DNA test revealed taxi driver's real dad and nine unknown siblings

When taxi driver Darrel Severn was growing up, he was bullied and taunted at school for being darker-skinned than the rest of his family or his classmates.

His mother said that medicine she took to prevent malaria while his army dad and family were posted to Aden had affected his skin colour.

It was a story Darrel accepted until, on a night out and after a few beers with his older brother, he was told the father he had adored all his life was not really his dad.

DNA testing found that David Singh fathered a number of children with different women.

Darrel, 64, a father of three from Glasgow, said: “I was stunned, shocked and hugely upset for months because my dad had been a wonderful man, a British Army Staff Sergeant who had nurtured and supported me all my life and never treated me differently. He had known I was not his son, but he loved me all the same.

“When I asked my mum who my real dad was, she said he was a David Sands, from Birmingham, and would tell me nothing else.

“I spent hours sifting through Birmingham phone books and old newspapers searching for a David Sands, a soulless search for a man who it seemed had never existed.”

Heritage test revealed even more secrets

The truth about his real family origins was to prove stranger than he could ever imagine. It came tumbling out in a DNA heritage test bought by one of his three daughters during the Covid-19 lockdown.

David Sands was really David, or Gurdev, Singh – a businessman who moved about the country having a string of affairs with women and leaving a legacy of at least 10 children in his wake.

He was a former British Army soldier with Bollywood looks who had settled in the UK in the early 1950s. He died in the early 2000s.

Few, if any, of his children born in the 1950s and ’60s knew about the existence of half-brothers or sisters until DNA tracing of close relatives was commercialised and people signed up in their millions – with three million using such services to date in the UK.

Darrel said: “My DNA showed that I was 40% south Asian and 51% English with Yorkshire origins and that floored me.

“Throughout my childhood I had wondered if my darker skin had come from a South American ancestor.

“I had suffered bullying at school – name calling and the like – because of my darker colour.

“My daughter was soon contacted through the heritage site by my half-brother who, in turn, put me in touch with another, Mark Wadsworth. He was detailing a family tree.

“He told me my biological father, David (Gurdev) Singh, had come from Pune, in western India.

“I could not see him as my father because the wonderful dad who brought me up will always be my hero.”

Meeting his family

The siblings arranged to meet up in Blackpool, each with their own childhood stories of fostering, adoption or being raised by single mums.

“Two had known David Singh as their dad, but one who often worked away from home,” Darrel added. “It was hugely emotional meeting as we told our life stories, passed around family pictures and saw how much some of us looked like each other.”

He admitted that it had taken plenty of emotional reserve to adjust to his new extended family, but he is truly happy to have found half-brothers and sisters, some of whom have become close friends.

Darrel Severn, right, and, above, third left with members of his ‘new family’, half-siblings Hugh, Debbie and Mark.

“I used to feel resentment towards the older brother and sisters I grew up with for not telling me the truth earlier, but we all know life is too short for that,” Darrel added.

His brother Hugh Hayden, 64, a former HGV tanker driver and Unite union official, from Birmingham, was born after his Scottish nurse mum met Singh when she worked in the Midlands.

The dad of two revealed he was given up for adoption because her deeply religious Catholic parents felt shame over their daughter’s illegitimate son. He said: “I went to a Catholic family nearby, as was the practice of the time, and had a wonderful childhood with parents who loved me.

“Their other children readily accepted me. On holidays to Spain, locals often thought I was born there because I darkened so much in the sun and we would laugh it off.

“During the 1990s I asked social work to find my birth mum and I got a call from a nurse in a Glasgow hospital.

“We arranged to meet up, but she pleaded with me never to reveal her identity or call her home as her police officer husband would make life miserable, so we caught up in Edinburgh a few times and had a few good secret years of contact before she died.

“She said my biological dad was a David Singer, from the Midlands… interestingly very similar to Singh.”

It wasn’t until Hugh saw a bargain offer for a DNA heritage test that he discovered his biological dad was from India and his half-siblings emerged. He said: “I worried about what they would be like, but it’s been a joy to meet them and make friends.

“There are no ill feelings from me about David Singh. He fathered me and that’s it.”

New chapter of friendship

Half-sister Debbie Hammond, 58, an NHS Stop Smoking in Pregnancy adviser who lives in Leamington Spa in the West Midlands, says her first years were with her single mum.

“My birth mother’s parents were strict Salvation Army members when society did not have much sympathy for unmarried mums and I was left in a mother and baby home,” she said. “I was fostered by an older couple who cherished me and built the confidence for me to thrive at school, get a university degree and senior lecturer college post before a career change to the NHS.

“One of my grown-up sons bought the DNA test and persuaded me to chase up our family heritage.

“I had endured the usual name-calling at school about being darker skinned and now DNA testing revealed my biological father was Indian. He fathered me, but my foster parents were the ones who loved and cherished me.”

She added that meeting newly found half-siblings has opened a new chapter of friendships in her late 50s.

She said: “We don’t and couldn’t live in each other’s pockets but have much in common and some good times together.”

Mark Wadsworth, 65, from Clitheroe, Lancashire, was kept by his single mum who told him, at 19, that his biological father was a David Singer from South America.

“Having a child out of wedlock was a huge shame back then but my mother coped and eventually married when I was six,” said the dad of four.

“I joined the British Army, left for the Territorial Army (now known as the Army Reserve), rejoined the army and eventually spent a few years back the in the Territorials for several years. I served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards.

“At 58, I joined a DNA online heritage site, and discovered my dad was Indian, so I confronted my mother who agreed. But David Singh had long since disappeared.

“She was 19 when she met him, and things had gone too far, she said.

“I don’t feel any ill will towards David Singh – it’s just life’s rich tapestry, isn’t it?

“It takes nine months to make a child but with some of us born in the same year, it seems that every three months David Singh had a different woman.”