THEY should have grown up in a home surrounded by more brothers and sisters than you could feasibly count on both hands.

But brothers Bernard Clark and Ian Savage were torn apart as children as their family was scattered across Scotland and beyond.

Only now, more than five decades later, they are piecing their lives back together. And with as many as 15 other siblings tossed to the winds, there is a lot of catching up to do.

The astonishing story of the Clark family from Greenock is to feature in a BBC Scotland documentary, A Family Divided, which is shown tonight.

In the 1950s and 1960s parents Elizabeth and William were deemed by the authorities to be unfit to look after their children who were successively swallowed up by the welfare system.

Some were old enough to know they had siblings when they were taken into care, but others grew up believing there were alone.

It would be decades before the children saw some of their brothers and sisters again.

The Herald:

Bernard was fostered in Greenock with his sister Joan by an unmarried Irish woman, while Ian was adopted shortly after birth by a family who lived nearby, and did not learn of his past until he was a teenager.

It was only when another brother, George, came knocking at his door that he found out the truth of his family’s past.

Ian said: “It never ever occurred to me there could be a family out there. It was quite a shock. The strange thing about it was that when I opened the door to him, I knew he was my brother. I don’t know what it is, but when he said ‘I’m your brother’, I thought ‘I know that’.

He added: “Within half an hour we had gone through the whole story about the all the kids who were related.

“You can’t explain how you feel about that. It was just overwhelming.”

George, who passed away in 2015, had made it his life’s quest to reunite the lost Clark children, and had already tracked down Bernard and Joan in 2011.

Bernard, who had been told his parents were dead, knew of another sister, Sandra, but was unaware there were more. He even grew up living near Ian, and the two may have played together as children completely unaware of their family ties.

He said: “Throughout my life I thought I was alone with Joan. No father figure, nothing.

“Then in 2011, a guy turns up at your door and says he’s your brother. It’s taken me six years to get my head around this and try and get some sort of understanding of this.”

But there was sadness among the revelations. George and his brothers James and Tommy were sent to live on a farm in the Highlands, where they were physically abused and kept in poverty.

Tommy, aged eight, was deemed strong enough to work the farm so he slept and ate at the farmhouse. James and George were dressed in rags and spent the next three years living in a dilapidated chicken hut, cold, starving and often beaten.

Ian said his biggest regret is the missing years.

“We are all in our 60s. I’m 67 this year and two years ago I did not know they existed,” he said.

The search also uncovered a sister Mary and a brother Billy, now deceased.

Sandra was found shortly before she died in 2011, while another brother, David, was uncovered living under the name Iain McLean in Clydebank.

A further six children – John, Isabel, Anna, Ruth, Elizabeth and Peter – were born between 1936 and 1943, but all died in infancy.

Another sibling, Andrew, was found during the making of the documentary living in Wiltshire, but the missing link is the oldest brother Tommy, who may have gone to Aberdeen after leaving the Highland farm.

Bernard said: “It’s so amazing. When I was a child I thought there was just three of us.

“And now, it’s like it’s just short of 300.”

A Family Divided, BBC Two Scotland at 9pm tonight.