You can only keep things buried so long
A successful paternity case against John Banks captured the nation’s attention last year. But the former Auckland mayor’s refusal to acknowledge his illegitimate son reopened old wounds for an Auckland woman misled for 16 years about the identity of her r
The mother of John Banks' illegitimate son wrote to the politician when she decided to come clean 27 years after the birth, telling Banks “you can only keep things buried for so long”. The handwritten letter was filed as evidence in Antony Shaw's successful paternity claim against Banks last year but its contents were suppressed.
A judge, who in August ruled the former Cabinet minister and Auckland mayor was Shaw's legal father, has also ruled the letter is now admissible, meaning its contents can finally be reported 18 years after it was penned.
The court accepted that Pamela Mayes had sex with Banks in a Hamilton motel in July 1969, when he was a travelling pharmaceuticals salesman.
On learning of the pregnancy, Banks urged Mayes to have an abortion and supplied her with drugs to make her miscarry, urging her to take the necessary dose, the court heard.
When she refused, Banks told her to form a new relationship and tell the other man he was Shaw's father. She subsequently did, and Shaw grew up thinking he was half Chinese. On November 23, 1999, Mayes wrote to Banks saying she was no longer prepared to lie. “I've kept to your rules for 30 years — you wanted me to have an abortion and even gave me quinine from the Drug Co you worked at. “When I wouldn't take that you told me to tell someone else it was their baby. “As much as I didn't want to I did, then had to live with the lie and parent our son by myself for four-and-a-half years — in the days before income support.” Mayes met with Banks twice that year to discuss coming clean after watching his emotional valedictory speech in Parliament, in which he discussed the pain of growing up without a father. “I am prepared to face up to the past and the lies and take responsibility for the wrongness that I did also,” she wrote. “You really did have control over me in those days. I should say I allowed you to control me but then I would have done anything you wanted me to do (except the abortion — I couldn’t do that!)” She continued: “There is a lot of pain and hurt still for the way I
was treated and let down by you. I’m feeling really stressed and tearful now that it has all resurfaced again.
“I guess you can only keep things buried for so long.”
Mayes told Banks her marriage had been destroyed by the subterfuge and she feared she could also lose her son because of the lies they had perpetuated. Those fears were later borne out and she and her son are now estranged.
“I will have to live with that also,” she wrote. “But I have weighed things up and even if Antony doesn’t want to know you or me after this it is important to me that the truth be told and you acknowledge him on his birth certificate.
“It seems to me that you want it all to go away — it won’t.
“You said nothing would change
Even if Antony doesn’t want to know you or me after this it is important to me that the truth be told and you acknowledge him on his birth certificate. Pamela Mayes, Antony Shaw’s mother
and you would not make a fuss — would keep it private with our family — not even tell your adopted son except maybe when he was older.
“I feel that you have missed out on having a relationship with your son for nearly 30 years. (Your choice).
“Now you have a grandson and I think you will miss out on having a relationship with him.”
After receiving the letter, Banks warned Mayes not to take the matter any further, accused her of wanting money and threatened to sue her, the court heard.
After several failed attempts to meet Banks to discuss the paternity issue, Shaw eventually filed proceedings in the High Court.
Banks has refused to respond to questions about the case and took no part in the civil case.
AT least he had the grace to cry. It’s Angie Richardson’s most telling memory of the moment she met her biological father Michael Whitehead in the late 1980s, a man she would later take to court.
After years of betrayal, she needed to know what he looked like and to hear the sound of his voice. She needed to know her real identity.
“He wasn’t as I imagined and it was disappointing,” she told the Herald.
Following that meeting, she and her father had sporadic and secretive contact for nearly 30 years, but the relationship now lies in tatters.
A handwritten letter from Whitehead to his daughter illustrates the falling out.
“Angie, Do not contact me. I don’t want to hear your take on it. Mike. However, good luck in your endeavours.”
Now a 51-year-old expressive arts therapist and mother of three based in Sandringham, Richardson grew up believing Graham Taylor was her dad. Though violent towards his wife, Taylor had been Richardson’s father figure and his name was on her birth certificate. She adored him and was crushed when he left when she was aged only 7.
When Richardson was 16 she learned everything she believed about her father was a lie.
She wanted to attend the Sweetwaters music festival in 1981 but her mother, Averill Richardson, refused to let her go.
A fierce argument ensued and Richardson, who says she had never once consciously suspected Taylor was not her real dad, suddenly demanded answers.
“I was really upset. The words just popped out of my mouth and I just said, ‘Graham isn’t my father is he?’ “She said, ‘ No he isn’t’. “The earth fell away from under my feet. I had a real physical reaction. It’s like a traumatic response. Everything’s broken. What’s true, what’s not true? What’s real, what’s lies?”
Richardson’s mother revealed that her biological father was a man named Michael. They’d had a relationship in 1964 and she’d become pregnant at the age of 18.
But Whitehead wasn’t willing to accept responsibility for his daughter, she’d later say in a sworn affidavit.
“Michael did not want the pregnancy to continue and offered to pay for an illegal abortion,” Averill wrote.
She says she refused and Whitehead was gone from her life.
Like John Banks’ son, Antony Shaw, Richardson would take legal action to force her father to acknowledge his paternity on official records.
Pregnant, still a teenager, and with no DPB or state child support system, Averill had to think fast. She was an unmarried woman in 1960s New Zealand. Conscious of societal prejudices but unwilling to put her baby up for adoption, her options were limited.
Taylor had dated Averill when they were at high school — she at Epsom Girls’ Grammar and he at Dilworth. A chance meeting in 1965 would alter the course of their lives.
Taylor visited Averill’s workplace to say hello. She was pregnant and desperate for legitimacy. He was willing to oblige.
“Graham Lindsay Taylor (now de- ceased) proposed marriage in the knowledge I was carrying Michael Whitehead’s unborn child, and I accepted,” Averill’s affidavit states.
The couple married and Taylor agreed to say he was the father, entering his name on Richardson’s birth certificate and stepping into the vacuum created by Whitehead.
“There was total family agreement,” Richardson says of the arrangement. “His family knew about me. I think it was kept fairly quiet.”
The wedding went ahead very quickly and they were married in the Dilworth chapel.
“I think my mother’s family would have been relieved. That solves the problem nicely. [Averill] gets to keep the baby and she’s married and nobody needs to know. It keeps the family’s reputation intact. “Nothing is as it seems.” In a strange parallel, Taylor had his own “father mix-up story”, Richardson recalls. His mother had an affair with a boarder while her husband was at war “so he was raised thinking he was the son of someone else”.
Maybe that’s why he agreed to the arrangement. Perhaps it was his working class background, and he saw Averill’s respectable middle-class family as a step up.
Richardson will never know. Estranged from her and Averill, Taylor moved to Australia and later died.
After learning that Whitehead was her father, Richardson eventually got “a bit interested” and looked him up in the White Pages. A builder by trade who’d moved here from the UK after a stint in the army, he’d built a house in Te Atatu and was living there with his own family.
She scribbled down the address and phone number and stashed the scrap of paper in a jewellery box.
Several years later, Averill remarried and bought a house in West Auckland.
Richardson asked for the address. It matched the one in her jewellery box. Her mother had inadvertently bought Whitehead’s old house.
Richardson later moved into the property with her then partner and baby daughter. She learned that Whitehead owned another house on the street and plucked up the courage to knock on the door.
Whitehead did not live there but the occupant provided his details.
At the age of 22, Richardson picked up the phone and the pair finally met face-to-face.
“He knocked at the door and he just knew. He didn’t deny it. He accepted it. He did have the grace to cry. It’s one of the few decent things he did.”
They kept sporadic contact, but Whitehead was “very clear that his daughter wasn’t to know”, Richardson said.
“Mike’s family had no idea. The wife he married, his children, his parents. Nobody. The Whitehead family did not know that I existed.”
Richardson believes her biological father was too ashamed to tell his family and that he always suspected she was after money.
He did give her several cash gifts, she says. One after she had breast cancer and the most recent in 2011. The largest was a $2000 loan towards a house deposit in 1992 which Whitehead later said did not need to be repaid, Richardson recalls.
But she is adamant the relationship was never about cash and says she only took legal proceedings for the sake of her children.
“It’s not that I wanted Mike on my birth certificate. It was quite a painful decision to have Graham taken off, even though we were estranged.
“But my middle son is an actor and was wanting to go to the UK to attend theatre school and do his masters, and I wanted him to be able to apply for ancestry visa-ship.”
Richardson says Whitehead in- itially agreed, but then went cold and dropped out of contact.
She “waited and hoped”, then eventually got angry.
“I knew that I had enough of a story [to prove paternity]. I had some letters and some things that would show to the court that he was my father.”
She filed proceedings in 2012, asking for a declaration of paternity.
Like Banks, Whitehead took no part in the proceedings. On July 4, 2013 a Family Court judge declared that Whitehead was Richardson’s legal father.
And though she’d like to see him again, Richardson thinks it’s unlikely given his letter and the court action.
“I guess after all those years you think you’ve kept a secret so well for so long and now it’s come out and it’s caused disruption.”
Richardson’s father is now retired, nearing 81 and living in Pakuranga. He told the Herald he had no desire to rekindle a relationship with his biological daughter.
“I don’t know why she’s continually bringing this up.”
They’d had a rocky, fractious relationship, he said.
“Some years ago I told her to stop contacting me because she was just a bloody nuisance.”
Whitehead denies offering to pay for an abortion all those years ago, saying he did not have enough money back then.
He also said his late wife knew about his illegitimate daughter, and that he had agreed to sign the birth certificate documents without the matter going to court.
“Averill wrote to me and said she’d be an intermediary so I wouldn’t have to go through Angie.
“I had the papers here, had them all signed, they only had to go through her mother and then for some reason her mother backed out of it.
“It was a messy situation and it shouldn’t have been like that. Initially it started off all right and then Angie, I suppose she wanted to
It was a mistake on my part. Secrets can really hurt. Averill Richardson, Angie’s mother
get her own back so that’s the way it went.”
Whitehead said he first met Averill at the Oriental dance hall on Queen St. After learning she was pregnant he considered taking her to Melbourne to provide for her.
“Then she rings up and says she’s getting married. So in a way I was let out. I didn’t feel anything about it one way or the other.”
He said Richardson somehow felt he owed her. He hadn’t spoken to her in years and preferred not to dredge up ancient memories. The events were now “hazy” and happened so long ago. Regrets? “Not really. When all this was going through, I suppose you get stirred up, you get certain emotions and you think about it. But since all this business settled, it hasn’t crossed my mind really.
“Why would she want to broadcast it all over the nation? What’s the point? I think she’s foolish playing around with it. I haven’t got any real