Kentish Express Ashford & District
War bride who left her baby and took secrets to the grave
Just after the First World War, Mabel Cackett sailed off to Canada to marry Canadian Expeditionary Force soldier Peter Dunphy but she left her baby in Ashford with her mother.
The young war bride already had daughter Audrey by her former soldier fiancée Alfred Barbaix and planned for her child to follow her a few months later.
But her strict Victorian mother had other ideas and baby Audrey Hughes stayed in Ashford with her grandmother, aunts and uncles, where she still lives today.
Great-grandmother Audrey Hughes, 96, from Essetford Road, said she never saw or heard from her mother again.
She said: “My father was a Belgium guy who moved to Canada just before the start of the war.
“He was a Lance Corporal and came to Ashford after he was very badly injured fighting in France.
“He met my mother when he came over here and I think he wanted to take her back to Canada but my grandmother would not have it.
“They never married and so he went back to Canada without her. He lived a long life and died in San Francisco in 1975.
“When my father had left, my mother met Peter Dunphy who she ran off to Canada with.
“I was 18 months old when she left but I really don’t know much about what happened because it was very, very secretive.
“She sent for me to follow but my grandmother decided I was staying here with her and there was no way she was going to send me to Canada.
“My mother never contacted me after she left but she did stay in touch with her sisters and my grandmother a bit.
“I knew about the seven half brothers and sisters I had in Canada but up until the Second World War, they never knew about me.”
When Audrey’s half-brother John Dunphy enlisted in the Canadian army and came to England in the Second World War he paid a visit to his grandmother.
Audrey continued: “He had absolutely no idea who I was or even that I existed so when my grandmother very brutally told him I was his half-sister, he nearly dropped dead!
“He was so furious with my mum and he wrote a different letter to every one of his siblings to tell them about me which must have caused a great furore out in Canada.”
Audrey, who worked at the Kent Paper Company as a secretary for most of her working life, married Richard Hughes and had two children of her own – Letitia and Adrian.
When her mother died in 1975, she went to Canada with her husband to visit her mother’s family.
She continued: “I discovered that my mother had told my halfsiblings that my father had been shot down before he could marry her, which is a lie.
“Nearly a century later and I still don’t know why my father left or why I didn’t go to Canada with her. “They knew how to keep secrets in those days and she took hers to the grave with her.”