Stolen as a baby ... found 60 years laterJOHN HUXLEY
September 6, 2009
Gathering together the missing pieces of her life ... Gladys Palmer, who was kidnapped aged 18 months from her home in Lithgow and taken to England to live. Years later, she discovered her father was still alive and she had two sisters in Australia.
BEFORE the mysterious disappearance two years ago of English toddler Madeleine McCann and before the dramatic recovery of American girl Jaycee Lee Dugard from her kidnapper, Phillip Garrido, there was the extraordinary case of Australian woman Gladys Palmer.
"It's the sort of stuff you could write a book or make a movie about," said David Sayers, of Gwandalan on the Central Coast, who has spent several years with family and friends on either side of the world trying to piece together Gladys's story.
"It's got everything."
Wars. Sudden deaths. Broken marriages. Scattered families. Secret documents. Intrigue. Cruelty. Duplicity. Discovery and, at its heart, a kidnapping – which, said Mr Sayers, "reminds us that you should never give up looking for missing kids".
In 1917 Gladys was born in Katoomba to Henry Victor Palmer and his wife, Janie. The family of four daughters, of which Gladys was the third, soon moved to Lithgow, where Henry – known to all as Sonny – opened a tailor's shop.
Within a year, Janie died, a victim of Spanish flu. "Suddenly, Sonny is left with four girls under six and a business to run," Mr Sayers said. The youngest girl also died. After answering an advertisement, the shadowy Mrs Johnston was employed as a live-in nanny. The Englishwoman had separated from her Australian husband after an ill-considered wartime wedding.
"One day, in 1919, after Sonny had gone to work, [Mrs Johnston] packed the two older girls off to school, and took Gladys, then about 18 months, away. Just disappeared. Probably on a train to Sydney."
Only many years later was Gladys – who died two years ago, four days short of her 90th birthday – able to recall some of her Australian childhood.
"Much of it seems to have been spent hopping from boarding house to boarding house in Sydney," explained Mr Sayers, her distant cousin. "Mrs Johnston never stayed in one place too often. She was always looking over her shoulder."
Eventually, she must have concluded that Australia was not for her. "She wrote back to a brother in England, explaining her marriage had ended, she had a small child, and would he pay their passage home." Gladys and her "mother" moved to Birmingham.
Mr Sayers, who now corresponds regularly with Gladys's son, Philip, in Birmingham, can only speculate why no one went looking for her.
"Sonny went to the police, but we don't know how hard he looked. Then again, communications were poor. The media didn't spring into action over missing kids, like now. People didn't need passports."
Gladys knew no better. "I think she was probably told: 'The other two sisters are dead, there's only us." She accepted that, and called Mrs Johnston 'mummy2019;. If she did confront her, the old lady probably just clammed up."
Mr Sayers says Mrs Johnston was a severe, stand-offish woman, who occasionally put her "daughter" in local orphanages when she tired of the responsibility of rearing her.
Several times, Mrs Johnston must have come close to revealing her awful secret. Gladys's birth certificate was required when in the 1940s she defied her "mother" to marry. Mrs Johnston told the authorities that the paperwork had been lost in a fire during the wartime blitz.
It was more than 20 years later that Gladys learned the truth, when the ageing Mrs Johnston needed to produce paperwork of her own before being admitted to a nursing home. "Gladys was given the key to a chest that always stayed locked under Mrs Johnston's bed.
"So she gets in there and finds all sorts of stuff, including the fact that she was a Palmer, born in Australia. You can imagine the shock."
It took another decade of searching before Gladys, with the help of Australia House, made contact with her Sydney relatives through a long-distance call to Mr Sayers's mother, Betty. "She said, 'It's Gladys Palmer here, I . . .' and mum just went, 'Oh, Gladys, we know all about you.' "
She made the trip to Australia, visiting Katoomba, Lithgow and Sydney, catching up with her two sisters, the Sayers family and even her father, Sonny, by then an old man of 92 living in New Zealand.
"We made a great fuss of her. She became one of us. We were able to show her what she'd missed out on," said Mr Sayers. "She even started talking with an Aussie accent again."
There are still gaps in what her extended family call the Gladys Story, but facts continue to be found. "The point is," says Mr Sayers, "people can be spirited away and they can be found many years later."
http://www.smh.com.au/national/stolen-as-a-baby--found-60-years-later-20090905-fc46.html
