I became father to 1million children after man at church told me it was my destiny

The Sun

FORMER pro footballer Robert Glover was stunned when a man at his church told him: “You are going to be father to as many children as there are stars in the sky.”

He already had six kids with his wife Liz and felt that was more than enough.

But today Robert, who played alongside Chris Kamara at Portsmouth after graduating from the Norwich City youth team in the Seventies, is “Dad” to a million children — in China.

In the week the country announced families are now allowed to have three children instead of just two, a new documentary tells the extraordinary story of how the Glover family helped orphans find loving homes.

Robert, who worked with disadvantaged children in Norfolk after quitting football due to injury, had seen the terrible conditions in orphanages on a visit to China in 1996 and felt compelled to help.

Two years later the remarkable couple sold everything they owned and moved to Shanghai with their children — Rachel, then 12, Lois, ten, Megan, eight, Anna, six, and four-year-old twins Josh and Joel.

They didn’t speak a word of Chinese and, in a city of 24million, the large family was such a phenomenon that locals would stop to touch their light-coloured hair.

Fostering was not a concept in China, but Robert, then a social worker in Guernsey, convinced top officials that the eight million children living in its institutions would thrive if they were given loving homes.

The authorities in Shanghai invited him to launch a charity backed by the British government.

In the tear-jerking Sky documentary, narrated by the charity’s patron and adventurer Bear Grylls, Rob and Liz recall first stepping into Shanghai Orphanage where they were to set up the office for Care For Children.

Robert, 64, recalls: “They had hardly any possessions, there was a little cupboard where they kept their stuff and some books and a few tiny toys.

“And then you saw the older boys and how tough they were and you knew that in their toughness they’d survived.

“For every one of those boys who had survived many hadn’t.”

Liz, 57, says: “Lots of children who were in cots weren’t nurtured and weren’t helped. That was really tough.

“The staff used to bring the children out and tie them together so they could walk in a line and didn’t wander off.

“It was scary, I’d never been to China, I didn’t have a clue what it meant to live there, and to take our six children.

“But the thing that made it more secure was that we’d be helping children that were in much worse conditions and much worse situations than my children.”

It was scary, I’d never been to China. I didn’t have a clue what it meant to live there and to take our family

Robert Glover

Among the early obstacles Robert had to overcome was being treated with suspicion by orphanage staff, who would refuse to let him eat with them in the canteen.

But he made a breakthrough thanks to his beloved Norwich City.

Robert says: “The teenage boys weren’t going to get the opportunity to live in a family so I used to take a ball into the playground and teach them a bit of football.

“It started with about five of them and it grew to the point where we were given permission to train them.

“Some of our team were deaf and dumb, and one boy only had one arm. But they were strong and resilient.

“I wrote to my old team Norwich City and they sent out a strip of yellow
shirts and socks and green shorts, and training became a bit more serious.

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