LONG LOST
Monica Porter
Monica Porter’s weekly 'Missing and Found' column has been running in the Daily Mail since June 1999, featuring the tales of people who are searching for their long lost friends and family members. Schoolmates and childhood pals, wartime comrades and evacuees, birth parents and estranged siblings, former colleagues, old flames, fellow members of Swinging Sixties pop groups and of scout troops. All of life is there - the light-hearted and the poignant, and often the strikingly evocative.
Over the years the column
has reunited many hundreds of people. And it was ahead of its time, a
forerunner to ventures such as the Friends Reunited website (launched
in 2000). Today there are many internet sites, as well as print
outlets, which aim to bring the ‘long lost’ back together. But 'Missing
and Found' has a quality which makes it especially appealing to its
readers: many of its stories tap into our national social and cultural
memory, they are concerned not only with the individuals named in them,
but with our common past. This, perhaps, is the underlying reason for
its popularity.
As well as reprising a selection of the column’s most colourful reunion
tales, Long
Lost tells the story behind the groundbreaking newspaper
column – how it was inspired by the experience of an ordinary couple
from the provinces, Gill and John Whitley, who traced John’s mother
after 34 years. The emotional reunion changed their lives and led them
to set up a voluntary service helping others achieve the same. They
became the column’s behind-the-scenes ‘people finders’.
In Long Lost Gill Whitley tells the author how her tracing methods have evolved, with electronic databases and online resources largely replacing old-fashioned ‘detective work’. She provides an easy guide on how to find a person yourself, as well as valuable advice on when it is wiser not to search for someone.
'Missing and Found' stemmed
from an idea proposed by no less than Sir David English himself, while
Editor-in-Chief of Associated Newspapers. Which makes the column - and
now this book - one of the illustrious Fleet Street editor’s enduring
legacies.
Monica Porter has been a London-based journalist since the 1970s and
her work has appeared in most quality Fleet Street newspapers, as well
as numerous magazines. Long
Lost is her fourth book.