Squeezed into a four-bedroom council house in Guernsey lives a woman branded the UK’s most prolific single mother.
Joanne Watson, 40, has 14 children, ranging in age from three to 22 and survives largely on state benefits after the breakdown of her marriage in 2010.
Once celebrated in endless articles in the press for her clan of immaculately turned-out blonde children, who were then supported entirely by the salary of her hardworking husband John, Joanne Watson and her family have now become figures of ridicule – and even hate.
The family’s bubble was burst four years ago when an accident meant John, 46, had to give up work as a lorry driver.
The financial pressure of caring for his 14 children meant John made a decision he will forever regret. As his health improved and with bills mounting, John claimed benefits while simultaneously taking some earnings.
He was caught, and the man who for two decades had been seen as the model father was sent to prison. The couple, who Joanne says had been arguing for years, separated and divorced.
I feel pretty sore about what went on,’ John says now. ‘I’ve been married 20 years and been a good father. I’ve worked hard. Nobody can say I haven’t, because I have.’
‘I did get done for benefit fraud,’ John admits.’ But I paid my punishment, I went to prison and I paid all the money back.
Joanne leaps to her ex-husband’s defence. ‘He wasn’t doing it to go on holidays and buy mobile phones,’ Jo says. ‘He was doing it to support us.’
The publicity the case attracted has made life – one that was already played out in the public eye – yet more difficult for the Watson children. Georgia, 15, says her regular appearance in the papers makes life at her school in St Martins very difficult.
Quality time: Joanne relaxes with her 14 children in the garden outside their family home
Quality time: Joanne relaxes with her 14 children in the garden outside their family home
‘When we’re in the papers, everyone talks about it at school the next day,’ she says. ‘Last time I was in the paper everyone was discussing it. People were leaving messages on my Facebook page. There were over 100 comments and not one of them good.
‘A boy at school the next day saw me and said, “Oy, what’s a Watson doing here?” I said I’d been here all along but he said I shouldn’t be there because there was too many of us.
‘We’re only a family. We’re like everyone else,’ she adds.
But Georgia is not entirely like everyone else. She is a sweet, calm girl with an outlook that is mature beyond her years. She helps tirelessly at home: planning school uniforms and packed lunches for the rest of the children, bathing her three-year-old sister Indianna and putting her to bed.
While her home life is no doubt happy and full of love, she has, perhaps, missed out on some of the carefree moments that children in smaller families take for granted.
