Outnumbered: family life with Britain’s first ‘surrogate dad’ and his triplets
To celebrate Father’s Day, meets Ian Mucklejohn and finds out how he’s going it alone with his teenage boys
In February 2001, Ian Mucklejohn and his three smiling, strawberry blond sons made history. Then 54, he had just become the first single man in the UK to have children by surrogacy, having found an American woman online to donate her eggs and another to carry the babies to term.
His cute, mop-haired triplets, Lars, Piers and Ian, who graced the pages of every newspaper, have since become strapping teenagers, and today marks Mucklejohn’s 15th Father’s Day as a dad – not that he’s expecting a card.
Now 69 (though he looks far younger), he is still single and, although he had nannies to help at home for the first few years after the boys arrived, since then the house has been without a motherly presence to nudge the boys towards the newsagents to buy a card.
Which is not to say he hasn’t had offers: after appearing in the press, a number of women reached out to Mucklejohn – “not, I’m sure, because of my charming personality, but maybe because they thought the children were poor motherless waifs.”
Mucklejohn intially began researching surrogacy because “I hadn’t found someone to spend the rest of my life with, nor was I arrogant enough to assume there was somebody who’d wish to spend their lives with me,” he says. “But I’d always wanted a family, as far back as I can remember.”
Running a successful language school alongside being a full-time carer for his father, who had been brain-damaged in a car accident when Mucklejohn was eight, meant his life had been, “to a large extent, on hold. I had to get cracking.”
In 1999 he travelled to a fertility clinic in Beverly Hills, California – only to be refused as a client because he wasn’t gay. But over the course of the next six months, another agency introduced him to the woman who would serve as his egg donor and surrogate, culminating in a call to say the latter was pregnant. I said, ‘Hang on, isn’t being pregnant an absolute?’ That’s when the doctor told me she was carrying triplets.”
If it was tough juggling three newborns, how is he coping with his teen triptych? “It is a challenge – they’re less pleasant,” he concedes, though he opts “not to get too het up, and let it all wash over me.” He keeps things in order with a “constant watchfulness and being on top of things” – if there is bad behaviour afoot, the Wi-Fi is swiftly unplugged. Does that do the trick? “Oh yes,” comes a knowing nod.
As an only child himself, he had never experienced sibling rivalry: now, dinnertime chatter is dominated by each of his offspring “pointing out each others’ inadequacies and how horrible the other is – at this stage in their lives, that’s what’s paramount”.
They may be united in their desire to produce the most cutting insult, but that’s where the similarities end: the trio are “chalk, cheese and whatever comes between the two”.
Lars is the oldest and tallest of the Mucklejohn clan – a keen linguist and gamer who could easily pass as a member of an indie band. Ian, the middle son, is more introspective, and can often be found glued to nature documentaries or scouring the internet to learn more about his favourite subject, animals. The highly articulate Piers who, like Lars, attends the prestigious Abingdon School in Oxfordshire, is “charm on legs”, according to their father.
That charm hasn’t quite won over Lars, whose football scarfsmattered bedroom we’re sitting in – he describes his brother as “a little shy”; Piers describes him as “a bit arrogant but quite sensible”, in turn.
is on, so we are without Ian. Previous dealings with the media have made him wary, not least because when he searches for himself online, he finds years’ worth of stories about his old man. “Naming him after myself was a mistake,” says Mucklejohn Sr.
The younger Ian worries that they will be on the receiving end of negativity, as his father was when news of their situation first came to light. Mucklejohn recalls one particularly memorable article which dubbed him a “spoiled millionaire”. Now, if the boys want to get one up on their dad, they taunt him with similarly critical headlines: “an unusual insult for a parent to receive,” he laughs.
Normal as life may feel at their neatly appointed home in Newbury, which Mucklejohn built in the Seventies, the creation of this modern family still feels unusual. There is scant data for how many men choose a similar route to child-rearing, although several have contacted the businessman to say that reading his books, which chart his experiences with surrogacy and fatherhood, inspired them to do the same thing.
“One of them even had triplets,” he smiles. “I’m very happy to have brought happiness into people’s lives, and to show them that it can be done.”
Single fatherhood has, unsurprisingly, not always been easy: “I wish I had somebody to share the experiences with,” Mucklejohn muses. “That’s probably why I write them down, so I can share them with everybody.”
The boys have dealt with their fair share of questions about their upbringing over the years. “People wondered how it worked,” Piers explains. “It’s hard to understand what it’s like to be made through IVF if you haven’t been, and at school, some people said they thought it might be weird to only have a father, like you’re missing out on a mother.
“I’ve never had one, so in my opinion if you have a mum, that’s an extra, but you don’t really need one.”
Such a sentiment strikes as rather grown-up for a teenage boy, though it might have been shaped by recent events: their surrogate, Tina Price, died suddenly in February, around the boys’ 15th birthday, at the age of 45. “She was a tremendous lady,” Mucklejohn says of the woman who carried his children, and whom he had taken the boys to the States to meet, along with their biological mother. “They asked, ‘How should we feel?’ And I honestly didn’t know.”
Mucklejohn had his own health scare 10 years ago, after a malignant melanoma was removed. “The children are very aware of death, which I wasn’t at their age.” Not least because they are being raised in a digital world, and hence are “vastly more informed about things they can do nothing about. No doubt these things occurred when I was young, but I wasn’t aware of it; they are extremely so, and it gives them a sense of powerlessness.”
He hopes he has “given them the tools to cope with awful things, and that they have a degree of resilience. I have to be philosophical with it – I tell them, ‘If you think things are bad, stand up and change them.’ ”
Have the boys taken these rousing words to heart? “Oh no – they think I’m a relic of history, that things have changed, and that all my views are out of date.
“But I’m incredibly modern; our situation is modern and I’m still in charge of a business, which is pretty youthful. I think there’s still a lot of mileage in me.”
And for “motherless waifs”, the boys, too, seem to be doing rather well. Mucklejohn’s hopes for them are simple: that they “will be happy, and that all the work that’s gone into bringing them up will pay dividends for them in the long run.
“As long as they are fulfilled, that’s the important thing.”