FOR four decades, Jo Emerson adored her dad Chris.
They were like chalk and cheese, but she knew he loved her deeply.
Jo on holiday with dad Chris in the 1970s[/caption]
However, her world was blown apart when her stepmother made a shocking slip of the tongue — and hinted he wasn’t Jo’s biological father.
“I felt like the rug had been pulled from under me,” says Jo, 52, from Bath.
“Only four people in the world — my parents and their second spouses — knew that I’d been conceived using donor sperm from a clinic in London in October 1971.
“Not even my grandparents had an inkling. It had been a secret for 40 years — and if Pat hadn’t let it slip, I might never have known the truth.”
Jo’s experience is similar to that of the actor John Simm, 54, who recently found out the man who raised him wasn’t his biological dad after a shock test result on new ITV show DNA Journey.
The Life On Mars star’s mum Brenda didn’t realise either, but admitted she and Ronald Simm, who died in 2015, had broken up temporarily and reunited around the time she had fallen pregnant.
John’s biological father was a singer called Terry Smith, who had also died by the time he found out.
The TV star admitted: “It spun my world, and everything I thought I knew, wasn’t real.
“I was really close to my dad. He was like my best mate.
“But having said that, there was always something, I really felt different. And I always felt a bit guilty about it.
“I’m glad my dad isn’t alive to see this because I’m sure he’d be shocked and upset.”
Jo says that, like John, she had a small inkling that something was out of the ordinary when she was growing up in Hemel Hempstead, Herts, but could never work out what.
‘I pined for him’
Her mum and dad — a nurse and an accountant — split when she was nine but she stayed close to her father.
“I pined for him when he left. I was heartbroken and it was very hard,” says Jo. “But he saw me as much as he could and I got on well with his second wife Pat.
“In contrast, my mum Jill was a difficult woman. We never got on.”
Jo, a confidence coach, was devastated when her father died in January 1999, aged 55, due to Marfan syndrome, a life-limiting genetic condition which affects the body’s connective tissues.
Unbeknown to Jo, it also leaves most male sufferers unable to have children.
“After dad died when I was 25, I still saw my stepmum regularly,” says Jo, who has daughters Beth, 20, Eva, 17, and Nancy, 15.
My mum was furious I found out and even sent my stepmum threatening messages
Jo Emerson
“We chose to stay in each other’s lives and we have a fantastic relationship. She was a shoulder to cry on when things were tough, like after my divorce.
“One day, in 2012, I was talking to her about the difficulties I had with my own mum. My stepmum told me how much she loved me and that Mum was the one missing out. Then I joked about whether I’d done something as a baby to upset her.
“Without thinking, my stepmum answered: ‘Of course you didn’t. But it could have been that other thing . . . ’
“Straight away. we both realised she’d said something she shouldn’t — and I asked her to explain, but she changed the subject.
“I knew deep down that a secret had been kept from me.”
For six months, Jo begged her stepmum to explain what she knew.
John Simm recently found out the man who raised him wasn’t his biological dad[/caption]
“She was conflicted because she felt she couldn’t break a confidence,” she says. “But I couldn’t rest until I knew the truth.
“Months went by and I told her I couldn’t go on like this. I had a hunch about what it was and asked her: ‘Is my dad my dad?’ She replied: ‘He always loved you, my darling’. And that’s when I knew.”
The details Pat had about Jo’s conception were sketchy, but she explained that her parents had unsuccessfully tried for a baby for three years and were not eligible to adopt due to Chris’s health issues.
“Their GP told them about a place in London where they could pay to get sperm from an anonymous donor,” says Jo.
“It was in the very early days of fertility treatment and very rudimentary.
“You had no choice who you got sperm from but the men were mostly doctors and medical students. They gave samples in the morning and prospective mums would be inseminated in the afternoon.
I’d have loved the chance to tell Dad that it didn’t matter to me – he was my true father
Jo Emerson
“But I’ve no idea what happened after that, if mum went alone or how many times they tried.”
Jo was born nine months later in July 1972.
The bombshell news about how she came to be left Jo reeling.
“I felt like I’d lost my dad all over again,” she says.
“But while it was 50 per cent devastation, it was also 50 per cent relief. It made sense because I’d always been so different to him.
“Although I no longer spoke to my mum, I contacted her to ask for the truth and find out why they never told me.
“She said it was none of my business and to stop ruining her life. I was in a tailspin. It felt like nothing was true any more.
“I was also embarrassed and ashamed. I was incredibly grateful to my stepmum for telling me, but also angry that they had all kept it from me for so long.
“Were they going to let me go to my deathbed not knowing?”
It took Jo a long time to start processing the news and to tell relatives.
“My grandparents were all dead but I met my dad’s brother and his wife for lunch,” she says.
“I was worried that they might not want me as their niece now but they just said: ‘You will always be ours, nothing changes’. It brought me closer to my cousins.”
Life-changing email
After meeting her now husband Terry, 50, a lawyer, her thoughts turned to finding the man who shared her genes.
“For Christmas 2018, Terry bought me a DNA test,” she says.
“He told me there was no pressure, but he’d support me if I decided to use it. After six years of processing the truth, I knew I would no longer be betraying my dad if I looked for my donor.”
In January 2019, Jo took the test and uploaded the results to ancestry.com.
Two weeks later, as she sat in a Pizza Express, she got a life-changing email.
The website had three identified matches — a donor sister in the UK and a donor brother in Australia, both her half-siblings, as well as a biological uncle, the brother of her donor father, also living in Australia.
“My donor siblings had grown up knowing their origins as their parents had been honest with them,” she says.
“Because of this, they had been able to do DNA testing to find each other and our uncle.
“There were more half-siblings, but they had chosen to stay anonymous. Our biological father had been a former medical student who went into acting.
“He donated sperm for the money, never thinking any children would find out his identity.
“He had his own wife and children, and was horrified that we’d discovered his identity. He’d been promised anonymity after all.
“But due to his stage work, they’d been able to find photos of him and straight away I could see the resemblance between us.”
Dashed hopes
Any hopes that Jo could meet the man who gave her life were quickly dashed.
Jo adds: “My donor siblings had written to him and his family, but were told in no uncertain terms that they should not make contact again.
His brother — our uncle — said he was ‘delighted’ to know about us, but couldn’t meet up.”
Initially, Jo found the rejection from her biological father painful but she slowly began to take a different attitude.
“For a long time, I felt angry that he would deny me the chance to shake his hand. Now I just feel gratitude to him,” she says.
“He gave me life and gave my dad the chance to be a dad. I’m forever glad of that.”
She met her donor sister in person in 2021, but the women haven’t stayed in touch.
“She was kind and generous, but we had little in common,” Jo says.
“It made me realise that not meeting my donor dad could be a blessing in disguise. It might be awkward trying to build a relationship with a stranger based on DNA. I’ve got such a happy life now, there’s no need to mess that up — or mess his up.”
When Jo’s mum Jill died in September 2023, she lost her final chance to know the exact details of her conception.
“I still question why my parents lied for so long and didn’t tell me when dad was still alive,” she says.
“My mum was furious I found out and even sent my stepmum threatening messages for spilling the beans. I think she was cross at being found to be a liar, whereas I think Dad felt ashamed of his infertility, which saddens me.
“I’d have loved the chance to tell him that it didn’t matter to me — he was my true father.
“For a long time, I took on my parents’ shame but I played no part in their decisions, I’m just the result of them.
“It’s an amazing story — and it’s my story.”
- Jo Emerson is a human behaviour and confidence expert.
- Find out more at jo-emerson.com
CONTROVERSY BEHIND CLINIC
ARTIFICIAL Insemination by Donor first became available in Britain in the 1940s, at a clinic run by Dr Mary Barton.
AID was contentious and carried out discreetly by private medics for many years, with parents told never to tell anyone, not even the child.
Years later, it was discovered that Barton’s second husband, Austrian physiologist Bertold Paul Wiesner, had fathered as many as 600 babies through the clinic.
It was never clear if Dr Barton had been aware of his prolific and ethically dubious donations as he had been the one responsible for recruiting men to donate.
The sperm bank business became more commercialised in the 1970s, but it was largely unregulated until the Human Fertility and Embryology Act in 1990.
Donor anonymity was removed for anyone conceived from April 1, 2005, giving children a right to know the donor’s indentity from the age of 18.
This group came of age in autumn 2023.
