Meeting a nephew of Dennis O'Neill

Twenty years ago, I published a chapter (“Histories of child abuse”) in the book Making and Breaking Children’s Lives.

In it, I was feeling my way towards the thesis that child abuse is less a new discovery than a phenomenon that has been regularly uncovered and then forgotten. This belief grew from a time when I was producing psychology newsletters in my day job and studying for an MA in Victorian Studies in the evenings. 

This belief was strengthened as I came to realise that the caring professions knew as much about their own history as they did about 19th-century novels.

I began the chapter with the death in 1945 of Dennis O’Neill, a child in public care who’d been ‘boarded out’ at a farm in Shropshire. His death caused a national scandal, shared the front pages with the last stages of the war in Europe and led to the 1948 Children’s Act. Yet Dennis had clearly been forgotten by 1973, when the death of Maria Colwell shocked the nation to a similar degree.

What led me to the Dennis O’Neill case was a passing mention of him in a book by Bob Holman that had come into the office for review. It sent me – intrigued that Dennis’s death had taken place at a “lonely farmhouse in Shropshire” – to a book by Dennis’s older brother Tom, who had worked in child care. That book, A Place Called Hope, was one of the sources for my chapter.

I may write another paper on this case one day because, though it was forgotten for so long – it has been better remembered since the publication of Terry O’Neill’s book Someone to Love Us – you can find traces of it in all sorts of unexpected places in our culture. 

The most substantial trace is in Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap, which has the Dennis O’Neill case at its root. You can hear Phil O’Neill, one of Tom’s sons, talk about the O’Neill family’s connection with the play on the All About Agatha podcast.

All this is by way of saying that I met Phil O’Neill, who is (or would have been) Dennis’s nephew, for a drink the other day. We’d been in touch by email for a while, which is why I was able to suggest him as a guest to the podcast. 

We had a good chat despite the London heat, and he told me one particularly interesting fact. In the Sixties, the maker of television films Jeremy Sandford, most famous for Cathy Come Home, was interested in writing something about Dennis O’Neill and in touch with his family about it, but nothing came of the idea.

He also confirmed that the photograph here is the only one of Dennis known to exist – he is the dark-haired boy in the middle. Copyright must rest with someone in the O’Neill family, but I hope no one will mind that I have used it here.