HEARTBREAK Of Divided Greenock Family Features On BBC DocumentaryA BBC documentary tonight (Tuesday) tells the story of a Greenock family of 17 siblings which was split up by the welfare system with little or no contact, many of them growing up in heart-breaking circumstances.
In the 1950s and 1960s successive children from the Clark family, in Greenock, were taken into care when their mother was deemed to be unfit by the authorities.
Three children went to a croft in the Highlands into what, as a surviving brother testifies in the programme, amounted to modern-day slavery. They were under-fed and frequently beaten.
Many of the other siblings ended up in adoptive homes or institutions across Scotland, often knowing nothing or very little about their other brothers and sisters. Some died in infancy, buried in unmarked graves.
Ian Savage (born Peter Fleming Clark), Bernard Clark, Joan Clark, Iain McLean (born David Clark) and James Clark. Ian Savage was adopted out locally and Bernard and Joan were fostered together in the Greenock. They didn’t know each other growing up but now are in close contact, all living in the Inverclyde area. Iain McLean, who was adopted out, now lives in Argyll, and James Clark, who was fostered out and in care, now lives in Stockport.
Only now as they reach retirement age, after years battling with the authorities to get information, have the surviving siblings begun to uncover their collective history and reunite.
The hour-long documentary –A Family Divided — is on BBC Two Scotland at 9pm. It follows a number of the Clark brothers and sisters as they bid to put the remaining parts of their family jigsaw together and try to find the last two of their long-lost siblings.
