A hurt that lasted 79 years and the sisters who helped to heal it
Charles could never forgive his mother for leaving him at the cruel Foundling Hospital... but then three old photos in an attic reunited him with the family he’d lost
REGULAR as clockwork, Joyce Mundon would write seeking news of the son she had been forced to give up. Her letters always ended with a plea to know how he was getting on. As often as she could afford it, she would enclose money or send gifts. But she only ever received the same curt, impersonal acknowledgement, addressed to “Madam” and signed by a secretary.
An unmarried mother from a poor background, Joyce had been left with no choice but to hand the three-month-old baby she had christened David to the Foundling Hospital in London, which promised a better life than she could give him.
It wasn’t until after he turned 16 in 1948 and was released from the charity’s care that the awful truth about that “better life” – year after year of beatings, canings and psychological torture – came out.
Staff had lied to David, whose name they changed to Charles, claiming that he’d been abandoned in a doorway, not handed over in an act of love and sacrifice.
Not one of Joyce’s heartfelt letters – addressed to ‘Y’, because she was not allowed to know his new name – was shown to him. Not one of the gifts she scrimped and saved to buy was given to him.
Mother and son had a brief reconciliation but, not knowing what to believe, he rejected her. “I met my mother for the first time aged 16,” Charles wrote in later life. “I remember thinking she was so pretty – likeVera Lynn.
“But we were never to grow close because by my teens my heart was already hardened against her. I was treated badly. I never forgave my birth parents for leaving me there.
“When my mother said she had kept in touch through the Foundling Hospital, I didn’t believe her. Now with hindsight and the proof that she never forgot me, I regret thinking badly of her. I realise that she did her best in very difficult circumstances.”
AS A tiny boy, he was forced into a scalding hot bath, scrubbed with rough brushes and carbolic soap, and held under the water as a punishment when he cried. “I thought I would drown,” he wrote.
Only after the hospital – actually a tough orphanage-cum-school – closed in the 1950s and the letters were passed on did he discover that Joyce had been telling the truth all along, she had never forgotten him.
But by then it was too late for Charles, known as Chuck, to mend any bridges… she was dead. Now their tragic story has been told in a heartbreaking memoir by Sylvia Court, one of three half-sisters he hardly knew.
They only learned of his existence after Sylvia, 78, decided to research her family tree and came across a person called David John Mundon, born on August 19, 1932. Her sister Marilyn got hold of his birth certificate and discovered that David was their mother’s first-born son.
“It was a shock but it was also a little bit exciting thinking, ‘Well, who is this person?’ What sort of life has he had? Is he alive or is he dead?” says Sylvia.
Sylvia, Marilyn and third sister Christine searched for months for a David Mundon without success. Then they recalled an old leather case with their mother’s documents in the attic – and a search yielded three photographs.
One was of a blond baby in a pram, the second showed a young couple with a dog and the third was one Sylvia and Marilyn recognised, as the other half of a picture in the family photo album. The section they grew up with showed them as children in the garden. Now in their hands was the missing piece of the picture – and it showed a young man.
Sylvia realised in that moment that she remembered meeting him.
“I didn’t know who he was at the time but I liked him,” she recalls. “I asked him loads of questions about horses as he worked in hunting kennels and I was horse-mad.” Her sisters also knew the couple in the other photo and had visited them in Gloucestershire. They remembered that they were called Chuck and Yvonne.
In an old address book of their mother’s, they found the contact details for Chuck and Yvonne who, unknown to them, was their brother’s wife. Marilyn made the first call and before long, in 2011, the three sisters were travelling to meet their brother. He was already old and frail and suffering from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease – a genetic condition which ironically he had inherited from his mother – that damages the nervous system and leaves sufferers bedridden.
“In that first meeting, he was friendly and polite but we were like strangers,” Sylvia recalls. “The elephant in the room was his
name and why it was different to that on his birth certificate but he kept avoiding that subject. He wanted to tell us about his life.
“He was bright as a button and instantly I could see my mum’s face in him. He had a cheeky grin and sparkly eyes.
“Throughout his life, he believed he had no family as far as he knew, or none that cared about him,” says Sylvia who now lives in
Somerset. “And because he didn’t need to live for anybody he did dangerous things, even if they killed him. He almost had a death wish.”
Chuck’s daredevil attitude took him to Cuba as a gunrunner for Fidel Castro’s forces and to America where he became a stunt bike rider, before returning to Britain to perform in a perilous Wall of Death act.
In later life, he became a respected animal trainer who worked on Hollywood film sets.
The walls of his home near Rochester, Kent, were lined with certificates, trophies and rosettes from his days as a dog trainer.
“His life could have been a James Bond film,” says Sylvia. But despite craving the constant adrenaline of adventure, Chuck couldn’t escape his tortured past which left him prone to outbursts of anger.
“He had what he called a red mist that descended when he was angry and it affected his whole life,” Sylvia says. “He said it came from his early life and how he was treated.”
In 2015, just three years and a half years after Sylvia, Marilyn, 75, and Christine, 71, met their brother, he died. But before his death, he wrote down his life story in a series of emails to Sylvia and gave her permission to retrieve his official records from Coram, the charity responsible for the Foundling Hospital. The records revealed that as a teenager Joyce was seduced by a man who got her pregnant, then abandoned her.
“My mum would have been innocent so it must have been a terrible shock,” says Sylvia. The Foundling Hospital was set up in 1739 by Thomas Coram, a philanthropist shipbuilder, as a safe place to house the estimated one thousand babies abandoned in London’s streets or sewers every year. Children were raised for a life of service and many were mistreated. They were farmed out to foster parents for five years before returning to the Foundling Hospital where they were stripped, bathed and dressed in uniforms. Discipline was brutal. All were given new names.
Joyce knew nothing of the barbaric treatment of her son. “She believed it was the right thing to do and the way for him to have a good education and life,” says Sylvia. “She sacrificed her own feelings.”
As for Chuck, he was told nothing but lies.
“They said he was abandoned because his parents wanted a life of pleasure and luxury without the encumbrance of a child,” Sylvia says. “My mum must have been overjoyed when she saw him again because all that time she had been sending letters, enquiring about him, dying to see him.”
T‘We were never to grow close as by my teens my heart was already hardened against her’
HOUGH she never forgot her son, Joyce married a professional boxer called James Banks, and became a dedicated mother who threw herself into raising their daughters, and was keen to pass on what she had learned the hard way.
“She was strict about us seeing anyone of the opposite sex, insisting that we always had a chaperone,” Sylvia says. “She was constantly warning us of the devious intentions of even the nicest men.”
Sylvia is pleased Chuck finally understood the truth before his death and believes it would be a blessing for her mother too.
“He died knowing he had a family that loved and cared for him.”
●●The Foundling: The Extraordinary Exploits of Chuck Kemsley by Sylvia Court is available to buy on Amazon for £7.99