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Authors P Neil Morrissey's rags to riches tale of growing up in Stoke-on-Trent care home ➝ I wasn't told why I was taken into care. For years I thought it was my fault ➝ Children in care are not just numbers: we must challenge the stigma ➝ Neil Morrissey revisits his children's home roots ➝ Benjamin Perks: Blogsite ➝ Back to Top

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Packing Like a Fury Tessa Hadley 2025 On 26 March 1965 Canadian writer Mavis Gallant’s short story “Orphans’ Progress” was published in The New Yorker. “Orphans’ Progress” in only 6 pages tells the story of the Collier sisters who, when they are six & ten and living in Montreal, are removed from their widowed mother and sent to live with their grandmother in Ontario. One of the well-meaning social workers who removed the girls says “I won’t forget the screams of Mildred when she was dragged out that pigsty.” The girls don’t recall the dirt; they do remember their mother’s art and that their own drawings were on the wall too. Cathie & Mildred learn that French is inferior – their mother is French-Canadian. Their grandmother speaks English. Mildred is adopted and by the time the girls are grown up they hardly know each other. “Orphans’ Progress” was published in “The Uncollected Stories of Mavis Gallant” in January 2025. The book is reviewed by Tessa Hadley for the London Review of Books, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n06/tessa-hadley/packing-like-a-fury External Website

Authors N The Truth about My Fathers ➝ Bridge Across My Sorrows ➝ Twelve Years a Slave ➝ Half and Half: The Memoirs of a Charity Brat 1908-1989 ➝ The Fish Ladder: A Journey Upstream ➝ Acceptance: A Memoir ➝ Banana Boy ➝ Back to Top

Authors W Wuthering Heights ➝ Poe's Cat ➝ Every Good Deed and Other Stories ➝ The Underground Railroad (novel) ➝ The Dictionary of Lost Words ➝ Extinctions ➝ Swallow the Air ➝ The Lost Girls of Willowbrook ➝ Marriages ➝ Winter Sonata ➝ Morvern Callar ➝ All the Colors of the Dark ➝ The Nickel Boys ➝ Time of the Child ➝ The Yellow Papers ➝ Before We Were Yours ➝ What She Left Behind ➝ The Echoes ➝ My Name Is Leon ➝ One Christmas Night ➝ The Nowhere Child ➝ The Picture of Dorian Gray ➝ Orphan Rock ➝ The Yield ➝ The Life She Was Given ➝ Coal River ➝ Back to Top

Poetry Blackberry's Child Joy Williams 1991 Poems on various subjects including, family, race relations and removal of children; includes brief biography of author and her removal from her mother early. External Website

Authors C Jack Maggs ➝ The Mousetrap ➝ Back to Top

Writers Jim Tully 1886-1947 Jim Tully (1886 – 1947) was a vagabond, pugilist, and American writer. After six years in an orphanage, Jim Tully's formal education ened but he loved reading and books kept him company as he lived the live of a 'road-kid'. He hung out in libraries where it was warm and dry, and was particularly fond of reading Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoyevsky & Honore' de Balzac. After a succession of working class jobs, Tully was encouraged by many to become a writer and he became an influential Hollywood journalist for 20 years from 1924, and published around 14 books. Tully is regarded by some as the originator of "hard boiled" fiction. External Website

Films/Videos The Grinch 2000 Jim Carrey is The Grinch (2000) - a Christmas-hating Grinch who wants everyone as miserable at Christmas as he is. (As a baby, Grinch was adopted by two elderly sisters.) With Christmas approaching, a bungled attempt by the Grinch to ruin a tree-lighting ceremony results in him having a flashback about his disjointed childhood spent alone and unwanted in an orphanage. The Grinch soon decides that he will steal Christmas from Whoville to assuage his distress. He learns the true meaning of Christmas through the loving Whos in Whoville. External Website

Biography of Care Experienced People Tracker Alexis Wright 2017 Stolen Generations legendary figure, Tracker Tilmouth, is the subject of this collective biography by award-winning writer, Alexis Wright. Alexis Wright used an Aboriginal way of storytelling, allowing others she interviewed to have their own say in the biography. Tracker Tilmouth (1954-2015) grew up on the Croker Island Mission from the age of 4 until he went to high school in Darwin, Northern Territory. In Darwin he was moved around between residential facilities and foster care. After he got his Bachelor of Agricultural Science degree in 1991, he worked for the Central Land Council supporting Aboriginal Australians who run cattle stations. External Website

Writers Joseph Conrad 1857-1924 Joseph Conrad (1857 – 1924) was a Polish-British writer regarded as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born in the Ukraine to Polish parents. Josef was seven when his mother died. For three years, his father, a poet, translator, publisher and political exile, looked after the small boy, reading him Polish poetry and teaching him Maths and French. But in 1869 he died too. Eleven year old Josef was taken in by his maternal grandmother. He went to a local school for a couple of years, but boarded at the school. When Joseph was 15, his maternal uncle Tadeus Bobrowski became his guardian - by correspondence though, they rarely saw each other. At age 16, Joseph was off, exploring the world as a sailor. Joseph Conrad took up writing in his 30s. He says he suddenly sat down one day at breakfast and began drafting his first book, which he worked on for a number of years. He sent the manuscript to publisher T.F.Unwin in 1894 when he was in London and looking for another job aboard a ship. That same year, 1894, his uncle Tadeus died, leaving Conrad enough money to commence his send book and to write for a year without the pressure of having to work full time. By the time of his death at 66 Joseph Conrad was recognised as one of the greatest writers in the English language. External Website

Actors Adam Beach Adam Beach (born November 11, 1972) is an Aboriginal Canadian actor. Adam Beach was born on the Dog Creek Reserve near Ashern in Manitoba, Canada. Adam’s parents, Sally and Dennis Beach, died within forty-one days of each other. Adam and his brothers first went to live in Winnipeg with their paternal aunt. Five years later, they began living their paternal uncle, Chris Beach. Adam Beach became interested in drama during High School and he didn’t complete his final year. However, he did find work in film and television. Most recently he has starred in Hostiles (2017) as Black Hawk, and the Netflix original film, Juanita (2019) as Jess Gardiner. External Website

Academic Books & Book Chapters UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945-1970: A Study in Policy Failure Gordon Lynch 2021 This book offers an unprecedented analysis of child welfare schemes, situating them in the wider context of post-war policy debates about the care of children. Between 1945 and 1970, an estimated 3,500 children were sent from Britain to Australia, unaccompanied by their parents, through child migration schemes funded by the Australian and British Governments and delivered by churches, religious orders and charities. Functioning in a wider history of the migration of unaccompanied children to overseas British colonies, the post-war schemes to Australia have become the focus of public attention through a series of public reports in Britain and Australia that have documented the harm they caused to many child migrants.Whilst addressing the wide range of organisations involved, the book focuses particularly on knowledge, assumptions and decisions within UK Government Departments and asks why these schemes continued to operate in the post-war period despite often failing to adhere to standards of child-care set out in the influential 1946 Curtis Report. External Website

Films/Videos The Secret Life of Bees (film) 2008 The Secret Life of Bees (2002) by Sue Monk Kidd was adapted for film in 2008. The film tells the story of a 14-year-old white girl who runs away from her home and searches out information about her mother. She ends up in the informal care of a Black woman, August Boatwright. With a stellar cast including Queen Latifah as August Boatwright and Dakota Fanning as Lily Owens, the film won the Favorite Movie Drama & Favorite Independent awards at the 35th People’s Choice Awards. The film also received 7 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) Awards, including Outstanding Motion Picture. External Website

Autobiography/Memoir My Turn: An Autobiography Norman Wisdom 2003 My Turn. Memoirs by Norman Wisdom With William Hall. The story of Norman Wisdom who was in foster care as a child and as a 14 year old was working as a cabin boy on a cargo ship heading to Argentina. Norman Wisdom's early years could easily have come straight from the pages of a Dickens novel. Left by their frightened mother, ill-treated by a brutal father, Norman and his brother were forced to fend for themselves, sleeping rough in London and stealing food to survive. (William Hall, who assisted Norman Wisdom in the writing of his life story, is a biographer, broadcaster and critic. He is the author of more than a dozen biographies, including Michael Caine, James Dean, Frankie Howerd, Larry Adler and Dick Emery.) External Website

Films/Videos Seriously Funny [the story of Corey White] 2015 The story of Corey White. The son of a hustling, drug-addicted mother and a violent father, Corey spent much of his childhood in foster care. As a young man Corey pulled himself out of drug addiction. His salvation - comedy mining his traumatic past to create a biting and hilarious stand-up act. External Website

Authors R singer, songwriter, record producer, composer ➝ Australian singer-songwriter ➝ Actor, producer ➝ Back to Top

Children's Fiction The Wonderful Wizard of Oz L Frank Baum 1900 In The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) by L. Frank Baum, Dorothy Gale's parents are not mentioned and it's unclear what happened to them. Dorothy is an orphan who lives with Aunt Em & Uncle Henry on a farm in Kansas but it's unclear if they are blood relatives (kinship care) or a foster family. After a cyclone she and her dog, Toto, are propelled into the magical Land of Oz. Dorothy is told by the Good Witch of the North that the way home is via the yellow brick road to the Emerald City where she can ask the Wizard of Oz for help. External Website

Fiction featuring Care Experience The Puppet Show M.W. Craven 2018 The Puppet Show (2018) by MW Craven has a detective called Washington Poe, inspired by Edgar Allan Poe (who was in foster care as a child). Washington Poe is a disgraced detective, brought back to work at the National Crime Agency to locate a serial killer known as the Immolation Man. There are several Care Experienced Characters in the novel, including Tilly Bradshaw who works as an analyst for National Crime Agency. . External Website

Children's Non-fiction Alan Turing Maria Isabel Sanchez Vegara 2020 Alan Turing (1912-1954) was an English computer scientist and mathematician. As a child he was in foster care for much of his first 10 years. Alan grew up in England, where his best friends were numbers and a little boy called Christopher. When his young friend died, Alan retreated to the world of numbers and codes, where he discovered how to crack the code of the Nazi Enigma machine. This moving book features stylish and quirky illustrations and extra facts at the back, including a biographical timeline with historical photos and a detailed profile of the brilliant mathematician's life. External Website

Blogs/Web Pages/Articles Orphan's role in movie upsets adoption groups David Crary 2009 Often divided over policy and practice, America's adoption community has unified in dismay over Orphan, a horror movie some say will fuel negative attitudes toward real-life orphans. External Website