Doctor Who do you think you are..?
Jodie’s tears for war hero great uncle abandoned as a toddler
It’s just the idea of a kid being left.. I wonder if she saw him again
DOCTOR Who star Jodie Whittaker is moved to tears when she travels back in time to find out her war hero great uncle was abandoned by his mum as a toddler.
The actress, 38, says researching her family tree for Who Do You Think You Are? was an “emotional rollercoaster”.
She learned her grandmother’s elder brother was born to their mother, Eliza Clements, when she was just a teenager.
She got pregnant after going to work as a servant in London for a man aged 45, who was married with two children.
Jodie says: “You fear this is a young girl being taken advantage of.”
Eliza returned to Lincolnshire age 18 and gave birth to Walter in 1893.
Three years later, Eliza had married and returned to London with her husband, where they went on to have eight children. But Walter was left behind in Lincolnshire.
Jodie, who has a five- year- old daughter, was shocked, saying: “It’s just the idea of a little kid being left behind. That is slightly heartbreaking. I wonder if she saw him again.”
Walter turned 21 during the First World War in 1914 and signed up at a military hospital in Southampton.
The following year he joined cavalry regiment the 10th Royal Hussars.
Jodie says: “It’s so weird because the only connection I have to
Walter is my grandmother Greta, who I was very, very close to but this person is now completely alive in my mind.
“I want to protect him and go ‘don’t do it’. He’s doing it probably knowing he isn’t going to come back. Bricking it, but doing it – that’s a hero to me.”
Walter was wounded in battle in 1917 but after recovering in hospital in England he rejoined his regiment in France.
Jodie says: “He feels like a lonely soul to me.”
In 1918, Walter sustained a serious shrapnel wound in his side and was sent to hospital in Manchester where this time, he did not recover.
Jodie adds: “He got through so much. It’s really sad, he was only 24.”
She weeps when she learns he was buried in East Finchley, North London, where his mother lived.
“I’m going to cry now,” she says. “She got to bring him back to her home.”
Jodie also discovers her great-grandfather and great uncles were mine owners. Brought up herself in Skelmanthorpe, a West Yorkshire mining village, she is unimpressed to learn they were strike-breakers in the 1920s. “It’s not an ideal bit of your family history,” she says.
Who Do You Think You Are? BBC1, Monday, 9pm. sadly,
JODIE WHITTAKER GETS EMOTIONAL ON BBC SHOW