The final episode of the current series of ITV 's Long Lost Family airs on Monday, July 25 and it's heartbreaking. The episode tells the story of a man who was given up for adoption and a mother who stopped at nothing to find her son. Previous episodes shown during this series include the story of two adopted siblings who never knew they existed. You can read more about that here.
This week, in a tragic turn of events, Andrew Barlow, 52, who waited six years to reply to a letter from his birth mother, discovers that she has died. The Long Lost Family team are keen to find out why he didn't reply straight away. Andrew, who lives on the south coast of Australia with his wife and children, was born in the UK and adopted as a baby. “I had a very happy childhood,” he says as he recalls his early years. “I never felt anything but love.” For Andrew, he began to think about his birth family after becoming a father himself.
Desperate to find out where he came from, Andrew used a professional social worker to access his UK adoption file. It was here that he discovered that his birth mother, Patricia Clark, who fell pregnant at 15, refused to sign the adoption papers and never gave up looking for him. Both mother and son, on opposite sides of the world, tried searching for each other but tragically missed their chance to connect.
Nine thousand miles away in Newcastle, Patricia's younger children, Lisa and Barry, grew up hoping to one day meet their brother. Lisa describes how her mother was “forced” to give Andrew up for adoption. She adds that “she lived with the trauma and the guilt” of giving him up. Barry, meanwhile, talks about how giving Andrew up “plagued” his mother.
After decades of searching on her own, Patricia contacted the Long Lost Family in 2014. Whilst the search team managed to locate Andrew, they received no response from him. But why exactly was that?
Andrew says: “Unfortunately when I received contact via a letter, I was having a really difficult time with my adoptive father dying at the time.” He adds that it was “hard to process” because of how close he was to him. “I felt a tremendous sense of loyalty,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to do anything to hurt my adoptive parents at that time.”
The letter that Andrew received sat on his desk for six years until he replied. “I woke up one morning and I got out of bed and came down the stairs and there was only one thing on my mind. That was that I needed to find the letter.” Upon contacting the Long Lost Family team, they immediately rang Patricia.
Unfortunately for Andrew, he was too late and his birth mother had "unexpectedly" passed away in 2019 after a heart attack. Lisa recalls how when she received contact from her brother, she was “devastated” as if he had called 11 months earlier, they would have been able to speak. “It was her lifetime dream,” she says, as she stressed how gutted she was for her mother.
Later in the episode, Andrew travels to London to meet his brother and sister. Talking to Long Lost Family host, Davina McCall, he expresses his overwhelming shock at his birth mother's death, he tells her: “My first response was that my heart sank. I was pretty devastated and I thought that I was too late.
“All this time, I’d be thinking about when I was ready and not when someone else was ready,” he continues as he breaks down to the presenter. Andrew tells Davina that he’d have liked to simply say, “Hello Mum”, to Patricia and they would go from there.
The episode ends with Andrew meeting his siblings. He says that he is “relieved” to have reached that point. The three meet at a hotel near where Andrew was born. Lisa tells Andrew: “It’s a dream come true and I love you so much,” to which he replies: “I’m not going anywhere now,” as she and Barry share a group hug with him.
Andrew learns that his mother never shared any resentment towards him for not replying to her contact. “You were never ever out of her mind,” Lisa tells him. With that, the three begin to form a relationship.
Long Lost Family airs at 9pm on ITV on Monday, July 25
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