A 34-year secret shrouded in shame paved the way to teach children about the horrors of our past

Madeleine Bridget Walsh was 17 years old in the spring of 1960, when she discovered she was pregnant. Terrified of bringing shame upon her family, she determined to leave home and applied to Miss Brophy’s Catholic Employment Bureau, an agency that arranged work placements for Irish girls in England. Miss Brophy’s agreed to pay Madeleine’s fare to London and secured a position for her as a housekeeper in the home of a Jewish family in Golders Green.

As Madeleine’s pregnancy progressed, she began to make desperate plans for her labour. Alone and afraid, she couldn’t bear the thought of presenting herself to a doctor and decided that the best course of action would be to go down into a tube station: a warm, dry place to give birth, where she could wait to be found and brought to hospital. But as her belly began to swell, Madeleine realised she would have to make arrangements much sooner. With nowhere else to turn, she went to St Edward the Confessor Roman Catholic Church in Golders Green and told the parish priest that she was pregnant. To her surprise, he seemed unfazed by her confession and she realised that he must have been accustomed to dealing with Irish girls in her “condition”.

As she spoke about the circumstances of her son William’s birth and death, it was clear that, though more than 60 years had passed, the pain and trauma of those terrible weeks was as acute as ever

The priest gave her the address of The Crusade of Rescue, a charitable organisation with its headquarters in Ladbroke Grove. Founded in 1859 to provide residential care for poor Catholic children, the organisation had since shifted focus and become a registered adoption agency. From the 1930s to the 1970s, The Crusade of Rescue was involved in the repatriation from Britain of pregnant Irish women in order to have their children placed for adoption.