The Death of Illegitimacy
Seriously...
BBC
4.1 • 885 Ratings
🗓️ 9 February 2018
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Illegitimacy once meant you were a 'bastard'. The MP Caroline Flint wants to know what the word 'illegitimate' means now.
Caroline has always been open about her unmarried Mum having her when she was 17 years old and that she had her first son before she got married. Caroline describes her own family's story as a Catherine Cookson novel. There are suspicions that her widowed great-grandmother had an illegitimate child. Her grandmother's older sister had an illegitimate child during WW1 with an American soldier who was brought up as though his mother was his sister.
She explores the archives to find out if the stigma has died out with social historian Jane Robinson and discusses the issue with best-selling crime author Martina Cole and fellow MP Jess Phillips. Martina, who is also an ambassador for the single parent families' charity Gingerbread, became a single parent by choice when she was 18 and then again 20 years later. Jess conceived her son when she was 22 and had been with her boyfriend for barely a month.
Is the biggest deal today not whether a child is illegitimate but whether she bears her father's surname? Has the cloak of illegitimacy really fallen because daddy is willing to say publicly: she's mine?
This programme contains archive clips of the stories of Betty, Ada and Gina from 'The Secret World of Sex: In Disgrace' (1991), sourced from Domino Films, copyright of Testimony Films - http://www.testimonyfilms.com/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box. |
| 0:05.0 | The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from. |
| 0:09.0 | And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.0 | The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape. |
| 0:12.5 | The IRA inmates who found a way. |
| 0:14.5 | I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path |
| 0:19.5 | through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history. |
| 0:25.0 | The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them. |
| 0:28.5 | Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:34.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:40.0 | Hi, I'm Riana Dylan, and this is seriously. |
| 0:45.0 | I was being sick in the morning, and my mother said, what's the matter with you? |
| 0:49.0 | I said, oh, I haven't a clue. |
| 0:51.0 | So she says, what have you been doing? I said nothing. She says |
| 0:54.4 | Ade you've been up to something. She says there's something upsetting you and it's |
| 0:59.3 | making you sick every morning. She says are you you pregnant? And I said, what's pregnant? |
| 1:05.0 | That's Ada. In 1928, she was 19. She was pregnant, unmarried, and punished for it. |
| 1:14.0 | But times have changed. |
| 1:16.0 | This happened in 1987. |
| 1:19.0 | In the House of Lords, they're debating a bill to end legal discrimination against 4 million British people, |
| 1:25.6 | the illegitimate. |
| 1:27.6 | Today's seriously interesting story is brought to us by Caroline Flint. She's a member of parliament here in the UK, |
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