Lost Children of the Empire

Philip Bean, Joy Melville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351171984
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1989. The extraordinary story of Britain's child migrants is one of 350 years of shaming exploitation. Around 130, 000 children, some just 3 or 4 years old, were shipped off to distant parts of the Empire, the last as recently as 1967.

For Britain it was a cheap way of emptying children's homes and populating the colonies with 'good British stock'; for the colonies it was a source of cheap labour. Even after the Second World War around 10, 000 children were transported to Australia – where many were subjected to at best uncaring abandonment, and at worst a regime of appalling cruelty.

Lost Children of the Empire tells the remarkable story of the Child Migrants Trust, set up in 1987, to trace families and to help those involved to come to terms with what has happened. But nothing can explain away the connivance and irresponsibility of the governments and organisations involved in this inhuman chapter of British history.

1

An Untold Story

In 1618, a group of orphaned and destitute children left Britain for Richmond, Virginia in the United States. It was the start of an extraordinary era in British history, formally referred to as Britain’s child migration scheme – a more acceptable phrase than child exportation – and was to last almost 350 years. The final boatload left only some twenty years ago, in 1967, when ninety children left Southampton for Australia, but altogether about 150,000 children were “exported” to outposts of the British Empire – to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and, to a lesser extent, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and the Caribbean.

The extraordinary part of this entire story is that the British public had, and still has, little or no idea that thousands of children were being sent out to the colonies. There was no deliberate plan or official conspiracy to keep it secret, but though there were some parliamentary debates and a number of reports and research studies have been written over the years, the scandal of what was happening was never appreciated by a really wide audience. Sometimes the very agencies that sent the children seemed, later on, to know nothing about it. One man, sent to Australia by one of the largest agencies involved in child migration, wrote to them for information on his family and got this reply from a principal social worker:

We’re sorry for the long delay in replying to your letter. I have been making enquiries on your behalf and I thought I would only write when I had something of consequence to say.

I have done extensive search of our old records and I regret I can find no trace of your name anywhere. But I regret that in any event the Society did not send young children abroad, only those who wanted to emigrate, in their teens, and they went to Canada . . .

I think it was unusual for young children to be sent abroad: your mother would have had to have given permission, and I wonder why you were not adopted as a baby, if she could not care for you herself? I think you will have to rack your brains a bit more, to try to remember who cared for you as a young child . . .

From the start the child migrants were mostly aged between four and fourteen and were usually rounded up and accompanied by a Poor Law guardian or a representative from the organisation sending them. Sometimes there was no representative and the word “care” didn’t come into it:

On May 20 1911, having no say in the matter, we were put on a boat and shipped to Canada. The trip was appalling, horror-laden, fraught with unconcern and disdain from those on board. We were all put in a large holding area in the ship and treated like cattle. The food was brought to the door and thrown to us. Whoever caught it, ate it.

A few of these young migrants were lucky: their existence in Britain was so bleak that they welcomed the hope of a better life in a new country. Some boys were excited about the idea of going to places like Canada, Africa and Australia. They represented adventure – cowboys and Indians and Tarzan. “I imagine my mother wasn’t sending enough money to keep me,” says George Barrett, who left for Canada in 1922, “and the authorities came to the school in Somerset and took me out and put me in the workhouse. And then I was in four different foster homes and the last one I was in, a little old lady and gent came in and asked me, ‘Do you want to go to Canada or work under a cook?’ And I said, ‘Canada.’ I thought of lions, tigers and bears.”

Some were glad to have the chance to go, believing their prospects in Britain were slight. As Tom Paine, a child migrant to Rhodesia in 1946, says:

I was a really naughty little bugger. I would forever be standing outside the pub in Peckham [south London], asking for a packet of crisps. There would have been no future for me in war-torn Britain. I hate to think of what would have happened when my grandparents died. I would have become a thug in Peckham.

Other children eventually made a success of their new lives: they became professors, doctors, lawyers, with one “Businessman of the Year” and at least one millionaire.

But mostly the children did not want to go, they did not want to be away from familiar surroundings, and they remained permanently affected by their experience. And some of those experiences were appalling. Denise Trowsdale, sent out in 1947 at the age of eight from a Catholic Home in England to an orphanage called Nazareth House in Geraldton, Western Australia, recalls that:

The first two years were dreadful. There was this nun, she was a cruel woman – she was expelled later from the order for her cruelty, but it was too late. She had this razor strop – that’s a wide leather strap for sharpening razors – and she didn’t hesitate to use it, it was an everyday affair. I saw her beat four year old Cathy until she was black and blue, beaten to a pulp. I lived in fear of that woman and she played on that fear. She enjoyed it. I didn’t know why I was being beaten. She would put you over her knee and hit you with a stick until you could take no more. She had the greatest influence on my life. She turned me into a scared, timid, nervy child.

In Canada, the young British children were sent to work for farmers, where they were forced into a routine which was relentlessly harsh. William Price will never forget his first job on a farm in Ontario.

I would get up at four am and go to bed at six or seven in the evening. You would work all day: you would harness the horses, clean out the stables, plough, cultivate and harrow. The farmer wouldn’t feed me. I would steal stuff out of the barns, rhubarb and such, and I would go into a meal and he would cut a piece of bread in two rather than give me the whole piece. And in the mornings I would stand at the far end of the table and I would have porridge and skimmed milk while his children would have cream.

I ran away one day and this farmer came along looking for me and he pounded me at the side of the road and threw me into the front seat of the car. My Welsh temper was boiling and all I could see when I looked at him was his silly, domineering face. And I closed my fist and I hit him with it. I was very strong, though small, and the blood hit the windscreen. And he stopped the car and he knocked me out. Other children died from the cruelty.

Many child migrants, particularly those sent immediately before and after the last war, describe a deep sense of loss. They remember their childhood as dominated by a deep feeling of loneliness, whether on the Canadian prairie or in the Australian outback. Some are still bitter about being uprooted and feel rejected by both their family and country.

I never ever forgave her [mother] for the fact she signed the papers and relinquished responsibility for Sis and I. When I tracked her down in later life, I wrote her a letter of abuse and she wrote back saying we were sent out because she was poor. I just saw that as an excuse.

Nita Brassy

The whole tragedy is that so many innocent English boys with the full approval of the British government and the West Australian government, lived in a dreadful, harsh, cruel environment which I think affected many of them for the rest of their lives.

Gordon Grant

You would expect that transported children would be orphans or unwanted street urchins, roaming the cities in the way Dickens describes them. And child migrants were frequently called orphans by the agencies shipping them out because people’s hearts are touched by orphans and they contribute funds for their welfare. Nevertheless, the vast majority of child migrants were not orphans; they were far more likely to have been abandoned, illegitimate or from a broken home. They came from all sorts of backgrounds and classes and were by no means all poor.

Their parents, when they gave their child(ren) into the care of an institution or society, generally had no idea that the children would end up being sent to the other side of the world. Some parents had offered their children for adoption but their children were shipped overseas instead, unknown to them. Some never read the small print that gave a Home the right to send the children abroad. “My mother never knew where I went to,” said one man sent to Canada in 1922 when he was twelve. “She blamed my grandmother for telling the authorities she couldn’t keep me any longer.”

The organisations sending these children out to distant parts of the Empire were convinced that they were doing them an enormous favour. They were seen as having no prospects in Britain, of having only a remote chance of doing well and that if they remained, they would drift towards the criminal and dangerous classes. Their families were seen as failing to provide adequate care for them. Sometimes the child had been deserted and put in a Home; sometimes the strength of family ties was considered weak and unlikely to last. So what better reason could there be, the argument went, for providing care and opportunities elsewhere? Why not send these children to the colonies to start a new life, in a new unsullied environment, away from their present inhospitable world? If nothing else, their health would improve in those wide colonial spaces.

These arguments were stated so persuasively that it was clear that the children left behind would remain in a miserable, unhappy place while the children sent overseas were off to a new, shining world. The following account from Making Rough Places Plain: fifty years’ work of the Manchester and Salford boys’ and girls’ refuges and homes, 1870–1920, proudly justifies sending 103 children, seventy-two boys and thirty-one girls, to Marchmont Home, in Canada:

Let us give the particular case of one of the boys. He was twelve years of age when admitted, neglected and living amid demoralising surroundings almost unmentionable, his mother was in prison for repeated acts of an abominable character, his father was unknown, the lad likely never had known him. After coming out of prison the mother signed our form giving us charge of the lad and tramped off to some Yorkshire town. Now think of the prospect before this bright English boy. It all pointed to abject poverty and degradation, if not to crime.

To put himself out of reach of this evil influence he chose to go to Canada and now within twelve months we have a letter from him, and it would perhaps be difficult to find a lad in happier and healthier surroundings. The contrast in the actual condition and prospects of the lad within about twelve months is more like a fairy transformation than reality, the gain – costing in cash about £11 – is inestimable. To a girl the benefit is often even greater in being thus removed from demoralising conditions. Again, multiply this by 103 and put down the answer in moral and material gain to the lad and to Empire.

Unfortunately, when you look more closely at the reasons for child migration, less high-minded and rather more pragmatic motives appear. The public face of the scheme may have been directed towards the welfare of the child but no one could deny there were advantages to the agencies sending them. In the late nineteenth century, for instance, it cost about £12 a year to look after a child in an institution in Britain. To send one overseas was a one-off payment of £15. Sometimes the “welfare” of the parents was the main object. The scheme became such a useful way of disposing of an unwanted child that one organisation refused to take any more illegitimate children, in case illegitimacy was seen to be encouraged.

Children in local authority care had to have the approval of the Secretary of State before being sent overseas. But this approval was not needed for children in the care of voluntary organisations like Barnardo’s, the Fairbridge Society, the Church of England Advisory Council on Empire Settlement, the Church of England Children’s Society, the Catholic Council for British Overseas Settlements and so on. Once a child was placed with an organisation, it was responsible for them until they reached the age of majority. Each made arrangements for the child migrants on arrival but there was no standard way of dealing with them. Sometimes they went to individual, isolated farmhouses to work; sometimes they remained in orphanages, children’s Homes or farm schools; sometimes they went to live in families as foster children.

The whole movement consisted of a number of different schemes run by different voluntary agencies or philanthropists: the only common thread was the shared aim of transporting “good British stock” from Britain throughout the Empire. Preserving the Empire was regarded as all-important and its need for British children to keep the flag flying was piously equated with the children’s need for its vast spaces. The Catholic agencies summed up this attitude in 1938:

Those who are co-operating with His Eminence [Cardinal Hinsley] and the other bishops of England in this great and noble project of transplanting poor children who are without means, influence, and parentless in many cases, from congested and unpromising surroundings, to a land rich in natural, but undeveloped resources which are awaiting the correct type of people to render them productive, are doing much to strengthen and extend the Empire, to preserve and augment our Christian civilisation which is so seriously threatened at the present time, and to give poor boys similar opportunities to advance in life to those open to the sons of comfortably-circumstanced parents.

But the reality was a bit different. As one boy who was sent to a Catholic orphanage in Australia said, “They didn’t give us much schooling. I am very, very bitter about that. We would go to school at nine o’clock and we’d be out of school by ten o’clock and out working.”

Voluntary organisations and successive governments shared the absolute certainty that what they were doing was right and you can only marvel at the tenacity, self-righteousness and insensitivity of those involved. Despite criticism, which as early as 1877, described child migration as “inhuman” and exposing children “to great disadvantages and to much obloquy”, youngsters continued to be transported overseas. Other critics spoke of the “total absence of efficient supervision, which exposed the children to suffering and wrong, for which they found neither relief nor redress”. But still the children went.

It was not that the administration at the British end was poor: far from it. On arrival overseas, the children were sent off to distribution centres or direct to farms, farm schools or orphanages. But those responsible for sending the children out were often ignorant of the conditions to which they were sending them. Young children arrived dressed in blazers, short trousers or skirts in the middle of a Canadian winter. Charles Devonport remembers arriving at Halifax harbour in 1922.

After 24 hours or so we unloaded there, and us twelve boys were ushered into the Department of Immigration shed, which was very cold and draughty: the wind blew in one end and out the other, and we were seated on dirty benches along the edges of the building – a massive, cold concrete-type building. And after a bit a chap came and told us to get on board this train, a small train which was only going a matter of thirty miles to a small town in Nova Scotia called Windsor.

We arrived at the Windsor railway station approximately nine o’clock at night, and we waited in the waiting room for a while, and eventually two teams of horses came and we were loaded on them. As soon as we got outside we realised how bitterly cold it was, so we all huddled together, because we had no suitable winter clothing – there were no extra robes or anything like that. So we went three miles in the bitter cold and the rain and the sleet. They hadn’t thought to bring extra covering to put over us, to make the ride more comfortable. There was no consideration given to the boys’ comfort right from the word go. No, none at all.

Young girls arrived on farms on the prairies or Ontario farmlands to work as servant girls, knowing nothing of the country, the families to whom they were going or the kind of work they were expected to do. Although it was the boys who were meant ...