At last I’ve found my real father
... who spent years questioning her identity, before stumbling on the secret her mother took to the grave
FOR more than a decade, Trisha Goddard was the queen of daytime confessional TV, helping t o reunite warring relatives and solve furious paternity disputes. Her trademark sincerity won her legions of fans – a popularity that only increased when it emerged she had more in common with her troubled guests than they could have guessed.
Away from the cameras, she had herself contended with drug abuse, marriage breakdown and even a suicide attempt.
Yet t oday, t he 59- year- old is enmeshed in a very different family drama, one that has turned her life and that of her family upside down. And at the heart of it is a grainy black-and-white photograph taken more than half a century ago.
A relic of another time, the picture shows her mother Agnes, a nurse newly arrived from the Caribbean, at a Christmas dance in 1956 with her colleagues. It features, too, a tall man Trisha has never met. Indeed, for years, he was kept entirely secret from her.
Yet this is the man she believes could be her natural father.
It is fitting that what has turned into a decade-long mystery first began with the sort of DNA test so often featured on Trisha’s own shows – and with the distressing evidence that she had no genetic connection to the pale-skinned, redhaired man who brought her up as his own daughter.
‘I was stunned that my suspicions had been right all along,’ Trisha says today. ‘ It felt like such a betrayal, but in some ways it was a relief to finally know the truth. I want to find out more about this man whose blood runs though my veins – to know if I have other siblings or cousins out there. I don’t feel I can rest until I do.’
She adds: ‘It was as if everything I had thought about myself was no longer real. I felt adrift. I had no idea who I was any more. All my life I had thought of myself as halfwhite and, although I knew I looked different from my three younger sisters, it was devastating.’
Her mother Agnes had died of lung cancer by the time Trisha took the test in 2008, and it seemed the identity of her real father went with her to the grave. Peter, the father who brought her up, is still alive.
Only now, after nearly a decade of painstaking detective work does Trisha believe that she has unearthed the truth – that she is the biological daughter of a man called Leonard James, a dashing oil executive and the man, sadly now dead, she believes had been the true love of her mother’s youth.
It has been a frustrating search, hampered by what the presenter describes as a wall of silence from relatives, who have told her to ‘let sleeping dogs lie’. Confidantes of her mother were equally unhelpful, refusing to reveal what they knew.
Yet she has persisted – for this is no vanity project. Without definitive proof, troubling questions remain for Trisha and for her two daughters, about their genetic make-up and about their health.
And this is why today she is now appealing for anyone with information about her parents or the photograph to come forward to confirm her discovery. The eldest of four girls, Trisha says she has felt like an outsider for most of her life. Perhaps this is understandable. Peter, her white father, came from rural Norfolk while her late mother had arrived from Dominica.
They were both trainee nurses at Hackney Hospital in East London and drew attention as a multiracial couple at a time when such a relationship was highly unorthodox.
Trisha says the first real sign she was ‘different’ came when she was in primary school in Brentwood, Essex, when the teacher read out Enid Blyton books featuring golliwog characters.
‘The other kids started to call me the naughty golliwog and would chant it when we were in the playground. It was horrible,’ she says.
‘Although I didn’t really understand why people associated me with the golliwog, I knew that it was not a compliment and that they said it to upset me, which it did.’
Trisha’s family, which included three younger sisters, Juliette, Linda and Paula – all born within four years of Trisha – were the only people of colour in the area. ‘Two of them are so fair that they could pass for white,’ she says. But although she had far darker skin, it was not a matter for discussion.
‘When I tried to talk to my mother about why I looked so different, she would be dismissive and say that I was just imagining things.’
With hindsight, she can now see the clues, especially with her growing estrangement from Peter as she entered her teens. He was violent in his physical punishment of her and took to referring to her as a ‘bastard child’ when his temper flared – things for which today she says she has forgiven him.
‘I now realise too, why Mum hated it when I did DNA tests on my show,’ she continues.
‘I just had no idea that I was at the centre of my own family’s dirty secret. It must have been a source of great tension between them and perhaps the reason they had so many rows.
‘ Obviously mum was embar-
‘All my life I had thought of myself as half-white’
‘Perhaps it was a reason they had so many rows’
rassed and deliberately hid it from us, though clearly some members of the extended family realised that I was not the same as my three younger sisters.’
Trisha believes that her mother’s fear of being discovered might have been the reason why Agnes cut her ties with fellow Caribbeans in London. The family moved to Surrey, on the edge of the city; certainly, Trisha has little recollection of meeting black people in large numbers until she was about 16.
‘By then, we were living in Virginia Water and we went to a Christmas party in Perivale in West London. I was shocked to be surrounded by so many black faces, but I didn’t really feel I was one of them,’ she says. She was artistic and ambitious. And after passing ten O-levels at a girls’ grammar school in Chertsey, Surrey, Trisha left home to play keyboards with a girl band called Eve on a tour of Germany.
While the band didn’t last, it was the start of a successful career in the public eye. She made a name for herself in Australia as the country’s first black female news presenter, before starring in ITV’s Trisha, her own show, followed by Trisha Goddard on Channel 5 until 2014. It was during an episode of the show concerning DNA testing that she began once again to question her own paternity.
‘I started having serious doubts when one of the genetic experts said it was impossible for me to have a white father,’ she recalls. ‘He had argued that a child could not be darker than the darkest parent. But when I told my mother, she dismissed him as “a stupid man”.
‘Even as she lay dying, she refused to tell me the truth, insisting that I was imagining things.
‘My daughters wanted me to ask dad, but I was worried he didn’t know and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. I was flabbergasted when he eventually confessed the truth to one of my sisters a few months after mum had died. He had known that I was not his daughter.’
It was just 18 months ago that she had the first real breakthrough. And that was when Peter gave her the first clue about who her real father might be in the shape of the black-and-white photo.
‘My dad gave me a photograph, marked “Hackney Hospital Christmas Dinner and Dance 1956” of my mother with a group, including the man he thinks might be my biological father,’ she reveals.
‘His name is Leonard James and he was supposedly my mum’s great love, but for some reason they could not be together. They had been very close in Dominica and he was visiting London when they apparently met up again at the West Indian Club in Bloomsbury.
‘It was the late 1950s and mum was training as a psychiatric nurse, when she and Leonard had a fling. She had broken up with Peter, but he later married her believing she was pregnant with his child – me.
‘After I was born in December 1957, Dad waited several months to see if I would become lighter in complexion, before challenging mum. He asked if he needed to take a blood test and she tearfully confessed I was not his child.
‘ But he says by then he had already bonded with me and, in any case, mum was again pregnant. When I asked why he had not told me the truth, he said she had forbidden him to say anything. They were devoted to each other until she died in 2004.’
She is speaking now partly in the hope that someone who knew her mother back then might see the picture and contact her.
‘If this is the guy, he worked for an oil company and may have ended up settling in Trinidad,’ she says. ‘I did not want to make this public, but I’m hoping by speaking out it might jog a memory of someone who might be able to help.
‘I suspect that mum would have told my birth father about my existence. I also think she went back to Peter and married him because she had nowhere else to go.
‘I tracked down one of my mum’s oldest friends and she told me she thought I had known all along, but she has point blank refused to give me any of the details. It’s very frustrating. It feels like there is a void in my life and I have two daughters who want to know their lineage.’
She has finally forgiven her parents for their deception. Peter, she says, has been doing everything he can to help her in her search.
‘My mum clearly felt ashamed of my illegitimacy and she did what she thought she had to, given the morality of the time,’ she adds.
‘I was angry about it for a long time and I’ve not been to visit her grave in Norfolk since finding out. But I’m ready to move on now.
‘I plan to sit by her grave side and tell her that I get it and that I forgive her.’
‘I’ve not visited Mum’s grave since finding out’