A Broughty Ferry man who only discovered he had a brother in his 86th year met his sibling last week after a fateful television programme brought the pair together.
Leonard Adams’ son, also Leonard, was watching a Martin Clunes documentary on the islands of Britain last year when it mentioned a hotel on Sark in the Channel Islands, where his father’s mother had worked during the second world war.
After a bit of detective work he discovered that his grandmother, Rosina Grace Caple, had had a liaison with a fellow worker at the Stocks Hotel after walking out on Leonard senior’s father.
The affair had resulted in the birth of Leonard’s long-lost brother, Dudley Bradley.
Leonard made contact with his uncle Dudley and last week Dudley extended a business trip to Glasgow to have lunch in the Ship Inn with his long-lost brother.
When the pair eventually met, Leonard said that it was the most natural thing in the world.
“It was great,” he said. “As if we have never been apart all our lives.”
Dudley (66), who now lives in High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, added, “It was very emotional. I could see it’s me in 20 years’ time.
“It’s quite lovely really. If longevity runs in my family hopefully I’m going to be okay.”Complete shockTo Leonard, the news he had a younger brother was a complete shock but Dudley had been trying to track his sibling down for many years.
He said, “My mother left my brother and sister Doris when they were about six years old. I didn’t know till many years later I had a brother.”
Rosina walked out on Leonard’s father and their children in Portsmouth and had moved to the Isle of Sark where she had the affair with Dudley’s father during the war.
Following the German invasion, Rosina and 500 residents from Sark were shipped off to mainland Germany where she gave birth to Dudley in an internment camp.
Dudley said, “In some ways I was better off than the people left behind in starvation.
“I spent my first two years in camp and then lived back in Sark after the war until 1953 when my mother came back to England.”
Rosina died in 1967 and Dudley did not visit the island again until 1993, when he discovered a host of long-lost relatives but was never given any lead to his brother Leonard.