https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14764655/Sharon-Graham-Unite-Christine-Andrews-father-adopted-union-chief-sister.htmlI was 15 when my 'father' called me into the living room and brutally told me I'd been adopted. Now, after 50 years, I've finally tracked down my real dad and the firebrand union chief who's my long-lost half-sister
By IAN GALLAGHER AND ABUL TAHER
Published: 16:49, 30 May 2025 | Updated: 16:49, 30 May 2025
Sharon Graham in full flight is something to behold. Fist aloft blazing rhetoric cries of solidarity. Spellbound comrades cheer her every exhortation. In the first female leader of Unite, Britain’s most powerful union, it is easy to recognise the firebrand orators of old. Hard-headed Ms Graham, 56, doesn’t give an inch. Just ask Birmingham City Council with whom she’s been battling over the bin strike. Or Ed Miliband whom she turned her guns on last week, saying he has no proper plan to make Net Zero work and should be replaced as Energy Secretary by someone who ‘believes in Britain’. Ms Graham has championed human rights, defended the oppressed and improved the pay and conditions of hundreds of thousands of workers, among them nurses. One nurse who has taken more than her fair share of knocks over the years and is keen to meet Ms Graham is 64-year-old Christine Andrews. Not least because, as the Mail reveals, Ms Andrews claims to be the union leader’s long-lost half-sister. The two women, says Ms Andrews, share the same father, Thomas Graham, a man she has never laid eyes on. If Ms Andrews is granted just two minutes of his time, it will suffice. She says: ‘Just to be in his presence, see him with my own eyes, to see if there’s a connection, and to maybe hold his hand for a moment to do that would mean the world to me. I feel it is a fundamental human right.’
Yet her much-imagined meeting with the man she calls her father, which she has replayed over and over in her mind’s eye, has yet to materialise. Ms Andrews acknowledges that Mr Graham may not wish to see her or her half siblings might wish to protect their father, now 89. But she hopes that Ms Graham, or someone in the family, might lend her a sympathetic ear. If she does, Ms Andrews would recount the sorrowful story of her early life. Her mother abandoned her at just two weeks old, leaving her feeling permanently adrift in the world. Despite early hardship she went on to forge a successful career, and during the 1980s was one of the first nurses to treat HIV/Aids patients. Ms Andrews was born in Hammersmith, West London, in 1960 to an Irish mother, Margaret Barry, 23, who worked in a biscuit factory. Ms Barry named the father as a hotel waiter, Thomas Graham, 25, from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Leaving hospital after ten days, mother and baby were taken to a hostel in Tulse Hill, South London. Three days later, struggling to cope, Ms Barry abandoned her daughter. She left a letter before running away to the United States saying: ‘I thought the best thing for [Christine] was adoption. I didn’t want to do this but I didn’t know what else to do. Please tell her it broke my heart.’
The baby was then shuttled from one institution to another before she was fostered aged two by a couple from Croydon, South East London. Ms Andrews recalls a loving childhood. ‘They [adoptive parents] were very affluent. We even had a second home,’ recalls Ms Andrews.
But Ms Andrews recalls as she entered her teenage years, the family fell into hardship as her adoptive father, John, lost his job and began drinking. Her relationship with her mother then became strained and abusive. The family later moved to Portsmouth, where Ms Andrews vividly recalls being summoned at the age of 15 by her father into the living room and told she was adopted. Her actual mother, he said, was an Irish woman who abandoned her days after her birth. ‘I started crying then,’ says Ms Andrews. ‘I remember saying “I wish you were my dad" or something. I went in a really bad depression for days or months. From then on, I didn’t know how to behave with the rest of the family.’
She left home at 19, first working at a furniture factory in Portsmouth for a for a year, and then moving to London to train and work as a nurse at the Greenwich District Hospital. Four years later Ms Andrews enlisted the help of social services to find her biological parents. Ms Andrews was handed a 50-page dossier, including hand-written letters from her mother and others from officials. Many recorded Ms Barry’s repeated claims the baby’s ‘putative father’ was a ‘Thomas Graham, a head waiter’ at a hotel. Ms Andrews managed to contact her now US-based mother by tracking down a maternal aunt in London. Their reunion didn’t go as Ms Andrews hoped and they lost all contact 15 years ago. Occasional attempts to track down her father throughout the 80s and 90s failed. But in November 2019 she had a breakthrough after contacting Ancestry.com and enlisting the help of a genealogist, who advised her to do a DNA test. Ms Andrews submitted her DNA result to Ancestry.com and MyHeritage.com, which immediately matched her profile to that of a number of second cousins who were nieces of her father, Thomas Graham. Using the DNA matches and the information in the dossier from social services, the genealogist created a family tree and concluded in her report: ‘It is very likely that Thomas Graham is Christine’s biological father. It is recommended that if possible Thomas Graham or one of his close blood relatives take a DNA test to verify the relationship.’
Ms Andrews has written to Mr Graham, a former catering manager at the House of Commons, and her half-siblings, including Sharon Graham, and is waiting for their response. Now, with her father’s age so advanced, she says she wants to see him just once in his life, before time runs out. She said: ‘If I could get the eye contact and be in his presence, and may be hold his hand for a moment and think: “Well, I’ve done that now in planet Earth - before I go, I’ve actually touched my father’s hand.”’
She adds: ‘To know our parents is a primal instinct in all of us.’
