A review of Terry O'Neill's life story in a social work journal

Twenty years ago, every branch of Waterstones had a section called "Painful Lives" that carried memoirs of abuse in childhood. The success of Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It in 1995 had awakened a public appetite for such literature, and publishers were happy to satisfy it.

It was in this climate that Terry O'Neill, the younger brother of Dennis O'Neill, whose death I have often written about, posted his life story on the website Authonomy under the title Never Again in 2009. This was a site where authors could post their manuscripts in the hope that its owner Harper Collins or another publisher would see it and be interested.

Fortunately, Harper Collins did recognise what a treasure they had. and published a rewritten version of Terry's book as Someone to Love Us. Despite this very "Painful Lives" title, and a cover that also made it look as though it belonged to that genre, my impression when I read it was that the ghost writer had done a good job. But I do remember things in Terry's original version that didn't make it into the published book, so I hope that manuscript still exists somewhere.

My reason for writing this post is that I've come across a review of Someone to Love Us in a social work journal. It was written by Dave Burnham and appeared in The Bulletin of the Social Work History Network (Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2016).

Here is an extract:

There are recognisable themes:

• Children never being told of decisions about them – not just by officials, but by anybody. 

• The number of placements and the yo-yo emotions associated with moving between caring family homes and rulebound institutions. 

• Although Reginald Gough’s beatings were by far the worst, the punishments meted out later to Terence in homes (beating, deprivation of food) bore a sinister similarity to Bank Farm practices. 

• The rich collection of characters involved in child care: the careful, kind leaders, the charismatic role models, the thoughtless, the demanding bullies. 

• The still silence of the scared children in the face of adult authority.

• The years of guilt Terence felt after Dennis’ death about what he might have done to save him. 

• The official emphasis on attempting to place the boys with a Catholic family, even though, as Terence said until he was in care he'd never been to church in his life. 

• The heartlessness of the press.

Most notably, during the boys’ six month stay there were perhaps ten visits by various officials, a Boarding Out volunteer, two senior Shrewsbury Council [in fact Shropshire County Council] officials, an 18 year old clerk from Newport and social workers dealing with other foster children at the Goughs. Not one of these people went upstairs to the freezing room where the boys slept on a straw pallet with one blanket. Monckton recommended some changes in Boarding Out visiting, but his report is most notable in proposing that people should simply do their jobs properly – seeing where boarded out children slept, for instance. had been expected for fifty years by then.

Burnham ends by saying Someone to Love Us should be read in conjunction with Sir Walter Monckton's report on the affair, but that this is hard to find.

You can find the Monckton Report online, but his statement that "no evidence came to my notice of any exploitation of the boys in the work of the farm" does not accord with the story Terry O'Neill tells.

Terry died in 2023. You can hear him speak in the award-winning BBC Radio Wales documentary The Mousetrap and Me.