point. And I did.
After some months he managed to coax her in to returning to London, move in with him and try to make a go of it. He paid for plane tickets - again, and thus profoundly changed the trajectory of our lives. My mother and I moved in to his one room bachelor pad in Chelsea. It lasted about three weeks.
John was extremely neat and tidy. He was 44, and as far as we knew then, had never been married. The flat was tiny. Although my mother has become quite organized and tidy in later years, at the time she wasn’t, and I was a perfectly normal nine month old: noisy and messy. My guess is that he was completely overwhelmed, and my mother was still not really interested. She moved out.
It could have ended there. But John paid child support, even though he was not registered on my birth certificate. When I was three, I said ‘I don’t have a daddy’, since I was seemingly the only one without one in nursery school. My mother then reached out to John, and asked if he wanted to see me. He did. That is when he gave me the teddy bear.
Not long after, things became more serious between my mother and my soon to be adopted father. John wanted to stay in touch with me, but my adopted father didn’t think it was a good idea, and my mother didn’t put up a fight. Neither did John. A couple of years later, we moved to Norway - and that was that.
‘We weren’t thinking 50 years in to the future’, my mother has said more recently. ‘We did what we thought was best at the time. I’m sorry’.
Then began my quest for details about John’s life.
He lived in the same Chelsea flat until he died in 2006, at the age of 81. After his career in journalism, he started a patent bureau, that he ran until retirement, when he sold it. He was the director of the London Press Club for a few years in the 90’s, and he worked at some point for Reuters, in Cairo. He was very well read, spoke fluent French, and travelled to Florida annually - as he owned or co-owned a property on the Keyes. He was kind and generous, and a rather good cook.
He had also in fact been married. In 1959 he married a German woman in Gibraltar. They did not have children, and later divorced. She remarried a Frenchman, and lived in France until she passed away in 2010.
John once said to a friend and former employee whom I was able to find through his will, ‘I have a child, but she is lost to me’.
The saddest thing is that I spent quite a lot of time in London between 1987 and 2005.
My best friend lived in London, and I visited regularly. I could have met him. He could have met all my children. It honestly never even occurred to me to try to contact him.
Now, after three years of digging into his life and background, I have become quite fond of this British family. The connection to Royalty, the famous relatives, the crazy stories, the tragedies, the early deaths, and all the divorces!
John’s parents divorced fairly early. I was able to find and purchase the autobiography of John’s father; ‘A Casual Change’, and devoured it hoping for some details. Alas, I found but one sentence: ‘I travelled to Germany with my young son.’ Sigh.
John’s mother Hester, emigrated to the US in the 1930’s and remarried. I have not been able to find out if she had any more children. I do not believe John’s father ever remarried, or had any more children, as I have not found any evidence to support that fact. John’s father Albert was also an only child of parents who divorced early on. This means that there are no cousins or aunts or uncles to be found on his father’s side. His mother’s side is well documented, but of her parent’s seven children, only two others seem to have lived long enough to have children.
Plot twist
Since I only had my mother’s word for John being my father, I thought taking a DNA test might be a good way to prove the British link. I had absolutely no reason to not believe her. Both she and John have clearly believed he was my biological father my whole life. However, a few weeks ago my DNA test results came back, and they did not prove the British link.
Quite to my surprise, all my closest DNA matches were in Australia, and to top it off, I was 1/4 Norwegian? I suppose I was destined to be a Norwegian all along. My biological father seems to be an Australian musician with Norwegian ancestors, who was living and studying in Kensington/Chelsea between 1965 and 1967…
I texted my mother his name. She remembered him, but claimed nothing happened between them. So there we are. My Australian father passed away in Australia the same week as my adopted father in 2019, and I am guessing he knew nothing about me.
So I lost and found, and lost and found - and lost - again.