For nine years adoptive father of four Roger Fenton has been compiling a list of famous and influential people whose lives have been touched by adoption, fostering or the care system in some way.

Adoption-net will be carrying a selection of the entries from his database.

Dame Peggy Ashcroft 1907-91

British actress

Dame Peggy was German Jewish and Danish on her mother's side and English on her father's side. Both her parents (Violetta and William) died before she was 20.

She began acting before her parents died, and soon became one of the best-known actresses in the world. She won an Oscar for her role in A Passage to India.

Her other films included Madame Sousatzka, When the Wind Blows, Joseph Andrews, Sunday, Bloody Sunday. Three into Two Won't Go, The Nun's Story, and The 39 Steps.

An alternative to the official biography says that Violetta and William were not her birth parents, but that William was the cousin of her birth mother, Elizabeth Ashcroft, an unmarried waitress, that her birth father was Francis Roberts, a naval officer, and that Peggy was adopted to hide the shame of her illegitimacy.

This version was reportedly confided by Elizabeth to her daughter, Mary (Elizabeth and Francis later married and had three more children), who claims to be Peggy's full sister.

According to Mary, Dame Peggy herself knew the situation for many years but never acknowledged it publicly.
[Last updated: 9 February 1998]

References:
O'Connor, Garry. The Secret Woman: A Life of Peggy Ashcroft. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1997)
O'Connor, Garry. "Is This Woman Peggy Ashcroft's Secret Sister?" Daily Mail [London], 6 January 1998, p. 9
Oxford Companion to the Theatre. 4th edition, edited by Phyllis Hartnoll. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983)
Cambridge Guide to Theatre, edited by Martin Banham. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1

Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children, 20th century

For several decades in the middle of the 20th century the Australian government operated a deliberate policy of cultural genocide, taking young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and placing them in boarding schools or with white foster and adoptive families.

The children were forcibly removed, often kidnapped without their parents' knowledge, let alone consent, even from their own front yards or encampments.

They were indoctrinated with white culture in an attempt to make them think and act like whites, with the ultimate intention of wiping out the Aboriginal people by intermarriage and acculturation.

The plan failed, partly because the children refused to acquiesce, partly because even when they thought and acted like whites the whites rejected them, partly because a number of the children went insane under the pressure.

There is currently a lukewarm attempt being made by the Australian government to find out what happened to these children, often called the Stolen Generation, and to reunite families.

The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people themselves have established a organization, Link Up, to reunite separated families. Some of these people appear elsewhere in this list:

A very similar, if marginally less harsh, policy was operated by the US government against Native American children, and with the same outcome.

Both countries had previously tried simply to exterminate their native peoples by poisoning and shooting, and similar policies have been pursued by many other colonizing powers in attempts to rid their lands of troublesome "savages" by assimilation or genocide.

In addition, the Swiss government connived in the Kinder der Landstraße scandal from 1926 to 1973, when Roma children were stolen from their families.
[Last updated: 2 June 1999]

References:
"Re: Whitewashing 'BLACKNESS'/Human Rights Down under the USA." Available at: http://www.msstate.edu/listarchives/afrigeneas/199705/msg00411.html [Last visited: 9 June 1999]
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. ATSIC Submission to the National Inquiry into the Separation of
"Grants & Outside Funds: Stolen Generations Project," NARU News, 45 (July-October 1995). Also available at: http://online.anu.edu.au/naru/nn-45.htm [Last visited: 11 October 1999]

John Victor Aspinall ("Aspers"), 1926-2000

British casino and zoo owner

Aspinall was adopted by a British Indian Army colonel as a very young child and spent most of his childhood in English boarding schools.

He was expelled from Cambridge University for faking illness before his final examinations in order to go to the horse races at Ascot.

He made and lost fortunes in gambling, owned four exclusive London casinos: the Clermont Club, Aspinall's Club, the Aspinall Curzon Club and Aspinall's; and had two private zoos in Kent, Port Lympne Zoo Park and Howlett's Zoo Park, which have seen a number of maulings and accidents to keepers and visitors, including five fatalities.

He, together with the brothers Sir James and Teddy Goldsmith, founded the Ecological Foundation and its magazine, The Ecologist, in 1972.
[Last updated: 2 July 2000]

References:
d'Souza, Christa. "The King of Clubs," Sunday Times [London], 25 October 1992, p. 5/5
Aspinall, John. The Best of Friends. (London: Macmillan, 1976)
Who's Who, 1998

Compiled by and copyright of Roger Fenton. Details of how to buy the compilation are available on Roger's website. Also available is Roger's e-book Adopting a Child in Britain

Roger is always on the lookout for new entries so if you come across them e-mail them to him.

See also