The extraordinary childhood of Michael Medwin

Michael Medwin is one of those actors who often turns up in old British films and always makes them better. He usually, but not always, played cockney characters.

He also went on to have an influential second career as film and theatre producer. He was the producer behind Lindsay Anderson's If.... and O Lucky Man! and behind the first production of Julian Mitchell's play Another Country, which helped establish the careers of Kenneth Branagh, Rupert Everett, Colin Firth and Daniel Day-Lewis.

But I come from a generation that knew him as Don Satchley, the smooth boss of Radio West in Shoestring.

When Medwin died in 2020, the Guardian quoted Michael Caine in his obituary:

"I was amazed when I met him to discover that he had a very upper-crust accent. Cockney is a hard accent to do and he did it brilliantly."

Yes, Medwin went to a public school, but his childhood was far from conventional.

His family background was Dutch and Irish, and he was adopted from an orphanage by two elderly unmarried women, Dr Mary Jeremy and a Miss Clopton-Roberts. 

I can't find anything about Clopton-Roberts online, but Mary Jeremy was a substantial figure - an early woman doctor who chaired the National Council for Women, which was an early feminist organisation. You can read a profile of her at the bottom of this page of the Poole's Health Record site.

She was also chaired the National Council for Women, an early feminist organisation that concerned itself with causes like equal pay.

And if you search for Michael Medwin on the British Newspaper Archive, the earliest story to come up is from the Western Gazette for 17 June 1932. It concerns a fete held to raise funds for the Hants and Dorset Babies' Home, Parkestone, at the garden of Meadowside, Colehill, the home of Dr Mary Jeremy:

Dr, Mary Jeremy was responsible for the serving of teas, and Mrs Kitching (Bournemouth) and little Miss Mary Medwin and Master Michael Medwin had change of stalls.

So it sounds as though we have discovered that he had, if not a sister, then at least an adoptive sister.