Jeremy Gibson is a GP in Derbyshire and works as Named GP for Safeguarding Children in Derby City.
In the BBC drama Ten Pound Poms, Kate travels from England to Australia in search of her son Michael. Against her wishes, Michael was transferred from a Catholic orphanage in England to one in Australia. Afterwards, he was adopted by a wealthy Australian couple. Eventually, Kate tracks Michael down, but, of course, she can never have him as her son. Throughout the episodes, her heartache is palpable. Sadly, Kate was not alone in her experience of losing her son this way, and Michael’s finding himself cared for and looked after in a well-to-do middle-class home was a rare ending for many such children.
In Philip Bean and Joy Melville’s bleak and rather depressing book, Lost Children of the Empire: the Untold Story of Britain’s Child Migrants, they detail the systematic and sustained deportation of thousands of children from the UK against their will and without the consent of their parents.
“Many of these children had not been orphaned but abandoned, born ‘out of wedlock’, or come from broken homes.”
It is estimated that between 1618 and 1967, under the Child Migration Scheme, 150 000 British children, aged 4–14, were sent abroad to the colonies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and the Caribbean. In 1990, it was estimated that 10% of Canada’s population had descended from these child migrants. The process was poorly regulated. While approval was required from the Secretary of State to send children abroad who were under the local authority, no such authorisation was needed for those in the care of a voluntary organisation.
Many of these children had not been orphaned but abandoned, born ‘out of wedlock’, or come from broken homes. Most did not want to go, and, when their parents gave them over to the care of the institution or society (as in Kate’s situation), they had no idea they might be moved abroad.
In their relocated areas, many of the children felt extreme loneliness. Instead of experiencing love and affection, like Michael, they were often poorly fed, inappropriately clothed (even in sub-freezing Canadian winters), physically or sexually abused by adults without accountability, and forced to work long hours on isolated farms. Few received any formal education. Generally, they were inadequately supervised and exposed to many dangers in their manual work.
Siblings were often split up. Their records, including family details, were deliberately withheld from them. Sometimes, they were falsely told that their parents had died. For some, unbeknown to them, their names had been changed. And, only when they became 21 years old, were some given their birth certificates.
“May we today learn from this dark blight on our nation’s history …”
Unsurprisingly, as they grew into adulthood, many remained bitter about having been uprooted from their country of origin and rejected by their family. They resented having lost their childhoods and not having received a proper education.
How, we may ask, was such a policy justified? Many who sent these children abroad did so with good intentions, unaware of the conditions they would end up in. The organisations involved claimed to be giving children with few prospects an opportunity to succeed abroad, even suggesting that transporting them from Britain’s inner cities to the wide-open spaces of the colonies would benefit them morally. They asserted that it was the right thing to spread ‘good British stock’ throughout the Empire. And, of course, the colonies were happy to receive such a cheap labour force.
But there was a dark side to many of the organisations that transported these children abroad. They saved money and may, as per The Doyle Report of 1864, have even made money by deporting the children. For example, in late 19th-century Britain, it cost £12 per year to care for a child in a children’s home compared to a single payment of £15 to ship them abroad. When Andrew Doyle exposed the ‘ruthless exploitation of the children’ who had been shipped to Canada, his report was mostly rejected, apart from the introduction of pre-sailing physical examinations.
Throughout these 350 years of child deportations, the voices of the children were never sought. May we today learn from this dark blight on our nation’s history and forever put the welfare of children front and centre in all their care.
Featured book: Philip Bean, Joy Melville, Lost Children of the Empire: the Untold Story of Britain’s Child Migrants, HarperCollins, 1990, PB, 192pp, £11.72, 978-0044406433.
Featured photo The World in 1897 dated circa 1897 by Cambridge University Library. Image in public domain.
