‘Being there meant my mother and I could be together’
Author Gordon Lewis tells Barry Egan about his childhood inside the secretive Catholic hostel, Dublin’s Regina Coeli
GORDON Lewis was born on February 25, 1953, in a small hospital on Morning Star Avenue in Dublin’s north inner city. Two days later, his mother, Cathleen Crea, brought him on the short journey up the road to the Regina Coeli, a Catholic hostel for homeless and unmarried mothers.
There was a special small dormitory on the first floor for the new mothers to stay before they were moved into one of the big dormitories in the former workhouse run by the Legion of Mary. He was to remain in the hostel for the first decade of his life.
Gordon’s earliest childhood memory was “playing with the many broken prams in the grounds of Regina Coeli”.
The kids in the hostel were known as “the unfortunates” in the local community.
“When we were at church or in school we were stared at,” he says. “We knew we were different from the other children in society, which made us feel like the underclass, but this made us more united and we looked out for each other.”
Gordon was never invited into anyone’s house because of his background and the suspicions people had of him: “I felt a stigma when I was young in Dublin.”
Accommodating 5,631 mothers and 5,434 children between 1930 and 1998, the building was condemned by Dublin Corporation in 1963. The Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes found that a total of 734 infants associated with the Regina Coeli died, mostly during the 1940s.
“This is no surprise,” he says. “This was poverty. I spent my first three years in and out of hospitals with diseases from the hostel.”
The Commission of Investigation refers to “reports of children suffering burns from boiling water” at the Regina Coeli, which suggest that it had to “be carried some distance, as opposed to flowing from a convenient tap”.
In terms of the poor living conditions, he says: “That’s what comes with poverty. From what I remember there was only three metal baths. Piss pots under each bed. More rats than people. All the mothers had to work and pay for their stay at hostel.”
The commission also says that Regina Coeli kept information on the women, among them a pregnant young woman who was admitted in 1951 because “her uncle is responsible”. Another woman was there because she had become pregnant by an elected political representative — “A TD is responsible for her trouble. She had been going to Leinster House and creating scenes there, trying to see him.” She had been sent to Regina Coeli “by the porter from Leinster House”.
“Every mother had her story of how they arrived in the hostel,” Gordon says. “So many sad stories…”
Cathleen Crea was a Lucan woman who became pregnant in her mid-30s by a Cork man who was secretly married with a family of his own and wanted nothing to do with her.
In 1953, entering a hostel run by the Legion of Mary was “the only place where a woman could keep her child out of all the homes in Ireland”.
“This was a place which meant my mother and I could stay together,” he says.
The Regina Coeli hostel was opened in October 1930 by Frank Duff out of a concern for unmarried mothers.
Sarah MacDonald wrote on the Catholic Ireland website in 2017 that Duff ’s “special sympathy for unmarried mothers was at odds with the mores of the time, when the consequences of an extra-marital birth were disastrous, rendering both mother and child social outcasts”.
From the moment Cathleen and Gordon entered the hostel, everything was done in absolute secrecy. She hid from society and her family. Her own mother thought her daughter was single, childless and rented a room in the city centre where she worked as a hotel chambermaid.
She “drilled” Gordon not to talk or even think about the Regina Coeli, to keep everything secret. “I was part of the secrecy,” he says. “My mother never wanted to talk about the past.”
In 1962, when Cathleen reunited with an ex-boyfriend, a Protestant called Bill, she moved with Gordon to London. The couple married the following year.
“It’s really her who felt the shame and guilt. Her way to erase the memory of the place was to move on with her new life in London,” Gordon says.
Bill died in 1993. Cathleen died three years earlier. She was 74. In 2015, Gordon wrote the best-selling book Secret Child.
“I would not write about this if either Bill or mum were alive. I wrote the book in homage to both, first to my mother who was courageous enough to keep and bring me up, and to Bill, who was a hero to the both of us. He lifted us out of the hostel to a new and hopeful life in London.
“She kept me and had help to get work from the hostel’s network of people who believed in Frank Duff ’s philosophy of keeping the mother and child together.”
Gordon has an admiration for Duff, who established Regina Coeli “where pregnant girls could seek sanctuary and keep their babies with them”.
In October 2020, Gordon approached Dublin County Council about putting a plaque outside the building.
They were, he says, positive but said the permission would be required from the Regina Coeli Trust, run by 12 trustees of the De Monfort Trust. He wrote to all: not one, he says, acknowledged his registered letters.
As for Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s apology on behalf of the State, he says: “All politicians are very good at apologising. What would be more credible is Micheál Martin’s action to legislate law to benefit children of single mothers, to ensure they have access to the best education and opportunities in life. This could help break the cycle and chain of the underprivileged.
“When I arrived in London at the age of nine, I was illiterate. The only thing I knew about was the Catholic religion. Bill sat me down and told me I needed to go to a school where I will learn more than just religious studies. I was a lucky one.”
In London, Gordon became successful in the music and film businesses. He also opened bars in the city. He has homes now in London, Rio, Kuala Lumpur, and Los Angeles. He has been with his partner, Yewweng, for 25 years.
“I get many emails from people who were in these homes and I realised I am the lucky one who has come out of this well and with few scars.
“I have my mother to thank for not being angry and judgmental. She was always forgiving and let bygones be bygones.
“I am very proud of what my mother and other women like her have achieved in that horrible period. She was the one that really suffered.
“That is why I wish to commemorate, with a small blue plaque outside the hostel, the thousands of women who suffered and were ostracised by the Irish society.”