the late sixties and even up the eighties it was bad enough. At 19 years of age, from a foreign country living in London with your partner’s family hating you. Let’s be honest - relationships have broken down over a lot less. He left London and came up to Manchester, settled down with a lady here and had another child. From what we understand he carried on intermittently with his studies and had a good time. He had a business but no idea what it was. My sister went to Chorlton High, the school that I was later to teach in, without knowing who she was, because I didn’t know she existed. She went to London while I was in Manchester then in 2008 I got a Facebook asking why I was using the name Tony Erizia, the name I used when I sang Jazz professionally. The message came from Christine Erizia saying ‘Are you Hawton Erizia’s son’ and I said ‘yes that is me’ and that took me in to the Erizias! There was my first cousin ‘Bisi ’ and her family and my second cousin Christine who lives in London. Every time an Erizia came to England they were told to find the children, the ‘lost’ children. But the children had different surnames, my brother was called Catlin and I was called Lawrence so what chance did we have? I had returned to London to work and was living in Luton when I got a phone call from Ann Le French3 telling me that she had met someone claiming to be my cousin in Manchester. Who did you meet? David Kantabe a second or third cousin who was one of the leading lights in the Manchester Nigerian Community in the 80s. By this time my Uncle Godwin, was over here chasing the Erizia children and he found Rhona. My brother grabbed one of those tape machines that were popular then we drove up to Manchester and got on the trail. From the information we got, my brother heard about a sister and set about trying to track her down. It’s 2008, maybe 2009, shortly after I met my cousins, my brother found our sister Rhona and she contacted me on Facebook. Did Rhona know her father? Yes she has fond memories of him – he used to push her around Moss Side in the pram. We met up and learnt that our father was buried in Southern Cemetery. He had become ill and died in 1957 he was only 28. 3
See Le French chapter
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