John was born in December 1926, and went to the Foundling Hospital in Redhill in 1932 and moved with the school to Berkhamsted in 1935. Upon leaving the school, John joined a military band and then the army. John had a large family of his own, and lived in Essex.
Early Life
‘My earliest memories were with my foster mother, living with my foster mother in Kent. And it was a very wonderful part of the country to have been brought up in because it was right in the middle of the garden of England and, I had a very very pleasant time. And in fact when my mother– my foster mother, took me to the– the Redhill school, that was a… a very big wrench in my young life and I think it affected me for quite a long time … I didn’t realise of course at the time that my– my foster mother wasn’t my real mother, so it was like taking a child from my mo– from his mother and dumping him in this ancient and quite forbidding place really.’
School Life: Discipline
‘Discipline was very, very hard, but again over the years you got used to it and it was accepted, you thought everybody else was doing the same thing in every other school. So there was nothing really odd about it … bad behaviour, really bad behaviour was the cane across the backside. For minor misbehaving was was strokes on the hand, but sometimes you’d take three on that hand, and three on that so you got six [laughs] and it really, they really did hurt, and it was certainly an inducement not to offend again.’
School Life: Food
‘You knew exactly on Monday, exactly what the meal was going to be, you knew on Tuesday what the meal was going to be … it was quite a good menu of food really but it was the same every week, what you had last week you knew you were going to get this week… few changes.’
Search for Birth Families
‘I know that I belonged to somebody… whereas before I didn’t belong to anybody, and I really wasn’t worried who I belonged to, but now… I’ve got a photograph over there with her family, and… I’ve accepted her for what she was, a very caring person, and… it’s given me, having met the– her children apart from the one that lives in Spain, a girl… they welcome me with open arms once they– they realised that I had proved that I was who I said I was… and it’s given me a family that I never knew existed, and this is wonderful, even at this late stage in the proceedings. Quite amazing.‘
