General Chat

Gordon Brown is to apologise for the UK's role in sending thousands of its children to former colonies in the 20th century, the BBC has learned.

Under the Child Migrants Programme - which ended just 40 years ago - poor children were sent to a "better life" in Australia, Canada and elsewhere.

But many were abused and ended up in institutions or as labourers on farms.

Officials are consulting with survivors of the programme so that a statement can be made in the new year.

On Monday, Australia's prime minister will apologise to the 7,000 UK migrants living there for the mistreatment.


He will deliver a national apology to the "Forgotten Australians" and recognise the mistreatment and ongoing suffering of some 500,000 people held in orphanages or children's homes between 1930 and 1970.

As they were compulsorily shipped out of Britain, many of the children were told - wrongly - their parents were dead, and that a more abundant life awaited them.

Many parents did not know their children, aged as young as three, had been sent to Australia.

Care agencies worked with the government to send disadvantaged children to a rosy future and supply what was deemed "good white stock" to a former colony.

In many cases they were educated only for farm work, and suffered cruelty and hardship including physical, psychological and sexual abuse.

Have just noticed there is a thread on Tips,

i hasten to add these are the child migrants sent out by the likes of Dr Barnardo's in the 1950s and 60s....not recently.

thanks Teresa, i dont know what has happened to my post, but half the text I put up has gone ! will delete and re post I think

This year will be remembered as the year of 'apologies'. Too little too late on all counts.

For years this has been asked for !!!!years.

I'd like to see the other countires including Canada who willing allowed these children some as young as 3 !!! into their countires with the knowledge what our gov at the time were doing.make public apologies.

Lots have done reasearch themselves,and been reunited with *family* who they belived they never had,also in the intervening years they lost every chance to ever be reunited with them or even birth mums/fathers,because of pudding brained bureaucratic red tape officials.

Apologies wont mend the broken..

I agree Kay, apologies will not mend the harm that was done to those children all those years ago, but at least it goes a long way to saying that what happened to them is recognised as wrong.

I don't know if , after all these years, that sort of thing can be made better, the scars are probably too deep in many of those poor children, but huge lessons are to be learned from it.

Human beings are not commodities.

T,
I met one of these children about 3 years ago when he was over and memories will never fade,he was 7 half ,along with a half brother and sister were shipped out to AU,,were seperated going to live thousands of miles apart from each other,,as a man,found the sister had died,and the brother adopted,.he wasnt,,and it was only a couple of years before his ever first visit here,,he found his brother,who has since died and was living in Canada...
He has been reunited with UK relatives,

Lots had a happy life.went to great families. made a good life for themselves.....but it was the deceitful way they were lied to. including a parent!!.made to feel it was all their fault they were taken to other families thousand and thousands of miles away,.

MIGRANTS
CHILD SLAVERY COMES TO MIND

nobody had any right to send theses kids anywhere

see also Janey's thread on General ,

My understanding of it is that certain churches had a lot to do with it and the government left it up to them. I may be wrong, but I believe that any apology should be forthcoming from the churches also.

It looks as if this country suffers from incompetent Governments in every generation.

As ever, the Church picks up the 'slack' on a charitable basis. A little inaccuracy often saves a lot of explanation.

What ever church or church run charity was involved at the time......couldnt just send multitudes of infants,young children and young adults without the gov backing or seal of aproval from each country....so in the end the Gov's said yes a good idea,!!!


Each young person had to be accounted for.

Dr. Barnardo's homes was one of the biggest exporters of children from Britain to Australia and Canada. Over the years, they have been singularly unhelpful to families trying to find their Home Child, and Home Children trying to find their families.

Home children commonly became cheap household/farm labour rather than becoming members of loving families. My mother's Uncle Charlie was one. Father died in the 1890s, then mother in the early 1900s, and he, the youngest of several children, arrived in Canada in 1905 at age 11 and appears on the 1911 census as a farm labourer. He never had any other contact with his family in England, and did go on to prosper as a farmer in Canada, marrying my grandmother's sister. His children all emigrated to the US, and my mum and her cousins recently had what will doubtless be their last get-together. Charlie never had any other contact with family in England - but as a result of name notes I have plastered around the censues at Ancestry (he gave his parents' names when he married in Ontario), I've just heard from a descendant of his mother's brother.


The Home Children really started being sent to Canada at least in the mid-1800s, not the 1900s. At that time, immigration to Canada was virtually wide open, for white Europeans at least, and especially British. There was very little in the way of immigration control. If mother England wanted to send its poor children to Canada, there would not have been much Canada could have done about it -- but the fact does remain that the policy was viewed with approval here, and the influx of a pool of young cheap labour was a benefit to Canada, economically and demographically.

I don't actually think that churches as such had a lot of involvement; it was more poor relief / social services agencies doing the work. The churches here have enough to answer for with the residential schools First Nations were sent to, and other abuses of children in schools.


This is the search page for the Government of Canada child migrant database:

http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/home-children/001015-100.01-e.php

The records are not complete, especially for later years (privacy legislation would certainly prevent disclosure in the case of people who might be living). But it's very often possible to find a missing child there. Some did return to England upon reaching adulthood.

The main Barnardo's staging centre for new arrivals was in Peterborough, Ontario, at Hazelbrae house. A memorial group that works on assembling historical info works out of a church there:

http://fourinfo.cioc.ca/record/PET0058

http://www.peterboroughmuseumandarchives.ca/publicbarnardo.htm

(I think "desolate" should have been "destitute", but desolate probably isn't far off.)

Barnardo Children

In the late 1800s, Dr. Thomas John Barnardo sent desolate British children to Canada to “better” their lives. At first strictly orphans were sent, but later this included any child that he felt would benefit from life in a new home.

The first Barnardo children arrived in Canada in 1884. Peterborough became one of the main Canadian distribution centers between 1889 and 1922. The children stayed in Hazelbrae House until placed in homes. Prominent Peterborough resident George A. Cox donated this building to Dr. Barnardo’s cause.

Some children were placed in loving homes, while others experienced hard lives. Sadly, many siblings were separated, with brothers or sisters even sent to different countries.

1912, No.807

(with a photo album)




Oh, and actually, many children were not accounted for. Apparently, parents who had had to place their children in what they intended as temporary care would return to find them ... gone. And the parents were never told where.

I have read and heard of a number of British children who were told before they left England, that their families had died in air-raids. They were brought to Australia and it wasn't until later in life, when they traced their families, that they often found their parent/s were still alive - or had been alive for many years after they were shipped off to 'safety'. I'm talking about WW2 here. The parent would tell them that they too, were told the child had been 'lost' in the air raids. Someone had to be responsible for those lies.

I have also met one of these forgotten children. She is too young to be a WW2 evacuee, so the scheme must have continued at least into the 1950s, or even later.
I wonder whether Barnardos is a church run thing. I think not, but orphanages run by various churches were responsible for many outrages. Still, younger members might like to know that what was conventional theory of child discipline has changed dramatically in 50 years.
I am aware of many outrages on ordinary schoolchildren by the Christian Brothers orders. The strap, beating, humiliation were the standards of the times.

Wasn't there a drama about this subject several years ago when it became a subject of debate? Sorry I cannot remember what it was called. I wonder why the Government didn't apologise then.

SRS,

The Child Migration Charity put this forward to Tony Blair when he was PM.and it was put on the back burner,,more or less saying present gov couldnt be held accountable for past gov actions,in reality that is true,,but back then a formal apology would have hekd more water than another 20years down the line,


These *children * now adults...have been helped in the past 15/20 years establish family links in UK,,but it comes with restrictions and a once only paid trip!!!!!..and because of red tape data protection in UK/AU/Canada it has taken years for birth information to be released......

The fault still lies with the country who put forward this proposal in the first pace,,,,,,,,UK..

Why Brown is lagging behind Mr Rudds statement just goes to show how lagging this country is....we should have been the first to make a humble move.-years ago.

Althought it may not be totally relevant in this thread - the UK Government is now cooking up ideas on how to stop the destitute, the poor, the maligned (and the terrorist) from coming here.

Funny old world, don't you think?

Hi Rose
Hi All
This makes my blood boil for my own personal reasons
an appology is to little to late for the years of suffering this caused so many children and their families and the suffering will be with them till their dying day not something that wll ever be taken away by a sorry
my father and his brother were nearly sent to canda in 1936 as they were in a poorhouse with their mum and sister she left taking the girl with her and the boys were left we believe her intentions was to try and get sorted then get them back but in the period of a couple of months the boys were boarded out to a couple who had a farm in this country and told their mum had died this we found to be a lie as in doing my research i found she had remarried and had a son in 1938 but had died after childbirth my father and his brother suffered terrible abuse from this woman and her husband and made to work the farm they were 7 and 5 and i know it causes my dad a lot of pain to talk about it and she was paid for the privilage of doing this and they were not the only children she boarded and abused i know their grandmother and mother tried to see them but was refused and i suppose in 1936 there wasnt a lot of places to go and get help to try and see your children or granchildren we are still trying to trace his sister as we are not sure what happened to her after the mothers death in 1938 wether she stayed with her step father or would have been put into a home maybe she was sent abroad on one of the ships in trying to find her i have come up with nothing in this country appart from her birth cert