Autobiography/Memoir My Autobiography Charles Chaplin 1964 Sir Charles Spencer Chaplin (16 April 1889 – 25 December 1977) was an English comic actor, filmmaker, and composer who rose to fame in the era of silent film. Chaplin's childhood in London was one of poverty and hardship, as his father was absent and his mother struggled financially, and he was sent to a workhouse twice before the age of nine and spent time in the Hanwell Schools for Orphans and Destitute Children.. When he was 14, his mother was committed to a mental asylum. He became a worldwide icon through his screen persona, "The Tramp", and is considered one of the most important figures in the history of the film industry. His career spanned more than 75 years, from childhood in the Victorian era until a year before his death in 1977. His autobiography is Charlie Chaplin's reflection on his impoverished childhood and his journey to becoming an icon of the movie industry. External Website

Television Shows Wire in the Blood 2002 Wire in the Blood is a British crime television servies based on characters created by Scottish writter Val McDermid and including Tony Hill, a clinical pyschologist. In Series 6, Episode 2 - Falls the Shadow - a young man who grew up in the kinship care of his grandfather is the killer. There are two other peripheral representations of Care Experienced People, both sensitively drawn. One young man is in a residential unit and Tony Hill encourages staff to treat him better. Another young man killed at the age of 11. He was released from prison aged 15, but kills himself. External Website

Children's Fiction Watch over me Nina LaCour 2020 The young adult novel follows Mila, an 18-year-old who has aged out of foster care and takes an internship on a remote farm. The farm’s couple, Julia and Terry, and the other children provide her with a chance at community and belonging. Haunted by both literal ghosts and memories of past neglect, Mila must confront her trauma. The farm is a metaphor for community, the setting a place to explore trauma, care, and healing. External Website

Authors G Goodwood ➝ Half A World Away ➝ A Small Quiet Dark ➝ Cousins ➝ A Room Made of Leaves ➝ Bitter Wash Road ➝ Secrets of the Sea House ➝ Lord of the Flies (novel) ➝ The Chess Raven Chronicles ➝ Lessons in Chemistry ➝ Swimming for beginners ➝ The Buried Life ➝ The Forgotten Home Child ➝ Back to Top

Performing Arts British Singer Mo Jamil Mo Jamil Adeniran (born 25 September 1995) is an British singer. He was born in Nigeria but grew up in Warrington, Cheshire. He was adopted as a three-year-old, but because his adoptive mother was abusive, he was removed from her at the age of eight and went into foster care. Mo Jamil rose to fame after winning the sixth series of The Voice UK, where he won a recording contract with Polydor Records. His debut album, titled Evolve, charted at number 36 on the UK Album Charts. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Theodore's story - Coram Story #realstoriesofcare Theodore Barrow 2021 Theodore Barrow was admitted to the Foundling Hospital in February 1760 at just three weeks old. This blog is part of Coram's #RealStoriesOfCare series External Website

Television Shows The Lost Children 2006 With Hudson Mills, Beatrice Joblin, Rhys Castle-Hughes, Mikaela Devitt. Ethan and his sister Amy are travelling by ship from England with their mother Charlotte, to join their father, who has gone ahead of them to establish the family farm. A storm hits, their vessel begins to take on water, and the captain issues the order to abandon ship. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Ash Museum Rebecca Smith 2021 1944. The Battle of Kohima. James Ash dies leaving behind two families: his ‘wife’ Josmi and two children, Jay and Molly, and his parents and sister in England who know nothing about his Indian family. After the death of James, the English family step in and send Jay and Molly to boarding school in England. Josmi dies and the children never see their mother again. Later in the novel as teenagers they come to London to live with Jucinda who is a friend of their aunt. 2012. Emmie is raising her own daughter, Jasmine, in a world she wants to be very different from the racist England of her childhood. Her father, Jay, doesn’t even have a photograph of the mother he lost and still refuses to discuss his life in India. Emmie, whose mother dies when she was young, finds comfort in the local museum – a treasure trove of another family’s stories and artefacts. Little does Emmie know that with each generation, her own story holds secrets and fascinations that she could only dream of. Through ten decades and across three continents, The Ash Museum is an intergenerational story of loss, migration and the search for somewhere to feel at home. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Fraud Zadie Smith 2023 Zadie Smith's historical novel contains Care Experienced characters, guess this is inevitable given the period in which The Fraud (2023) is set, A key witness in the Tichborne case - central to the story - is Andrew Bogle, a servant of the Tichborne’s. Andrew Bogle’s father was trafficked to Jamaica as a 9-year-old child we find out in an extended discussion of Bogle’s history. Eliza Touchet, cousin of and housekeeper to novelist William Ainsworth, is key to The Fraud. She finds out that 2 of her dead husband’s grandchildren have grown up in a Barnardo’s home. More famous Care Experienced characters are Charles Dickens and William Thackeray, part of Ainsworth’s (and therefore Eliza Touchet’s) literary circle. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir The Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau Jean Jacques Rousseau 2018 Thought of as the first modern autobiography; in his Confessions Jean-Jacques Rousseau tells the story of his life, from the formative experience of his humble childhood in kinship care and then in foster care, through the achievement of international fame as novelist and philosopher in Paris, to his wanderings as an exile, persecuted by governments and alienated from the world of modern civilization. In trying to explain who he was and how he came to be the object of others' admiration and abuse, Rousseau analyses with unique insight the relationship between an elusive but essential inner self and the variety of social identities he was led to adopt. Rousseau was seen as being radical and was anti verbal lessons and instruction he believed children learnt by experience alone, which encouraged thought. Instruction is bad because it is not natural. Children should be guided how to learn for themselves. In the book (Emile) he wrote about the right way to raise children, and yet he sent all his own children, five of them to the Paris Foundling Hospital immediately upon birth. He never knew or even saw them. He says that at the time he was not troubled by his conscience and the only reason he did not boast openly of his actions was to save the feelings of his mistress (the mother), who did not agree with the decision. He claimed abandoning one’s children at the Foundling Hospital was “the custom of the country” as told by the “fundamentally decent” men at the dining establishments he frequented. He regarded children as a considerable inconvenience, abandoning them was a socially acceptable way to relieve oneself of it, problem solved. Rousseau eventually was troubled by his conscience about the way he had disposed of his children. He considered making a public confession at the start of Emile, but thought better of it. A baby at the Paris Foundling Hospital had only a two thirds chance of surviving its first year and only a five percent chance of reaching maturity. These are facts which Rousseau could have determined without much difficulty if he had bothered to find. This brings into question his thoughts about children when he had so little love, compassion and caring for his own. External Website

Authors O David O'Brien ➝ Back to Top

Authors B Blindspot ➝ Borgen ➝ Back ➝ Ballard ➝ Bones ➝ Black Earth Rising ➝ Based on a True Story ➝ Birdsong ➝ Bosch: Legacy ➝ BBC Two - Neil Morrissey: Care Home Kid, Episode 1 ➝ Boy Swallows Universe (television series) ➝ Black Butterflies ➝ Belgravia ➝ Bordertown ➝ Bad Sisters ➝ Bad Monkey ➝ Bodkin ➝ Breaking the Silence: Britain's Adoption Scandal ➝ Blood ➝ Blackshore ➝ Bridgerton ➝ Bergerac ➝ Bodies ➝ Berlin Station ➝ Baptiste ➝ Bosch ➝ Back to Top

Fiction Featuring Care Experience Juice Tim Winton 2024 Juice (2024) by Australian writer Tim Winton is a dystopian climate novel set in a future Australia ravaged by extreme heat & where outdoor living is nearly impossible. The novel follows an unnamed man, the narrator, who travels with a silent girl as they pass through desolate landscapes searching for a safe place. The young girl travelling with the narrator is not his biological daughter but rather is a child he picks up on the road and takes under his protection. She acts as his ward (he does have a daughter Esther but she is not with him) and represents both a burden & a glimmer of hope for the future. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters Parragirls: Reimagining Parramatta Girls Home through art and memory Bonney Djuric 2019 Parragirls profiles the transformative artwork Parragirlsrealised in collaboration with contemporary artists and communities since theParragirls Memory Project began in 2012. This vividly illustrated book revealshow art can change places and perceptions, in this case the long-neglected siteof Parramatta Girls Home in Western Sydney, located on the lands of theBurramattagal people of the Darug nation. Centred on the art and activism of itsformer residents, this is the first publication of its kind to use images andcreative writing to open up the difficult spaces of an Australian former childwelfare institution, one where significant abuse took place right up until itsclosure in 1974, as evidenced in the royal commission into child sexual abuse. 'Parragirls is an impressive book that serves as both an art publication and a record of social change. As an enduring testament to the experiences of the Parragirls – a collective of former residents of Parramatta Girls Home, where abuse and cruelty were rife – it charts the work of the Parragirls Memory Project across seven years of visual art, performance, events, exhibitions, writing, advocacy and activism...Parragirls is able to deliver something that is at once rigorous in its detailed presentation of a clear model, and accessible through its compelling narrative.' ― Eugenia Flynn, The Saturday Paper External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Switherby Pilgrims Eleanor Spence 2005 In 1825, concerned for the future of her ten orphan charges in the grim factory towns of their native England, Miss Arabella Braithewaite, known to the children as Missabella, decides to take a land grant in Australia and makes the long, daunting journey with her wards to the austere bush country of New South Wales. External Website

Radio & Podcast The Songwriter: Willie Nelson American Masters Willie Nelson (b. 1933) is a superstar of country music (“Red Headed Stranger,” “Shotgun Willie,” “Stardust”). His mother left soon after he was born, and his father remarried and also moved away, leaving Nelson and his sister Bobbie to be raised by their grandparents, who taught singing back in Arkansas and started their grandchildren in music. Nelson reinvented the country music as one of the founding fathers of outlaw country, forging a style of music that went against the convention of its time. Filmmaker Steven Cantor sat down with Willie to talk about how he got his start in this 2002 interview. External Website

Writers Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Writer) Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911) was born in Baltimore, Maryland and orphaned at the age of 3. She was then raised by her maternal aunt and uncle. Frances was much influenced by her uncle as the Reverend Watkins was a civil rights activist and abolitionist as well as a Methodist minister and founder of the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth. Frances took up paid work as a 13-year-old; she read and wrote in her spare time. She began publishing poems in anti-slavery journals in 1839. Her first collection of poetry was published in 1845, when she was only 20 years of age, making Francis Watkins one of the first African-American women to be published in the USA. In 1850, Frances moved to Columbus, Ohio to teach (domestic science) at Union Seminary. She was the first female teacher at the school. 3 years later, Watkins joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and gave many speeches while travelling for 8 years nationally and in Canada. She also wrote for anti-slavery newspapers—and for some she is the ‘mother’ of African American journalism—while helping slaves escape via the Underground Railroad. Watkins - who married Fenton Harper in 1860 - also became involved in the women's rights and temperance movements. She published her first (of three) novels in 1869. External Website

Films/Videos Star Wars (film series) 1977 Luke Skywalker (played by Mark Hamill in 6 films & 2 tv series) is a character in the Star Wars film franchise created by American filmmaker George Lucas (b. 1944). Luke Skywalker is the protagonist of the original trilogy of films and also appears in the sequel trilogy. Princess Leia Organa (often considered a 1980s feminist hero) is also one of the main characters in the Star Wars franchise, played by Carrie Fisher. Luke Skywalker & Princess Leia were twins born to Padme Amidala of Naboo. Their father is Darth Vader. Separated at birth, Luke grew up with Owen and Beru Lars on a farm on Tatooine. Leia was adopted into the Royal Family of Aderaan. British poet Lemn Sissay has long drawn attention to Luke Skywalker as one of many fictional characters who were displaced from family as children, see for example https://www.tiktok.com/@c4news/video/7279069273392188705 External Website

Actors Tommy Davidson Thomas "Tommy" Davidson was born (November 10, 1963) in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. He is an American comedian, film and television actor. He was an original cast member on the sketch comedy TV show In Living Colour. As a baby, Tommy’s birth mother literally threw him behind a garbage can and left him there. His adoptive mother, Barbara Jean Davidson said that she had a feeling to look behind the public trash can in the alley and she spied a toddler’s foot poking out from behind a tire in a pile of garbage in Greenville, Miss., From there she took him to the hospital where they didn’t know if he would live or die. Davidson says: “I was damaged pretty bad. I had contusions in my skull, was scarred. The doctors didn’t even know if I was going to live.” Following his adoption by a white family in 1966, they moved state to state until he was about 5 years old when they moved to the East Coast, Washington, DC at one of the most racially volatile times in American history–two days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr was shot and killed. It was after this that he experienced childhood incidents of racial abuse from both white and black people. What he says about his upbring was that: “The love that I got didn’t have any color.” Davidson met his birth mother in 1998 when he was performing in Wisconsin, where she lived, and invited her and her family to the show. He calls the reunion “an out-of-body experience,” but found it difficult to “acknowledge her as my mother.” He learned that Gene already had three other children before him and was struggling with addiction. She managed to turn her life around and now works as a minister traveling around the country giving sermons. After some intense conversations, Davidson says he was able to forgive her. “Because I realized that she didn’t abandon me on purpose,” he writes. “She had no control over what she was doing … What I learned was that a person can do the most awful thing imaginable — abandon her child — and still heal herself … Forgiveness can be powerful.” External Website

Television Shows The Bletchley Circle 2012 The Bletchley Circle (2012-2014) is a British mystery series. Set in the early 1950s, it has 4 women who had worked as codebreakers at Bletchley Park come back together to solve crimes. In Series 2, episodes 1 & 2 revolve around a 17 year old adoptee, Lizzy Lancaster (Faye Marsay). She has recently reunited with her biological father, a distinguished scientist (Paul McGann). Her biological mother (Hattie Morahan) has been convicted of his murder. External Website