JOHN PRESCOTT offered to be a father to his girlfriend’s baby son more than four decades ago, when they were both teenagers.
Pauline Tilston was faced with the dilemma of being a single mother in the censorious 1950s and eventually took the heartbreaking decision to put her son up for adoption.
Mr Prescott’s offer, however, was a sign of the deep loyalty he still retains towards Pauline, whom he married in 1961. Their marriage is one of the most enduring in Westminster. His future wife was just 16 when she became pregnant in 1955 in her home town of Chester. She gave birth to Paul in 1956 and a year later she met Mr Prescott, then a steward in the Merchant Navy.
Mr Prescott knew from the moment he met his future wife that she had a child by another man. Mr Prescott stood by her and said he would support her whatever she decided to do.
By the time Paul was born, Mrs Prescott’s father had died and her mother was ill. Mrs Prescott was forced to go to work as a hairdresser and had little time to raise her child.
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Having looked after her son for the first three months she was compelled to place him in a children’s home where she visited him as often as she could. Paul was four when he was adopted by Ted and Mary Watton on October 7, 1960. In the intervening years, another adoption offer fell through because of an illness.
Mother and son were re- united in 2001 after a journalist broke the news to Lieutenant-Colonel Paul Watton that Pauline Prescott was his birth mother. John Prescott was the first to contact and then meet his stepson.
Mrs Prescott finally met her firstborn son again after several phone-calls and letters. She was, according to The Sun, so overcome with emotion that she was lost for words when she saw him as an adult.
Mrs Prescott, who bore her husband two sons, Johnathan and David, is a private woman but she was unwittingly thrust into the public spotlight by her husband at the Labour Party conference four years ago.
Mr Prescott, who was then Transport Secretary, was heavily criticised for taking a car for the 250 yard journey from their hotel to the conference centre in Bournemouth. When questioned by a television interviewer why he did it, he replied: “Because of the security reasons for one thing and, second, my wife doesn’t like to have her hair blown about.”
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Mr Prescott has often made jokes about his wife’s fashion excesses, but nobody doubts the strength of their marriage or their loyalty to each other.
The reunion between Pauline Prescott and her son has strong parallels with that of the former Cabinet minister Clare Short who was reunited with the son she gave up for adoption when she was a teenage student.
She gave up Toby Graham for adoption in 1964 when she was 18. They were reunited in 1996 after a gap of 31 years.