‘My wife killed herself over church-home trauma’
In 2006 Stephen Hindley’s wife Judith killed herself close to where her baby son was buried. He believes the “Dickensian” treatment she received at a church-run home for unmarried mothers in the 1960s and the lifelong trauma of the death of her son there, led to her suicide.
“I’m going to tell you something – and when I tell you, you won’t want to see me anymore.”
Mr Hindley said he remembers his wife saying those words, telling him that she was sent to an unmarried mother’s home, as a teenager.
In 1963 and pregnant at the age of 17, her parents sent her to St Monica’s in Kendal.
A Church of England home run by the Diocese of Carlisle, it was a place where teenage girls were sent to have their babies, away from view.
