Why Was a Nine Month Old Girl Left on a Hillside to Die, with Her Hands Tied

Why Was a Nine-Month-Old Girl Left on a Hillside to Die, with Her Hands Tied?

Why was a nine-month-old girl left on a hillside to die with her hands tied? In the summer of 1937, a family of holidaymakers suddenly found a nine-month-old girl hidden in a bush with her hands tied. Now, Anthea Ring is an 80-year-old woman who has spent all her life looking for the answers to where her parents were and why they left her to die. Thanks to the significant progress in genetic genealogy, she finally has some answers.

A Shocking Discovery on the South Downs

Every year, Jane Dodd traveled from South London for a fortnight’s holiday in Worthing with her family. On that sunny August day, she was walking with her parents, Arthur and Margaret, and her older sister Elizabeth. Even though it was 6 p.m., the weather was really hot. There was no shade, just blackberry bushes and grassland. Then, her mother stopped out of the blue.

“There’s a baby up there,” she said. “Of course there isn’t, there’s no one up there,” the father turned around and answered. “I haven’t had five children and don’t know what a baby sounds like,” her mother replied.

After a few minutes of searching, they found a little girl hidden in a bush. She had blonde hair, a pink dress, a few scratches, and insect bites. The girl looked about one year old. Her hands were tied tightly in front of her.

Growing Up Adopted

Nine-year-old Anthea Ring was playing with her friend Peter near her home. Then they started arguing, and the girl warned her friend she’d complain to her mother. “She’s not your mother, you’re adopted,” he replied, and they ran to her mother in shock. And that evening was the evening that changed her life.

“They told me I was left on the doorstep of Worthing Hospital when I was a newborn baby,” Anthea says. “They’d lost a daughter, Veronica, three years before and decided to adopt me.”

It may sound hokey at first, but the girl was excited about this news. All the adopted kids were the heroines in books she loved so much. “I remember thinking I could tell my friends at school the next day,” she says. “It didn’t cross my mind to think about who my birth parents were. Mine was obviously so secure.”

Her adoptive father, Douglas Shannon, worked for the Ministry of Food, and Anthea remembers the times when she was going on trips with him to check over various food stations. “He was a very kind man. I loved going out with him,” she says. Her mother was a kind and caring person, while also being a bit nervous due to the fact that she lost her first daughter, and it was quite understandable. Margaret was intelligent but hadn’t gone to Girton College, Cambridge; her family simply couldn’t afford it. Margaret wanted Anthea to become a teacher, but the girl’s desire to get her first job as soon as possible prevailed.

At 15, she started working for the Bourne & Hollingsworth department store in Oxford Street. In a while, the girl trained to become a nurse in Bath, where she met her future husband, Francis. They gave birth to two kids, Jonathan and Christine.

Uncovering the Truth

In 1961, Anthea took a picture of her baby, Christine, and brought it to her parents’ house. The parents noticed she took after Anthea as a baby and finally decided to put everything on the table.

“Then my father said to my mother, ‘You’ll have to show her now, Peggy,’ and she went upstairs,” Anthea recalls. Margaret gave Anthea a newspaper clipping with a picture of a baby and asked, “Who is it?” “It’s you,” Margaret answered.

That’s how Anthea found out she had been discovered by Arthur Dodd on a hillside near Worthing on the 26th of August, 1937. The police had tried to find her parents and made a nationwide appeal for information, to no avail. Margaret offered her home by writing to the hospital, and the Shannons were chosen as they had experience in raising a child who got hit by a car when she was seven years old.

“My mother said that was when they walked into the ward, I came out to the end of the cot and put my arms out,” Anthea says. The family paid the juvenile court 11 shillings and sixpence and took the girl home to Surrey. When finding out the truth, Anthea went home and started crying. She told everything to her husband, but they decided to keep the shocking information away from their kids.

The Search for Her Roots

Over a period of years, Anthea’s children had their own children. Her grandson, Aaron, was also a carbon copy of Anthea as a baby, so she wondered once again who she truly was. The woman joined a group of people called NORCAP, helping adopted adults find out more about their roots. The group suggested writing to the police in Worthing to ask whether there were still some records left, and a miracle happened.

The police superintendent for West Sussex put her in touch with the retired policeman, Mac, who’d investigated the case. “He told me he’d been on crowd control in Worthing that day as they’d had a famous film star at the cinema. He got called back after I was found and put on door-to-door inquiries,” Anthea says. He said he’d carried her photo in his wallet for years and would produce it if he thought someone might know her, but no one ever did. Mac thought the girl was not a local kid and could have been brought on the train from London, as it’s impossible to keep secrets in such a small community.

Mac told the local retired policemen’s association about Anthea, and the press discerned the whole story. Thus, the woman was to focus on national news one more time. In a few weeks, she received a letter from Elizabeth Dodd, the eldest daughter of the family who’d found her. “She said I’d ruined her holiday all those years ago because she’d wanted her parents to adopt me and they wouldn’t,” Anthea says.

Elizabeth said that when they found the little girl, they decided to take her to the nearest house, yet nobody had a phone there to make a call. Thus, the family took her to the big farmhouse in the village of Sompting. “They were having a tennis party and passed me around the dining room,” Anthea says. “One of the farmer’s daughters called the police, and I was taken to the hospital.”

Jane, a younger sister who’s now 92, still remembers that day. “My mother and sister did everything while I held my father’s hand,” she says. “That night I was very frightened as I thought we’d taken someone’s baby and they would be cross with us.”

The following day, hospital staff said her parents’ baby had been called Anne. This name was given by a hospital nurse, Betty. “Apparently, I was put in a cot in the sister’s office. Maddy realized I needed a name when she handed it over at the end of the shift. She called me Ann as it was her favorite name,” Anthea says. The girl had been staying in the hospital for six weeks while the police were investigating the case. “Apparently, the ward sister used to take me out in a pram and walk up and down the front. I’ve always loved the sound of seagulls,” Anthea says.

The Genetic Breakthrough

In 2012, Anthea, then 75, decided to take a DNA test as there were no clues who her actual parents were. The tests showed her ethnicity was 92% Irish and matched her with some cousins in America and Ireland. One cousin, Joan, who lived in North Carolina, asked her relatives to take a test. Thanks to it, they found out Joan linked to Anthea through her father’s maternal side; they came from County Mayo in Ireland.

“I met Joan in 2013. She was the first blood relative I’d ever met, so it was quite something,” Anthea recalls. A bit later, Anthea matched with a woman called Anne who was working at Dublin University. Yet Anne didn’t match with Joan, which led to the assumption she was from the other side of Anthea’s family. Anne’s family came from County Galway.

In April 2016, Anthea was put in touch with genetic genealogist Julia Bell, who offered her help. Once Bell had found her own American GI grandfather using DNA and genealogical research, she believed everybody deserves to know who they really are. Bell suggested Anthea take some further DNA tests with different companies. This helped make further breakthroughs. “We then used genealogy to build trees to find possible common ancestors and then brought the lines down,” Bell says. It was a lot of work because families could have 12 children, and there were a lot of intermarriages. This could make people seem like closer matches than they actually were.

With the help of genealogist Angie Bush, Bell was sure one of Anthea’s parents was a Coyne from County Galway and the other an O’Donnell from County Mayo. John O’Donnell had seven daughters. “I was looking at the youngest daughter, Ellen O’Donnell, who was born in 1911,” she says. Later, thanks to Irish amateur historian Catherine Corless, they found out that Ellen’s official name would be a saint’s name, Helena.

Everything started to fall into place. “Earlier on, I had ordered records of illegitimate births in England and Ireland in 1936. I’d come across an unmarried mother called Lena O’Donnell but dismissed it. Suddenly I thought, of course, Lena could be Helena.”

Lena O’Donnell got married in Ireland in 1945, seven years after Anthea had been found, and had brought into the world four more children. Bell found one son who agreed to take a DNA test in April 2017. The test confirmed the man was Anthea’s half-brother. “I was sitting in the garden in the sun when Julia rang,” Anthea says. “She told me my birth mother was Lena O’Donnell. I was delighted.”

Unraveling the Mystery

Anthea’s birth certificate disclosed her birth name was Mary Veronica, and she was born on the 20th of November, 1936. Her biological mother had been working as a machine operator at a telephone factory. She was taken in by the Home for Guardian Angels, a maternity home for unmarried mothers. In a couple of weeks, Helena moved in with her baby to another home called Devon Nook in Chiswick that encouraged mothers to keep their babies and take care of them. It’s the last known record of her until she appears on an electoral roll in 1939 back in Cricklewood.

Meanwhile, Mary Veronica vanishes altogether. What happened after Lena left Devon Nook? Bell asks rhetorically, “I don’t think she was the one who abandoned Anthea. I think she did a brave thing and decided to try and keep the baby.”

If Lena had wanted to keep her baby, there were a lot of much easier ways to do such a thing. One article in the Daily Herald from the 28th of August, 1937, stated there were 12 abandoned babies lying in London hospitals. “They’ve all been found in the last 10 weeks in railway carriages, churches, station waiting rooms, public parks, and on the doorsteps of private houses. There were only two cases out of 15 that succeeded in searches for their mothers.”

But how did it happen then that Anthea ended up on the South Downs? There’s a theory that Lena left Anthea with a foster mother while going out to work. At the time, foster mothers proposed to get children in their care adopted for a fee. Then they just sold the kids to a couple or another broker. “The traffic in babies was getting to be one of the biggest evils of London,” a director of the National Children Adoption Association said. “Americans are often willing to pay a high price for fair-headed babies, especially with curls. They call them the pure Anglo-Saxon type. At present, they’re bought and sold more easily than motor cars.”

There’s an assumption that there was a plan to exchange the fair-haired Anthea near Worthing, but somehow everything didn’t go as planned. “I may never know what happened to me, but I’ve come to terms with it,” Anthea says.

Finding Her Father

Talking about Anthea’s father, Bell had narrowed down the search to six brothers. Four of the brothers—Michael, Martin, Patrick, and Philip Coyne—were laborers in London in 1936. Martin’s daughter also took a test that revealed she was a first cousin. This led to the thought that one of the other three would be Anthea’s biological father. Michael was also out, so there were two brothers left.

The only thing that could prove fatherhood would be a sample of their DNA, but it was hard to find after years of their death. However, Anthea knew Dot, who was the daughter of one of Patrick and Philip’s sisters. “I was telling Dot about the problem when she said, ‘Well, I’ve still got letters Patrick sent me,'” Anthea says. These letters had been sent from England to the U.S. about 30 years earlier.

David Nicholson of Living DNA gave hope by saying his company could use a recently developed forensic test to get Patrick’s DNA from saliva left when he licked the stamps. It sounds unbelievable, but on the fourth attempt, the test proved Patrick Coyne was Anthea’s biological father.

“I was so happy, as I’d been looking for my father for 29 years,” Anthea says. Her father’s side of the family told her Patrick was a vivacious man, the life and soul of every party. “We don’t know if Patrick ever knew about me. He never married and once told Dot it was because he liked his independence and didn’t want to be tied down,” Anthea adds.

Now being the age of 80, Anthea is grateful for the DNA she inherited from her parents. She is really healthy for her age, but finding her biological parents hasn’t blurred the memory of her adoptive ones. Last summer, Anthea had a family party with her children, grandchildren, and cousins.

“I told them my mother was Helena O’Donnell, but my family were Margaret and Douglas Shannon.”