I was a phone box foundling: Dumped in a call box as a baby, Chris found the family he never knew in Florida thanks to the new Long Lost Family spin-off show
- Chris Mason was found in a London phone box as a newborn in 1966
- READ MORE: I found the long lost family my dad spent 50 years searching for
For years, all Chris Mason knew about his family history was that he’d been found in a London phone box as a newborn just before Christmas 1966.
It seemed particularly poignant that at a time of year when the world is celebrating a joyous birth, a desperate mother felt she had to abandon her six-day-old child.
‘It must have been horrendous for my birth mother to do that,’ says Chris, now 56, an engineer from Surrey, speaking exclusively to Weekend.
‘I’ve always been more concerned for her than for me. You don’t know what situation she was in.’
Chris’s tear-jerking tale features in this week’s first episode of a new series of Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace, the spin-off show that tracks down the family members of foundlings.
Chris Mason was found in a London phone box as a newborn just before Christmas 1966 and that was all he knew about his family history
Chris was adopted by loving parents who brought him up with their two birth children in Wimbledon, southwest London, but over the years his efforts to find his blood relatives had drawn a blank.
Chris’s wife Alison and their four children aged 23 to 29 were so eager to find out where Chris really came from that he applied to Long Lost Family.
Chris admits he had anxiety about being rejected by any relatives the experts dug up. ‘My only fear doing this show was that they’d say, ‘We don’t want to know,’ he admits.
A DNA test Chris undertook a few years ago revealed Irish and Italian roots, but no close relatives.
The show’s experts followed up the DNA matches, learning that Chris’s mother Elizabeth was an Irishwoman who married a US airman and moved to Maine, USA. That’s where Chris was conceived, but then questions arose: why was he born in England, and who was his father?
Long Lost Family’s team cracked the mystery through further research and put Chris on a plane to Florida to meet Elizabeth’s daughter Marie, Chris’s half-sister, who is nine years older. She was overjoyed. ‘I knew about Chris from hearing my mom talking about him in my earlier years,’ says Marie. ‘When I was in my teens I went to the library and tried to find him via newspapers, but I was looking in the wrong area.
‘So when I received the picture of Chris from Long Lost Family, I was amazed at how much he looked like our grandfather John, my mother’s father. Also, Chris has my mother’s eyes. I couldn’t believe it was real.’
Chris was bowled over to meet Marie and his half-brother Bobby (another sister had died) and learn about his heritage. ‘I never dreamed it would happen,’ he says.
Chris with his wife and family including dad Dominic (second from right) and half-sister Marie (third from left)
‘To have siblings alive, it’s amazing. I was so moved to find out Marie had looked for me, too.’
Marie showed Chris an album stuffed with his relatives’ photos. ‘The big thing for me was to see the photo of my mother,’ he says. ‘Never did I imagine I’d see someone who looks like me or like my children.’
The sadness in his story is that Elizabeth died in 2008. Trapped in an abusive marriage, she became an alcoholic and passed away aged 69.
But there was happiness to come, when Long Lost Family identified his birth father, Italian-born Dominic, now 79 and a businessman in Florida. Dominic had no idea Chris existed until Long Lost Family matched up their DNA.
‘Meeting my father was the icing on the cake,’ says Chris. ‘It’s hard to explain what it’s like to have the door opened and see someone who made you.’
It transpires that Elizabeth had left her marriage at one point, and Chris was conceived during a brief relationship with Dominic.
Elizabeth was an Irishwoman who married a US airman and moved to Maine, USA
But after Elizabeth reconciled with her husband, he kicked her and the children out when he learned she was pregnant. They fled to England where Elizabeth gave birth before returning to the US and her husband.
‘Marie told me that Elizabeth did not have a happy life, but that in the six or seven months she spent with Dominic she was happy,’ says Chris. ‘And I told Dominic that. That moved him. He mentions that still.’
Chris has kept in touch with his birth family, and Dominic, Marie and his other half-siblings will soon visit him in Surrey. A family trip to Italy is also on the cards.
This experience has meant closure for him, as well as a new beginning. ‘I had two sentences about my life – I knew the telephone box, I knew the street and sort of the date,’ he says. ‘But now I could fill books. It’s amazing, a big turning point.’
- Long Lost Family: Born Without Trace starts 26 June, 9pm, ITV1 and ITVX.
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