General Chat

what a disgrace
after seeing this morning ITV

as if a sorry will make it alright
this has ruined peoples lives

Joy, it was a disgrace. I do not know personally any family that this happened to, but there was a lady on our local radio station yesterday, and it happend to a cousin of hers. One day she answered a phone call, and an Australian voice spoke to her, asking a few details. It was then established that her cousin had been in Australia, under this so called scheme. Sadly, he died before she could see him. All of it is so sad.
Julia in Derbyshire

I AM SHOCKED

at what i have just seen on ITV and what i have read
i wonder if any of the 150 thousand children had a happy ending

this is legal kidnapping

Terrible......I seem to remember seeing a television drama about an Irish girl who had a baby in Liverpool and tried to bring it up herself, but when it was about 2 she had to put it into a Catholic home.......she was encouraged not to visit but did in time get enough money so that she could support herself and her child....

......she went back to the home and found that the child had been 'adopted' without her consent........years later she was contacted by her adult child who had been sent to Australia under this scheme, with many other children from the home........wish I could remember what it was called now........perhaps another boardmember can remember seeing this programme.....

The show was called "The Leaving of Liverpool" - I have just bought it on DVD. A joint ABC/BBC production made in about 1993.


xxxxxxx mick

Of course it was Mick....... doh!.......as easy as that....

When I was in Oz I bought a couple of books, and one was about child migrants who had been shipped to Oz to boost the population ........another was about aboriginal children who were forced from their families and taken by the religious groups to be taught and then work as servants.... thank goodness this stopped happening.....



Slightly off topic, but same theme.....my Gt. Uncle was an out o work young miner and went to Australia under a working scheme to work on farms for 2 years, then they could buy themselves a passage home.......the Agents went to poor parts of Britain where there was unemployment.......my Gt. Uncle came home having saved a lot of money and lived very well for the rest of his life......he wrote a small book about it called My Journey to the Land of Milk and Honey, which he paid to have published and he wrote in his later years..........although he worked very hard and in very hot conditions, he enjoyed his time there, and the kindness of all the people he met.......he even rode on a Brumby (Ozzy horse)..... and they called him Mr. Aindee........his name was Andrew......lovely man and lovely story......

child slaves
thats what most of them become

just found this , gives history
national museums liverpool child emigration

margaret

Thanks Mgtjwl, glancing over that it shows how many childrens' societies were involved........I am sure most of them would say that they thought the children would have a better life........but history has shown us this was not the case........we can see this as a cruel decision, especially as some of the children were told they were orphans, when they obviously were not....

Hi

I was listening to a few personal stories on the radio in the car yesterday, some were so harrowing that I had trouble not to cry as I was driving home.

These poor people, and of course their families left behind here, some of whom had their children taken without their consent or knowledge. Dreadful, truly dreadful, what a *civilised* society does to it's children!!

Never mind an apology, what these families need are some form of compensation.

Perhaps, as one of the victims of this scandal suggested, free flights for life for them and their families in order that they can start to build a relationship. Some of these people are now quite elderly, and as we all know flights to and from (e.g. Australia) are expensive and out of the reach of a lot of them!

I guess you can imagine I feel quite strongly about this whole scandal :-((

And as for the guy who rang into the radio show saying that Gordon Brown shouldn't apologise as it's like asking Norway to apologise for the Viking invasion.......well, I'm speechless!!

Mary

What is a disgrace, is that those other Governments, who had the children sent out to them, did not check to see if the children were happy & being cared for!

If I can just add a view from a slightly better side, regarding Home Children in Canada.

The scheme was indeed poorly conceived and even more poorly executed. There were no supports for the children once they were placed in homes, and while some were in fact treated like children of the family, many were child labourers -- the girls as domestics and the boys as farm workers.

This was the fate of many children from the lowest economic levels throughout the 19th century in England itself. England also did not have the kinds of social and economic supports for children that would satisfy us. Children worked from a young age, often in unpleasant circumstances.

My mother's mother's sister married a Home Boy around 1920 in Ontario. His family always understood that he was an orphan and that his name (say, John Smith) was the name assigned to him because his was not known.

I traced his roots a couple of years ago. I found him in the Canadian government records of child migrants on line. He was 11 years old.

"199 children in Dr. Barnardo's Party - 198 boys and 1 girl. 35 boys to Russell, Manitoba and 163 boys and 1 girl for Ontario." -- The boys were pretty obviously destined for farm work.

I found him in the 1911 Canadian census as a late-teenaged farm worker, and then I found his marriage certificate (to my mother's aunt) in Ontario -- and it gave both his parents' full names. I located him with his family in the 1891 and 1901 censuses in Southampton.

In his WWI attestation papers he gave his occupation as Farmer, at age 22. This is odd: he named his mother in England as his next of kin, with an address in London - maybe he actually didn't know that his mother was deceased. Maybe he simply didn't want to say he had no known family. The address is in fact in Southampton, not London.

His father had died in the late 1890s, and his mother, I thought I had determined, in the early 1900s, leaving him an orphan for real - not like many of the children sent abroad, whose parents did not even know or consent to them going in many cases.

"Uncle John" prospered in Canada. He became a market farmer in his own right, in the rich agricultural land of southern Ontario. Not an easy life in the 20s and 30s, I imagine, no one had it easy then; but he owned his own farm and did well. He had four children, all of whom eventually moved across the border to the US and had their own families. The children (my mum's age, born in the late 20s and early 30s) became regular middle-class US citizens, Reagan supporters all, but eventually soured by Bush II.

What would his future have been if he had stayed in England? Quite possibly he would have done fine. It's doubtful he would have owned his own farm ever. He might have gone to sea like his father and older brother ...

I only knew him when he was quite old, up to the early 60s, when I was a kid. As far as I know he never talked about his experience as a Home Child. Most likely it was not pleasant. But he was the orphaned child of a widow, youngest of several, and the older children were not likely economically secure or able to take on caring for him. (I haven't been able to determine for sure whether his next youngest brother also came to Canada - or if he did, whether "Uncle John" knew.)


Anyway. The moral of the story is -- there were many child migrants like "Uncle John" whose lives were no worse here than many other kinds of immigrants' at the time, or than the lives of many of their counterparts back home -- and who prospered and were content in Canada in spite of the hard beginnings their lives here may have had. Not that anyone should not have had the *choice*.

The situation in Australia was often different, I gather. Child migrants in Canada were not placed in residential schools, with all the horrors that sometimes involved, for instance. The scheme was ended in Canada in 1948. The residential school horrors of the 50s and 60s here were reserved for First Nations children who were to be assimilated at all costs, and for Canadian-born children whose economic circumstances or perceived bad behaviour landed them there.

As for reparations, any child migrant now living who did experience these hardships probably should be given compensation, by the governments that sent and received them.

I would venture to guess, though, that the descendants of earlier child migrants (who of course would not be on earth had their parent or grandparent or great-grandparent not been shipped out) have enjoyed advantages they would not have had, had their ancestor not come to Canada, at least.

Hi9 Mike from the Bush,

Very creepy, but today I went to the library and have taken out a book called, The Leaving of Liverpool, by Maureen Lee........Not about sending children to Australia but of a couple of Irish girls who went to the States.

Should you wish to read a book on this subject, it is a novel but is based very strongly on a real person, called Never look back by Lesley Pearce... it will have you crying on every page.

Kathlyn

how could they be so cruel

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/6578427/Australian-apology-to-British-child-migrants-speech-in-full.html

This is the Australian Prime Minister's apology to the Child Migrants. It was given in Nov 2009. Over the last week or so this issue has again been in the news as you all know.

It is infuriating that these apologies should come so many years after the events. Are they hoping the majority will have passed away and not create a stir. I have never been a fan of "better late than never". I wonder how many other scandals and horror stories have yet to be revealed from our recent past. All in the name of religion or doing what is thought best for the underprivileged or unwanted citizens.

If you google the subject you will see the practice of moving children from Britain commenced about 1869 and has continued over the years. There was a news article in the last few days on Australian radio about a scheme the government is putting in place to reunite broken families. This might work for some of those children who were sent over here in the 1950s and 1960s. This is when you look back on your own life and thank goodness your lot was boring, normal and nondescript.