The Forgotten Child: Heartbreaking true story of boy abandoned by canal and left to die

His mother, Lucy Cunningham, cut the umbilical cord herself, wrapped Richard in newspaper and a blanket and pretended nothing had ever happened.

She turned up to work the next day after having previously hid the pregnancy from her partner and all her family and friends.

Thanks to an alert postman, Richard survived – but what happened next is a tale of abuse, discovery, heartbreak and closure.

Ahead of the release of his book – The Forgotten Child – Richard, now living in Dudley, tells his story to the Express & Star.

"My mother walked along the canal bank in Gas Street in Birmingham and under a bridge, on her own in the scrubland, gave birth to me," Richard recalls from his home in Quarry Bank.

"This would have been around 7pm. It was a freezing cold night, temperatures were -2C (28.4F).

"Exposure had set in for me but luckily for me at about 9pm a postman, who we now know to be Joseph Lester, was on his way home from work at the mail office.

"As he walked down from Gas Street Basin he heard something making a noise on the opposite side of the canal. He thought it was a baby crying or an animal, but he had no idea. So he shone his torch to the other side of the bank, and all he saw was this white blanket, which was wriggling about slightly.

"He summoned the police, who attended and got me straight off to hospital so I could be treated."

At the old Dudley Road Hospital in Birmingham, staff were incredibly pessimistic about Richard's chances. They summoned a chaplin and had him christened, deciding on the name Richard. As far as they were concerned, he was not making it through the night.

"But being the plucky character I am I did manage to survive, I made it through to the next day and gradually my condition began to improve," Richard says with a smile.

"My mother Lucy turned up for work the next day as if nothing had happened. She worked that shift but as the day went on she felt unwell and she herself had to be taken to hospital. Totally by chance and unconnected at this time, they took her to the same hospital."

It did not take staff long to put two and two together. They had an abandoned baby in one ward and a woman suffering from complications from giving birth who had not mentioned any baby in another.

When confronted by West Midlands Police, Lucy confessed to what had happened. She was charged with abandonment and causing unnecessary suffering to a child, and the following month hauled in front of magistrates.

But she was spared jail after the judge decided it would be unfair on her other child, a baby girl she had had with Richard's father, who would be forced into care.

Lucy maintained she had abandoned Richard because she would have been kicked out of her lodgings in the city if she brought another baby back.

"Two years before all of this she had walked out of her marriage, leaving three children," Richard explains. "The reason for that is because she became infatuated with my father Harold Wren.

"At the time of my birth he was in prison, so he knew nothing about me or my birth. He did not even know Lucy was pregnant and carrying me. She kept that from him for the rest of his life, he never knew.

"Harold was already married with five children of his own. He moved Lucy into lodgings just a few doors away from him as he was already fathering a baby girl he had had with her. Harold was well known to the police and ran various scrapyard businesses in Birmingham. He spent a lot of time at Her Majesty's Pleasure. I later found for whatever reason he splashed the clash on my mother and she was totally infatuated with him. He would be in and out of prison and she would be waiting for him."

While Lucy returned home and waited for Harold to reappear after yet another prison stint, Richard was placed into the care of Birmingham children's department and shipped off to Field House children's home in Clent, near Stourbridge.

"It was the most idlyic place anyone could wish to be brought up in," Richard recalls fondly. "It was a beautiful grand manor in the middle of the countryside.

"In this huge house there was probably 20 children and we had house mothers who would look after us. We would be taken on walks up the Clent hills, we were fed well with lots of fresh food, encouraged to play in the beautiful gardens – all in the safety of this magnificent gated building."

Life was perfect for Richard at Field House – but it was never going to last. Under the system in place at the time, when you reached the age of five you either need to be moved to another children's home for older kids or be adopted. For Richard, it was to be the latter.

He remembers: "One day the house mothers said to me we've got a couple – Arnold and Pearl – who are going to come and see you and see if you like them. I was told if I did like them then they would become my parents and I would be going to live with them in a new home with no other children. I remember being awkward about it and saying I did not want to go – but rules were rules."

The couple, whose names have been changed for the purpose of the book, took Richard home around a week later.

"They turned up in a hand painted blue Ford Thames van with big lights on the front," he remembers vividly. "I wondered looking at it where I would sit as there was only two doors, but I soon realised I would be sitting in the back. The doors closed and off we went down the lane.

"We had not gone very far down the lane but it was bumpy, a hot very day, and I was not used to travelling in vehicles. This coupled with having to leave my happy home, friends and house mothers, caused me to be violently sick.

"The van came to an immediate halt and Arnold got out. I thought he was going to let me out for some fresh air and perhaps I could even run back to Fieldhouse! But he opened the doors, pulled me out, and started violently kicking and punching me in an absolute rage because I had made a mess in the back of his van.

"This is what began 10 years of awful abuse."

Richard, not wanting to give too much of his 312-page book away, does not expand too much on the abuse he received at the hands of Arnold, but speaks warmly of his mother Pearl.

"She was a very bright, bubbly, warm, lovely sort of lady," he says fondly.

The relationship with Arnold, which had started with a kicking, never improved. Aged just 15, Richard left the family home in Castle Bromwich.

He explains: "I left home to try to break away from the relentless abuse I was suffering and the upset I thought I was causing to Pearl. She was by this time not very well, she suffered with her nerves and every time there was a flashpoint in the house it would upset her greatly.

"I felt the only way to break this cycle was to earn some money and leave. I left school at 15, got a job in Birmingham, saved a little bit of money and found and moved into a bedsit at the top of a house in Acocks Green."

He had a provisional motorbike licence and a motorbike, but at 15 Richard was unprepared for life as an adult. He was struggling to pay the bills and was not able to eat properly due to his financial situation.

"One night I must have been so tired I blanked out in an underpass in Yardley," he recalls. "A minibus hit me and that put me back in hospital with a head injury."

A social worker visited him in hospital to give him the bad news – he had to go home to Pearl and Arnold, who had by this time adopted him and officially become his parents. As a consequence of the adoption Richard's surname changed from Cunningham to Gallear.

In hospital Pearl told Arnold: "You've got to leave him alone." But the words did not sink in, and before long Richard and Arnold were back at each other's throats.

Richard decided his way out was to work in a hotel, as they would be able to both feed him and provide him with a bed – as well as give him an income. So in 1972 he headed for Chateau Impney, in Droitwich, Worcestershire, and never saw his adoptive parents again.

He got in touch some years later to ask for some paperwork, but was given a brutally cold response and told not to contact the pair again.

Between 1972 and 2009 it became a case of just living life for Richard. He enjoyed his time at Chateau Impney but eventually moved on and found himself moving around taking different jobs. His adventure saw him become a shopkeeper and at one stage move to Walsall.

"In the years that passed I made lots of good friends who have become my family," Richard said. "But as time went on I realised there was a need to try and find out about what had happened in my past and in my childhood because I had absolutely no idea."

By the time 2009 rolled around Richard was happy and settled in Quarry Bank. He had chosen that location as it was close to Clent, where he had spent some of the best days of his life as a child in Field House. For Richard, with his life settled, he knew it was the right time to discover his past.

"Life gets in the way of many things when you're younger but in 2009 when I was set up in Dudley it felt like the right time to really get to grips with my past," Richard recalls, leaning forward in his living room chair. "The main research took me to many places – libraries, archives, police stations, children's department, adoption charities. So many places yet so many places with closed doors and brick walls."

But Richard did not give up, and on one visit to Birmingham Children's Department his whole world was blown apart.

Richard remembers the fateful moment like it was yesterday: "They pushed me a newspaper clipping across the counter, which was headlined: 'Baby abandoned on canal bank'.

"I knew I was adopted and my mother had given me up but I always assumed it was because of hardship or something like that. So of course nothing could have prepared me for that newspaper clipping because pushed across the table, I was totally devastated. I could not believe it was me."

The newspaper clipping was the start of Richard's discovery. From there his investigation took him all over from ancestry records to knocking on doors. "Proper police work," he quipped.

His journey of discovery is perhaps best saved for his book, which is out on March 21, but it involves the postman who saved his life, a large number of siblings – some who to this day still do not know Richard exists – and tracking his mother's final movements.

Asked if the book had given him closure, Richard said: "By writing it I knew it would not be a secret anymore, it would be out there and a permanent record of me and that dear postman Lester who saved my life. It had become a massive therapy to write this and express it in the way I have. It clears the air and encourages you to move on, take a step forward instead of always trying to take a step back. If I didn't do this I would always be left wondering who, what, why, how.

"One sibling wishes I did not write any of this down or mention our mother, but had I have done that it would have remained the secret that she wanted to keep. Had the book not have been done I would still be The Forgotten Child."

He continued: "Writing this book has been closure and I think I have done the most I can to get to the bottom of what happened to me and why. I have got as many answers as I think I am going to get.

"Not knowing why is one of those things that bites away at you the fact that you will never know. Lucy had had children before and after, so why was I singled out? It does eat away at you but I have to leave that in the place it is in or else I would never move forward. I do not have any bitterness in me at all, to me it is something that has happened and it'll have to be what it is."

Richard, still blown away from the fact the book is going to be published and is receiving such positive feedback in Canada – where publishers Harper Collins is based – added: "I hope people can take something from the book. Perhaps people in the same situation as I found myself in will see it is possible to move on from a rocky start in life."

There's plenty of material left over to make a second book if required, but for Richard his circle is complete. He is no longer the forgotten child.

• The Forgotten Child, published by Harper Collins, is out now and available from all good book stores.