At the start of her episode of Who Do You Think You Are?, The Only Way Is Essex star, media personality and businesswoman Gemma Collins says she knows nothing about her mother’s side of the family. Her mother Joan was “left at the hospital” as a baby and grew up in foster care.
“She never talks about it,” Gemma says. “I just think it’s too painful for her to go there. It would be so nice to know where my mum’s from and just put all the pieces together.”
Joan agrees to talk to Gemma about her origins for the first time. Joan was brought up by a foster family since she was two weeks old. She was temporarily sent to a children’s home when she was thirteen for playing truant at school, which she found traumatic.
Joan has very few memories of her birth mother, who was also called Joan Williams. When she was four, she remembers her mother came to visit and brought her sweets and played a Rolling Stones record. When she was a teenager, her mother once wrote to her asking her to bring her cigarettes, despite not having seen her in years. Joan also had a cousin, Christine, who she was close to.
“Her mum was in and out of her life,” Gemma says. “How confusing must that have been for my mum?”
Gemma wants to find out more about Joan and why she gave up her daughter. She visits Epsom in Surrey, where her grandmother was admitted to two mental hospitals, and meets historian Kirsty Arnold to look at her medical records. Joan was first diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted to a mental hospital at the age of thirteen. After she gave birth to her daughter at seventeen, she was forcibly committed to hospital again. Gemma notes that it’s significant that she, her mother and her grandmother all had personal struggles when they were thirteen, as she struggled with self-harm at that age.
Gemma meets psychiatrist Dr Claire Hilton, who tells her that schizophrenia was much more widely used as a diagnosis for teenagers in the 1950s and 1960s than it is now. Joan was also placed under a ‘fit person’s order’ when she was pregnant with her daughter, putting her in care, as pregnancies out of wedlock were stigmatised at the time. Gemma’s mother’s foster care records show that her mother did continue to visit her as a child. It looks like Joan’s daughter was taken away from her, rather than her giving her up.
“That information that I received upsets me,” Gemma says. “Their actions left my mum feeling like she was never good enough because her mum didn’t want her.”
There’s also some good news – the makers of Who Do You Think You Are? have tracked down Christine, Gemma’s mother’s cousin. Gemma’s overjoyed to meet Christine and her daughters.
Christine tells Gemma that her mother and Gemma’s grandmother were among the four daughters of William Williams and Daisy Dutton, from Tower Hamlets in the East End of London.
Gemma goes to Tower Hamlets to meet historian Fiona Rule. She says that William Williams appears in the 1901 census records as a one-year-old. His family were living on Dorset Street. In Charles Booth’s poverty maps, it’s classified as ‘Vicious, semi-criminal’.
In the 19th century, Dorset Street was notorious for its connection to the Jack the Ripper murders – three of the serial killer’s victims had connection to the street and one of the murders took place on the street. In 1901, there was another murder on the street, and the Daily Mail wrote an article condemning Dorset Street as “The Worst Street in London”. Jack McCarthy, the Williams’ family’s landlord, held a public meeting refuting the newspaper’s claims.
“I think it’s awful to be misrepresented in life,” Gemma says. “I’ve had a lot of that. At the end of the day we’re made of strong stuff, because we didn’t have silver spoon beginnings… I’m really loving the fact that my family are from here, and I also love the camaraderie of them fighting for their rights.”
Gemma now wants to find out more about William Williams’ father, also called William Williams, and his mother Thirza. Records of the Whitechapel Workhouse infirmary show that William senior died there in 1902. Thirza was left a poor widow with three children – William, Nora and Julia. Records show that Thirza had her daughters rebaptised as Catholic so they could attend Crispin Street School, a Catholic school that provided them with an education and care.
“It just shows the determination of Thirza,” Gemma says. “She wants to get her kids out of the squalor, she wanted a better life for them… It brings tears to my eyes, ‘cause my Mum was a real powerhouse in our family… She always pushed me and my brother to do really well, so she must have had a lot of Thirza in her.”
On Thirza’s birth certificate in 1865, her parents are named as Gerard and Thirza Moore, formerly Moles. Gerard’s profession is given as ‘hairdresser’. Gemma’s mother Joan has also worked as a hairdresser. Thrilled to find out that her 3x great grandfather was “the Nicky Clarke of the 1800s”, Gemma goes to meet cultural historian Dr Seán Williams and hair and make up artist Helen Casey. Seán tells her more about the important role hairdressers played in the 19th century while Helen does her hair in an 1860s style.
Census records show that Gerard’s wife Thirza was born in Foulness Island, Essex, taking Gemma’s journey back to where she began. The island is used by the Ministry of Defence for testing explosives, but Gemma is allowed to visit the island and meets Peter Carr, who runs its heritage centre.
Peter tells her that Thirza was born in 1822. Her parents were James Moles and Sarah Garnham. In the 19th century, Foulness was isolated from the rest of the country and life on the island was hard, but it was a beautiful place to live – something that Gemma appreciates, having inherited a love of nature from her mother.