The cruellest lie

Great-gran Gina leads crusade to give stillborn babies' dignity

- BY SARA WALLIS

MORE than 50 years after her precious stillborn baby boy was taken away in a cardboard box, Gina Jacobs realised she had been told a terrible lie.

She had carried the grief of not knowing exactly where her baby Robert was, having been told he had been buried “with a nice lady”.

The truth of what really happened to Robert and hundreds of others, which Gina only discovered a couple of years ago, was horrendous.

The great-grandmother, 81, from Greasby, on the Wirral, Merseyside, said: “If you had a stillborn baby you just had to get on with it. Robert was whisked away. I never even saw him.

“He was put in a box and we were told he'd be buried with someone being buried that day or the next.

“We never asked where he was buried out of respect for the family. That family turned out to be fictitious. We just knew he would be in Landican Cemetery in Birkenhead and for decades my late husband Jim and I would walk the cemetery wondering, ‘Where is Robert?'