Scottish pop star Lulu has revealed the sectarian scandal in her family’s past and how her grandparents fought to stay together despite Glasgow’s religious divide. The singer, 68, discovers the secrets in an episode of the BBC television show Who Do You Think You Are? to be shown this month.
Lulu discovers how her grandparents, Hugh and Helen, married against the will of both sets of parents in a non-religious ceremony, after the birth of their second child, and went on to have five more children.
Hugh was a jailbird from a Catholic family in Glasgow’s Townhead, while Helen’s family was strongly involved with the Protestant Orange Order in Bridgeton. Lulu’s grandfather was sent to live in America but returned within months to be with Helen.
“I imagine that the families absolutely refused to allow them to get married but couldn’t keep them apart,” Lulu said.
The singer, who shot to fame in the 1960s with the hit single Shout, reveals her desire to discover why her mother, Elizabeth — the middle child of Hugh and Helen’s seven offspring — was given away to be brought up by another family.
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“The story of my mother is a big secret. Basically she had been given away as a baby. The real essence of this is why did they give my mother away?”
Elizabeth Kennedy-Cairns was fostered at the age of six months, to a family called McCoid, before being taken in by the McDonald family.
At the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, Lulu locates her mother’s name in an index of infants living independently of their birth families. The singer discovers that her mother lived with the McCoid family for one month. The records show that the McCoids were not paid for looking after Elizabeth.
“The actual heading is — beautiful wording — ‘how disposed of’. It pains me, I have to say,” Lulu said.
The records, however, attest to the loving and stable home the McDonalds provided for Lulu’s mother.
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The singer is emotional when she reads the inspector’s reports about her mother’s childhood, such as “child went to school yesterday for the first time and is very pleased with herself”.
Lulu said: “I’m crying and I’m laughing at the same time, I can just see her. She was well loved and cared for, and felt secure.”
The singer, born Marie McDonald McLaughlin Lawrie, discovers how Hugh worked at the Springburn railway depot from the age of 14 as a foundry labourer. At 20, he left on a ship bound for Boston where records state he would stay “indefinitely”. Passenger lists show her grandfather returned just a few months later, however.
Who Do You Think You Are? with Lulu is on BBC1 on August 17 at 9pm.