I reckon if I had got pregnant before I married in 1969, my father, who was half Irish, would have been tempted to ship me off to one of those evil laundries, even though he wasn't Catholic!!!!!!
Nonsense floo, they were in Ireland. I doubt your parents would have sent you to Ireland even if your dad was half Irish, maybe mainland England where, so I understand, the conditions were better than in the Magdalenes. In any case, you had a boyfriend from a young age and you loved eachother so you would most likely have got married quickly, which a lot of people did.
Had I become pregnant, I daresay my parents would have wanted me to go somewhere but, again, it wouldn't have been Ireland. I could be doing my parents an injustice of course, mothers often used to warn daughters and make veiled threats but very often, if it came to it, they looked after their daughter and child. We will never know what my mum and dad would have done.
The Good Shepherd convent where I was sent had a laundry, it was for the school and the convent and didn't take in outside laundry, except for that of one priest in the district. We didn't know about the infamous Magdalene laundries in Ireland, had never even heard of them. and some of the girls worked in there part time, in between lessons, but weren't pregnant. We were paid a little bit, I remember. A nun had overall charge and, under her, I worked in and was in charge of the wash house and I loved it!
The GS nuns did run a couple of mother and baby homes, one was near Bristol I think. Some girls visited us from there and seemed to like the place, they were well cared for and the GS order gave them a lot of help if they wanted to keep their babies. However, that was over here and it was later on in the 1960s than the film sets for the Magdalene laundries. It's amazing what difference even a couple of years makes, also being in a different countries.
