As an 11 year old child, in July, 1952, he was sent to Molong, a Fairbridge Farm School, Australia. He was placed in Goldsborough Cottage.
r n"WHEN DID YOU LAST SEE OUR FATHER?

From the Echo, first published Monday 6th Jun 2005.

MORE than half a century after being shipped out to an Australian orphanage, Robert Stephens will be returning to Bournemouth later this month in a desperate bid to trace his father.

The painstaking search for clues to their father's whereabouts has already taken the art gallery director and his sister Margaret more than four decades.

Robert, 62, who now lives in Canberra, has only fleeting memories of John S Harris, the man who had a five-year affair with their mother Mary Stephens in the 1940s.

If he is still alive, Mr Harris, who may be known as Sidney, is in his late 80s.

When Mary Stephens died in 1961 from heart failure she took the identity of her secret lover with her to the grave. Her husband Wallace Stephens died in 1994.

Mary's relationship with Mr Harris is believed to have begun while they were attending light engineering classes in the St Alban's area of Hertfordshire after Mary's husband went to war in 1942.

Robert was born a year later. Within weeks he was put into an orphanage in Havant, Portsmouth, where he stayed for the next six years before going to live with his mother and her husband in Peckham, London.

Records show that Mary left her husband in January 1946 to set up home in Bournemouth.
r n"While I was at the Havant orphanage quite often my mother would take me to stay with her in Bournemouth," Robert recalled. "My most vivid memory of my father is being taken for rides on his black motorbike.
r n"I understand that my mother used to run a dating agency in Bournemouth, quite an adventure in those times. She had various other jobs including secretarial work and took typing exams, possibly attending a local college.
r n"From what her brother and sister have told me the years she spent with my father, although brief, were the happiest of her life."

Robert and Margaret's exhaustive research has traced Mary Stephens to six addresses in Bournemouth in the late 1940s; Strathmore Road, Burnaby Road, Edifred Road, Lonsdale Road, Kimberley Road and Bellevue Road in Southbourne where Margaret was born in December 1947.

Margaret, 57, now lives in Battle, East Sussex, with her husband Andrew.

Robert was among ten child migrants sent to the Fairbridge Farm School, an orphanage in New South Wales, Australia, in July 1952.
r n"The one ambition I had from the day I arrived was to go home," said the father-of-seven. "Sadly this was never to be. Time is running out; if our father is still alive he's about 88. We are desperate to find him - before it is too late."

Robert and Margaret are planning to visit Bournemouth from June 18 until June 21 in the hope of being reunited with their father.

First published: June 6"

Bob did go to Bournemouth to search for his father, only to discover the truth. This was documented by BBC TV:
r n"In search of a childhood lost - Bob Stephens

Inside Out (BBC) follows Bob Stephens on an emotional search for his father - a quest that starts in rural Australia and ends with a mysterious death on a Dorset roadside.

Bob was one of thousands of unwanted children who were sent to Australia for new lives in the 1950's.

He was brought up at the Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales from the age of seven.

But unlike many of his classmates at the orphanage, he still had parents living in England.

Bob's mother died before he had the chance to see her again and he never knew the name of his father.
Village hall
Fairbridge Farm School where Bob was brought up

When he asked for information about his dad, he was told that the Fairbridge Society didn't have any details