'A drunken revelation led me to my secret brother... for years we crossed paths without knowing'

Two brothers who had no idea each other existed have met for the first time after a drunken revelation at a party brought their lives together.

Lee Langton, 55, was at a party with his aunt when she made an off-hand comment about his older brother. Not knowing who she was referring to at the time, it sparked a journey of discovery that has changed his life ever since.

“I was at a party quite a few years ago at my auntie Liz’s house in south London,” Lee, who lives in Staines-Upon-Thames, told the M.E.N. “I thought she meant my younger brother, and I said ‘no, I haven’t seen him in a long time’. She turned to me and said ‘no, I mean Richard’.

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“She had drunk a bit of red wine at the time and I had just thought she was talking nonsense but it stuck with me.”

Lee then reached out to his aunt’s daughter to see if she knew anything more about the drunken comment. A few days later, he was told that the revelation was true.

Lee’s mother, Annie, died in 1999 at the age of 56 from breast cancer. On her deathbed, she had made her sister promise not to divulge the family secret. He’d learnt that older brother Richard, who now goes by Stephen, was born four years earlier than him in 1963 and was put up for adoption after their mum struggled to look after him as a single parent.

“I was quite a bit mad about that at the time but I now look back that my auntie was being loyal to my mum,” Lee explains. “I think my mum was a little bit embarrassed about it. In the 60s, things were different. There was no welfare system, there was no support for single parents.”

Lee, who works in props design, then underwent a journey to track his older brother