July 8, 2015 • 23 mins
In the 19th and 20th centuries, 150,000 child migrants were sent from Britain to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia. Many of these children ended up in far worse conditions than they left behind. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody, just a quick note before we get started
with today's episode. We recorded this one before the June
sev attack on Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston,
South Carolina. That mass shooting put the former colony of
Rhodesia in the national spotlight in the United States. We
mentioned Rhodesia in this episode almost as an aside. That
(00:21):
was a coincidence, and we definitely would have approached it
differently if we had recorded even a couple of days later.
So if you get to our brief mentioned of Rhodesia
and wonder why we didn't include a more thorough or
detailed explanation, that's why our focus was really on Australia
as we were preparing this episode, and a full episode
related to Rhodija will be coming in the near future.
(00:43):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetop
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. A lot
of our listeners probably like the BBC drama called The Midwife.
I know I like it very much. It is for
(01:06):
those who are not familiar set in the impoverished neighborhood
of Poplar in London's East End in the nineteen fifties
and sixties, and it tells the story of these nuns
and midwives who are basically providing healthcare and delivering babies
in people's homes. And it's based on the memoirs of
Jennifer Wirth, who was one of the midwives who did
this work during this time period. So every episode of
(01:29):
Called the Midwife tells these stories of women in their
neighborhood and lots of babies and uh and family stories,
but because of when they're set, they are also peppered
with horrific other happenings in the world. Um there are
stories of women who have survived work houses and the
eugenics movement. There are ones about teenage mothers who had
(01:50):
their babies taken away from them without their consent or
the chance to say goodbye. One of the most recent
episodes that aired in the US, I was literally yelling
at my television to a pregnant woman who was having
extreme morning sickness. Don't take that it's the litamide, because
we know now the litamide caused many many children to
(02:10):
be born without their limbs and with all kinds of
other physical problems. For the most part, when like when
Called the Midwife drops one of these things on the viewer,
I know that story already, right, I already knew about
work houses and teenage moms who had their babies taken
away and all this stuff. But there's one episode that
(02:31):
alluded to a horror that was entirely news to me.
The first episode of the most recent season, which is
series four. It's about a family of four young children
who have just been woefully neglected, neglected by their mother,
and the oldest one is trying to look after the siblings,
but he's just a little boy. In the end, they
are taken from their mother's care. The baby, who was
(02:54):
just in very horrible condition from all this neglect, was
adopted by another family um and then the rest of
the children are sent to Australia as part of the
Child Migrants program, where, according to Vanessa redgraves narration, they
faced a life of hard labor. And then I was like,
I'm wait, I'm sorry, the what the what program are
(03:15):
we talking about right now? Then I basically tweeted that
I just wanted to thank Called the Midwife for telling
me some horrible thing from the past that I didn't
know about that now I was going to have to
do a podcast episode on because that's exactly what happened.
We have before on the show talked about a number
of government attempts to populate their various colonies throughout encouraged
(03:35):
or more accurately forced migrations. Before in the fairly recent archives,
we have episodes on Lefi Duroi, who were the women
sent to New France which is now Canada as potential
wives and the hope that they would even out the
gender ratio and boost population there. And we've also talked
about the Lady Juliana, which was a ship of female
prisoners sent on a similar mission from Britain to Australia.
(03:57):
And in the US there were the Offen trains, which
transported children, some of which were orphans, some of which
were not from densely populated cities in the east to
country out west where they would have it was hoped,
a better life. So the fielding wat migrated in the
late seventeenth century. The Lady Juliana sailed in seventeen eighty nine.
(04:19):
The Orphan trains ran in the United States from the
eighteen fifties until nineteen twenty nine, although that last train
only carried three children on it. In Britain, child migration
efforts started as early as the sixteen hundreds, when children
were sent to the American colony of Virginia was about
a hundred children, but these efforts didn't really get going
until the eighteen hundreds. From then until the nineteen twenties,
(04:43):
about one hundred thousand children were sent from the British
Isles to Canada to live. For the most part, these
Canadian children were sent through processing centers and then they
were divided by gender. Boys went to farms to do
farm work and girls went to homes to act as
domestic servants. So this phase of child migration from Britain
(05:06):
did have some things in common with the orphan train
movement that we've had a whole episode on. People thought
that the children were going to be better off in
their new circumstances, that they were getting access to a
better life than they would have had in an institution
in Britain, and that they were also learning to work
in their new placements. But in reality, British children sent
(05:30):
to Canada wound up doing manual labor for little to
no money. Once in Canada, home children, as they came
to be known, were usually stigmatized, and they were treated
as second class citizens, regardless of whether they were working
on a farm or in a home or somewhere else,
so much so that many of them hid this part
of their childhood when they became adults. It's estimated that
(05:52):
a little more than ten percent of Canada's population is
actually descended from child migrants. I kept find in a
statistic that more than half of these children had also
been abused in some way, but I could not figure
out how that statistic was determined. Uh, and some of
the children who were sent to Canada did wind up
(06:12):
back in orphanages and other institutions when placements for them
could not be found in homes and farms and other places.
So in these cases, children had basically been sent from
one institution to another institution, with the second one being
on the other side of an entire ocean, so they
basically lost the connections they had had to friends and
family and the people who were caring for them where
(06:33):
they came from, to have to start all over somewhere
on the other side of the world. Many of the
surviving British child migrants to Canada were tracked down in
the nineteen eighties, and by that point the ones that
were still alive were elderly, and the stories that they
told were also very similar to what we talked about
in the Orphan Trains episode. Many had been sent to
(06:54):
Canada far too young to really know what was going on,
and most were told that their parents had id but
many had siblings, cousins and other family, all of whom
were separated from one another. Child migration efforts from Britain
to Canada ended with the Great Depression, but a new
wave of migration followed, and this was to Australia and
(07:15):
New Zealand. We're going to talk about that more after
a brief word from a sponsor. So the Department of
Health estimates that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a
hundred and fifty thousand child migrants were sent from Britain
to other countries. A hundred thousand of them, as we
just talked about before the break, went to Canada. The
rest of them went to Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia
(07:37):
which is now Zimbabwe. In the wake of World War Two,
the British Empire feared for the stability of its territory
in Australia and New Zealand. Having such an expansive, largely
unpopulated territory, so far away from Britain and so much
closer to nations with which Britain had just been at war,
seemed very threatening. Plus there were some overall population and
(08:00):
worries in general, there had been a great loss of
life that had come along with the war. And then
there was the fact that the white colonists in Australia
were basically a minority in that hemisphere. In the words
of the Archbishop of Perth in quote, if we do
not supply from our own stock, we are leaving ourselves
all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming
(08:20):
millions of our neighboring Asiatic races. So the British government
decided to send children to Australia and New Zealand. Australia
also invited other European nations to participate in this scheme,
and about a hundred children came from Malta, but that
really seems to be the extent of participation from elsewhere
(08:41):
in Europe. About five hundred and fifty British children were
sent to New Zealand and placed in foster homes. Although
many of those placements turned out to be temporary, they
just didn't work out for one reason or another, and
that whole process was not really supervised very well by
local authorities or child child welfare organization, And once the
children were in New Zealand, many more children were sent
(09:04):
to Australia. The British and Australian governments took on this
scheme with a collection of religious charities and other charitable organizations,
including the Salvation Army, Bernardo's, the Fairbridge Society and National
Children's Homes. There were organizations affiliated with the Roman Catholic
Church and the Church of England that also were involved
(09:25):
in this plan. So at least in some cases, there
seems to have been a genuine desire to provide a
better life for children who were living in poverty, or
were being neglected or mistreated by their families, or were
for some other reason living in some kind of unsafe condition.
So there were definitely people involved in this who were
(09:46):
envisioning that these children would have an idyllic life on
a farm with warm weather and lots of sunshine once
they got to Australia. When you look at the pictures
of these children as they're leaving Britain or arriving in Australia,
they often look really happy, like they're about to involve
embark on this wonderful adventure. But the reality was much different.
(10:07):
Between the nineteen thirties and nineteen sixty seven, between seven
thousand and ten thousand children between the ages of three
and fourteen were moved from Britain to Australia, and they
were described in the press at the time as quote
war orphans, and newspaper coverage praised these efforts as being charitable.
But even though they had generally been told that their
(10:28):
parents had died, most of these children were not orphans.
Many of them were children whose families had fallen on
hard times during the war, and they had consequently put
their children into care, hoping to come back for them
later when they had their their finances under control. Many
of them were children of unmarried women and other parents
who had placed their children up for adoption and thought
(10:50):
that their children had been adopted by families who were
going to be better off that way. For the children
who still had living families, which was a lot of
the children who were sent to Australia. This basically deportation
was done without their parents knowledge or consent. So at
this point we have children who were told they were
(11:11):
orphans but in fact they were not, and parents who
were told their children were going to be placed with
an adoptive family, but in fact that they were not.
And instead these children, who were as young as three
years old, were sent twelve thousand miles away on a
sea voyage that took up to twelve weeks, giving them
very little hope of ever returning to Britain. Let's make
(11:31):
things worse. Once the children were in Australia, they were
not families waiting to care for them. That the whole
plan was pretty much abandoned almost immediately as being too
much trouble. They went back into institutions. So for a
lot of children, even if they had started out at
an institution in Britain, this meant being uprooted from a
setting that was familiar, where they had relationship with relationships
(11:52):
with staff and other children, and being sent to the
literal other side of the world once again to start
over at a different in the tuition, with different staff
and different surroundings and different peers living with them. Although
some children who were relocated to Australia did well there,
many wound up feeling rejected by Britain and never really
(12:13):
at home in Australia. A couple of the institutions where
these children were placed became notorious for abuse and neglect.
In particular beIN Dune, Boys Town, which is north of Perth,
was literally built by the boys who were to live there.
It was heavy manual labor and they were children as adults.
Many of the boys who lived there reported being physically
(12:33):
and sexually abused, and this was by far not the
only place where abuses were reported, but reports of abuse
at ben Dune were widespread and extremely horrifying. So apart
from the news coverage that had happened as children were
being sent which was generally favorable, this whole process fell
out of you for a lot of people for a
(12:54):
long time. We're going to talk about when and how
that changed. After another brief word from a sponsor, so
as we just alluded to before the break, after all
this favorable news coverage in the post war years, this
program kind of faded away from the public consciousness. In
the British Empire. That started to change in when a
woman known as Madeline wrote a letter to a British
(13:16):
social worker named Margaret Humphries. Humphries had been running a
support service called Triangle, which was for birth parents, adoptive
parents and adults who had been adopted as children. So
it was for all three pieces of the adoption Triangle
to kind of get to know each other and have
a support group and that sort of a thing. Madeline
(13:36):
was living in Adelaide and had heard about the service
from a friend who had taken a trip to Britain.
Madeline's letter said that she had been taken from a
children's home where she had been living because her parents
had died when she was four, and sent to Australia.
So when Humphreys read this letter, she thought Madeline must
be mistaken or misremembering that there had to be some
(13:57):
other explanation, because the idea of a four year old
being sent from Britain's to Australia without a guardian there
was just frankly unbelievable. Not long after that, though, another
woman at a Triangle meeting who had been adopted as
a child, told a story of basically remembering as an
adult that she had had a brother. When she managed
to track this brother down, it turned out he also
(14:19):
had been sent to Australia. Even as she started searching
for birth records and the records of Madeline's parents deaths,
Humphrey thought this must all have been some kind of misunderstanding,
But after looking for birth records one day at St
Catherine's House, which is where all the birth, death and
marriage records were kept, she walked to the nearby Australian
(14:39):
High Commission House and asked about the records of children
who had been sent to Australia after World War Two,
and the wording of the answer that she got sent
off some alarm bells quote the records of the children
had been sent to Canberra that made it sound like
there were many, So she started to do some more investigating,
(15:00):
put ads in Australian newspapers asking for people who had
been sent to Australia from children's homes in the forties
and fifties to write to her, and soon it became
clear that there was just a vast tangle to uncover.
She teamed up with Annabelle Fareman, who traveled to Australia
to do more research, and Bell Fareman was a journalist
who was going to write articles about what they discovered.
(15:21):
While she was in Australia, Humphries meant more people who
had been sent to Australia as children, and once they
were in Australia, they had wound up in institutions and
all of them believed that their parents had died. They
had no birth certificates, they had no other ties to
their home, and many of them weren't even sure of
what their own birthdays were. Eventually, Humphries worked to establish
(15:43):
the Child Migrants Trust to help reconnect these now grown
children with their families back in Britain. This became an
actual organization and working there became her full time job.
Many of the children's records were destroyed as schools closed
down or charities ceased to oper rate. Some of these
records were falsified or even lost when the children were
(16:04):
originally sent to Australia, and one of the difficulties that
arose was that once children were reconnected with their birth parents,
they had trouble traveling to Britain to meet in person.
With no birth certificates or other documentation, they couldn't get passports.
Humphries really worked just she worked herself to exhaustion repeatedly
(16:24):
doing all this. She also got as the allegations of
abuse became more public. She got death threats and multiple
death threats, threats to her family. Um Like, she really
continued to do this work as people were uh showing
up at her hotel rooms trying to break in because
(16:45):
she was speaking out against abuse that children had suffered
at the hands of religious care institutions. The whole thing
is pretty horrifying. Um. In addition to many many trips
to Australia, she also traveled to Canada and to Zimbabwe,
which was during the time of the migrations known as Rhodesia,
(17:06):
to meet with former child migrants in both of those places.
And we haven't talked as much about child migration to Rhodesia,
but based on the accounts that she heard there, most
of the child migrants that were sent to Rhodesia were
sent to school and treated as a privileged class, although
they still did not know who their families were. The
(17:26):
migration to Rhodesia seems to have been orchestrated, at least
in part to make sure that there was an ongoing
white upper class in British African territory. A documentary drawing
from Humphrey's work came out in It was called Lost
Children of the Empire. A drama followed which was called
The Leaving of Liverpool. And as each of these aired
(17:47):
in Australia and in Great Britain, people just came out
of the woodwork in both places trying to connect with
their lost children and their lost parents. Humphries also wrote
a book which was originally called Empty Cradles. It is
now retitled as Oranges in Sunshine after the movie that
was made based on it. Kevin Rudd, who was then
(18:08):
the Premiere of Australia, publicly apologized for the child migration
in two thousand and nine, saying we are sorry sorry
that as children you were taken from your families and
placed and institutions were so often you were abused. Sorry
for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold
absence of love, of tenderness of care. Prime Minister Gordon
(18:30):
Brown apologized for the program also in he said to
all those former child migrants and their families, we are
truly sorry they were let down. We are sorry they
were allowed to be sent away at the time when
they were most vulnerable. We are sorry that, instead of
caring for them, this country turned its back, and we
are sorry that the voices of these children were not
(18:52):
always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And
we are sorry that it has taken so long for
this important day to come and for the full and
unconditional apology that is justly deserved. Uh, that's so long,
Like literally twentysomething years. Margaret Humphreys had been trying to
get someone to acknowledge what was going on before the
(19:15):
official apology came, and in that same statement, Brown announced
a six million pound fund which has kept the Child
Migrants Trust working to connect children with their families. Humphries
and the Child Migrants Trust continue to do this work today.
She was actually named to the Order of Australia. She
was the first British citizen outside of the Royal family
(19:36):
to be so named. She was later named the Commander
of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Thanks
called The Midway for making us have to talk about
I do love that show, but especially with Christmas episodes,
there's always just this like some kind of social or
historical horror that stabs you in your heart part while
(20:00):
you're watching See I'm safe because I'm I'm phobic about
all babies and childbirth. Things I don't watch Call the Deadlights,
so I am safe for these cruel, cruel episodes. Do
you have a spot of a listener mail for us?
I do have a spot of listener mail. Uh, and
it is about time capsules. It's from John. John says,
(20:22):
first off, love the podcast. Now let's talk about time capsules.
Time capsules are actually the reason why I started listening
to your podcast. Well an art project that deals with
time capsules, about six hundred and ten of them. I
currently work in the archives at the Andy Warhol Museum
as an imaging technician. Starting in nineteen seventy four and
until seven, Andy Warhol field containers made like cardboard boxes
(20:44):
with different items from his life. He had a few
possible plans for them. One was to turn all the
items into an art show someday, and another was to
sell each box off as a piece of art, but unfortunately,
he unexpectedly died before any of that could happen. They
consist of newspapers, photographs, artwork, letters, invitations, uncash checks, an
(21:05):
inflated birthday cake, a picture of Rob Low wrapped only
in a stuffed animal snake, probably the best thing ever.
John Michelle Bosciot's birth certificate, and countless other items, including
stuff from when he was a child growing up in
Pittsburgh until his death. In these boxes contain more than
three hundred thousand items. The museum has been working to
archive and catalog everything they're in these time capsules. There's
(21:28):
a great This American Life about the project. My job
at work, My job is to work at trying to
digitize this entire collection of items. A pretty cool job,
if I must say. But I do spend a lot
of time just mind loosely scanning things. So I started
to listen to podcasts. It was a few months in
before I found yours, but when I did, I was hooked.
That's exactly what I was looking for. My favorite episode
(21:49):
being The Night Witches, well one of my favorites. When
I saw the Time Capsule Capsule episode, I've perked up
with delight. I didn't think that you would touch on
Andy Warhol, but it was still exciting for me. Thank
you for providing me with such joy through history. And
then He finishes up with an episode suggestion, I had
no idea that that was even a thing. Well, I
(22:11):
feel stupid because I really love Andy Warhol, and you know,
curse Valerie Salonas for robbing us of the eventual plan
for this one. But I had completely forgotten about it
as well, So it was a nice like, oh my gosh,
I totally forgot that. Yeah, I. Um. We've gotten quite
a number of letters from people about specific time capsules
(22:32):
or specific projects of this nature. Um, and some of
them are like, I'm surprised you didn't mention this. There
was just there was way too much stuff for us
to mention every time capsule, even just every super interesting
cool one. There are lacks of them. Yeah, So if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other uh episode, we were at History podcast at
(22:54):
how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at
miss in History. Are tumbler is missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, and we're also on interest at pinterest
dot com slash missed in History. You can come to
our parent company's website, which is how Stuffworks dot com,
and you can look up all kinds of stuff about
the history of foster care and adoption, which, as we
(23:14):
have learned through some episodes in this podcast, was not
always a great history. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in history dot com, to find show
notes and archive of every episode that we have ever done,
and other cool stuff. You can do all that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or missed in history dot com for more on this
(23:37):
and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works
dot com.
Hey, everybody, just a quick note before we get started
with today's episode. We recorded this one before the June
sev attack on Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston,
South Carolina. That mass shooting put the former colony of
Rhodesia in the national spotlight in the United States. We
mentioned Rhodesia in this episode almost as an aside. That
(00:21):
was a coincidence, and we definitely would have approached it
differently if we had recorded even a couple of days later.
So if you get to our brief mentioned of Rhodesia
and wonder why we didn't include a more thorough or
detailed explanation, that's why our focus was really on Australia
as we were preparing this episode, and a full episode
related to Rhodija will be coming in the near future.
(00:43):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from housetop
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. And
I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. A lot
of our listeners probably like the BBC drama called The Midwife.
I know I like it very much. It is for
(01:06):
those who are not familiar set in the impoverished neighborhood
of Poplar in London's East End in the nineteen fifties
and sixties, and it tells the story of these nuns
and midwives who are basically providing healthcare and delivering babies
in people's homes. And it's based on the memoirs of
Jennifer Wirth, who was one of the midwives who did
this work during this time period. So every episode of
(01:29):
Called the Midwife tells these stories of women in their
neighborhood and lots of babies and uh and family stories,
but because of when they're set, they are also peppered
with horrific other happenings in the world. Um there are
stories of women who have survived work houses and the
eugenics movement. There are ones about teenage mothers who had
(01:50):
their babies taken away from them without their consent or
the chance to say goodbye. One of the most recent
episodes that aired in the US, I was literally yelling
at my television to a pregnant woman who was having
extreme morning sickness. Don't take that it's the litamide, because
we know now the litamide caused many many children to
(02:10):
be born without their limbs and with all kinds of
other physical problems. For the most part, when like when
Called the Midwife drops one of these things on the viewer,
I know that story already, right, I already knew about
work houses and teenage moms who had their babies taken
away and all this stuff. But there's one episode that
(02:31):
alluded to a horror that was entirely news to me.
The first episode of the most recent season, which is
series four. It's about a family of four young children
who have just been woefully neglected, neglected by their mother,
and the oldest one is trying to look after the siblings,
but he's just a little boy. In the end, they
are taken from their mother's care. The baby, who was
(02:54):
just in very horrible condition from all this neglect, was
adopted by another family um and then the rest of
the children are sent to Australia as part of the
Child Migrants program, where, according to Vanessa redgraves narration, they
faced a life of hard labor. And then I was like,
I'm wait, I'm sorry, the what the what program are
(03:15):
we talking about right now? Then I basically tweeted that
I just wanted to thank Called the Midwife for telling
me some horrible thing from the past that I didn't
know about that now I was going to have to
do a podcast episode on because that's exactly what happened.
We have before on the show talked about a number
of government attempts to populate their various colonies throughout encouraged
(03:35):
or more accurately forced migrations. Before in the fairly recent archives,
we have episodes on Lefi Duroi, who were the women
sent to New France which is now Canada as potential
wives and the hope that they would even out the
gender ratio and boost population there. And we've also talked
about the Lady Juliana, which was a ship of female
prisoners sent on a similar mission from Britain to Australia.
(03:57):
And in the US there were the Offen trains, which
transported children, some of which were orphans, some of which
were not from densely populated cities in the east to
country out west where they would have it was hoped,
a better life. So the fielding wat migrated in the
late seventeenth century. The Lady Juliana sailed in seventeen eighty nine.
(04:19):
The Orphan trains ran in the United States from the
eighteen fifties until nineteen twenty nine, although that last train
only carried three children on it. In Britain, child migration
efforts started as early as the sixteen hundreds, when children
were sent to the American colony of Virginia was about
a hundred children, but these efforts didn't really get going
until the eighteen hundreds. From then until the nineteen twenties,
(04:43):
about one hundred thousand children were sent from the British
Isles to Canada to live. For the most part, these
Canadian children were sent through processing centers and then they
were divided by gender. Boys went to farms to do
farm work and girls went to homes to act as
domestic servants. So this phase of child migration from Britain
(05:06):
did have some things in common with the orphan train
movement that we've had a whole episode on. People thought
that the children were going to be better off in
their new circumstances, that they were getting access to a
better life than they would have had in an institution
in Britain, and that they were also learning to work
in their new placements. But in reality, British children sent
(05:30):
to Canada wound up doing manual labor for little to
no money. Once in Canada, home children, as they came
to be known, were usually stigmatized, and they were treated
as second class citizens, regardless of whether they were working
on a farm or in a home or somewhere else,
so much so that many of them hid this part
of their childhood when they became adults. It's estimated that
(05:52):
a little more than ten percent of Canada's population is
actually descended from child migrants. I kept find in a
statistic that more than half of these children had also
been abused in some way, but I could not figure
out how that statistic was determined. Uh, and some of
the children who were sent to Canada did wind up
(06:12):
back in orphanages and other institutions when placements for them
could not be found in homes and farms and other places.
So in these cases, children had basically been sent from
one institution to another institution, with the second one being
on the other side of an entire ocean, so they
basically lost the connections they had had to friends and
family and the people who were caring for them where
(06:33):
they came from, to have to start all over somewhere
on the other side of the world. Many of the
surviving British child migrants to Canada were tracked down in
the nineteen eighties, and by that point the ones that
were still alive were elderly, and the stories that they
told were also very similar to what we talked about
in the Orphan Trains episode. Many had been sent to
(06:54):
Canada far too young to really know what was going on,
and most were told that their parents had id but
many had siblings, cousins and other family, all of whom
were separated from one another. Child migration efforts from Britain
to Canada ended with the Great Depression, but a new
wave of migration followed, and this was to Australia and
(07:15):
New Zealand. We're going to talk about that more after
a brief word from a sponsor. So the Department of
Health estimates that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a
hundred and fifty thousand child migrants were sent from Britain
to other countries. A hundred thousand of them, as we
just talked about before the break, went to Canada. The
rest of them went to Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia
(07:37):
which is now Zimbabwe. In the wake of World War Two,
the British Empire feared for the stability of its territory
in Australia and New Zealand. Having such an expansive, largely
unpopulated territory, so far away from Britain and so much
closer to nations with which Britain had just been at war,
seemed very threatening. Plus there were some overall population and
(08:00):
worries in general, there had been a great loss of
life that had come along with the war. And then
there was the fact that the white colonists in Australia
were basically a minority in that hemisphere. In the words
of the Archbishop of Perth in quote, if we do
not supply from our own stock, we are leaving ourselves
all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming
(08:20):
millions of our neighboring Asiatic races. So the British government
decided to send children to Australia and New Zealand. Australia
also invited other European nations to participate in this scheme,
and about a hundred children came from Malta, but that
really seems to be the extent of participation from elsewhere
(08:41):
in Europe. About five hundred and fifty British children were
sent to New Zealand and placed in foster homes. Although
many of those placements turned out to be temporary, they
just didn't work out for one reason or another, and
that whole process was not really supervised very well by
local authorities or child child welfare organization, And once the
children were in New Zealand, many more children were sent
(09:04):
to Australia. The British and Australian governments took on this
scheme with a collection of religious charities and other charitable organizations,
including the Salvation Army, Bernardo's, the Fairbridge Society and National
Children's Homes. There were organizations affiliated with the Roman Catholic
Church and the Church of England that also were involved
(09:25):
in this plan. So at least in some cases, there
seems to have been a genuine desire to provide a
better life for children who were living in poverty, or
were being neglected or mistreated by their families, or were
for some other reason living in some kind of unsafe condition.
So there were definitely people involved in this who were
(09:46):
envisioning that these children would have an idyllic life on
a farm with warm weather and lots of sunshine once
they got to Australia. When you look at the pictures
of these children as they're leaving Britain or arriving in Australia,
they often look really happy, like they're about to involve
embark on this wonderful adventure. But the reality was much different.
(10:07):
Between the nineteen thirties and nineteen sixty seven, between seven
thousand and ten thousand children between the ages of three
and fourteen were moved from Britain to Australia, and they
were described in the press at the time as quote
war orphans, and newspaper coverage praised these efforts as being charitable.
But even though they had generally been told that their
(10:28):
parents had died, most of these children were not orphans.
Many of them were children whose families had fallen on
hard times during the war, and they had consequently put
their children into care, hoping to come back for them
later when they had their their finances under control. Many
of them were children of unmarried women and other parents
who had placed their children up for adoption and thought
(10:50):
that their children had been adopted by families who were
going to be better off that way. For the children
who still had living families, which was a lot of
the children who were sent to Australia. This basically deportation
was done without their parents knowledge or consent. So at
this point we have children who were told they were
(11:11):
orphans but in fact they were not, and parents who
were told their children were going to be placed with
an adoptive family, but in fact that they were not.
And instead these children, who were as young as three
years old, were sent twelve thousand miles away on a
sea voyage that took up to twelve weeks, giving them
very little hope of ever returning to Britain. Let's make
(11:31):
things worse. Once the children were in Australia, they were
not families waiting to care for them. That the whole
plan was pretty much abandoned almost immediately as being too
much trouble. They went back into institutions. So for a
lot of children, even if they had started out at
an institution in Britain, this meant being uprooted from a
setting that was familiar, where they had relationship with relationships
(11:52):
with staff and other children, and being sent to the
literal other side of the world once again to start
over at a different in the tuition, with different staff
and different surroundings and different peers living with them. Although
some children who were relocated to Australia did well there,
many wound up feeling rejected by Britain and never really
(12:13):
at home in Australia. A couple of the institutions where
these children were placed became notorious for abuse and neglect.
In particular beIN Dune, Boys Town, which is north of Perth,
was literally built by the boys who were to live there.
It was heavy manual labor and they were children as adults.
Many of the boys who lived there reported being physically
(12:33):
and sexually abused, and this was by far not the
only place where abuses were reported, but reports of abuse
at ben Dune were widespread and extremely horrifying. So apart
from the news coverage that had happened as children were
being sent which was generally favorable, this whole process fell
out of you for a lot of people for a
(12:54):
long time. We're going to talk about when and how
that changed. After another brief word from a sponsor, so
as we just alluded to before the break, after all
this favorable news coverage in the post war years, this
program kind of faded away from the public consciousness. In
the British Empire. That started to change in when a
woman known as Madeline wrote a letter to a British
(13:16):
social worker named Margaret Humphries. Humphries had been running a
support service called Triangle, which was for birth parents, adoptive
parents and adults who had been adopted as children. So
it was for all three pieces of the adoption Triangle
to kind of get to know each other and have
a support group and that sort of a thing. Madeline
(13:36):
was living in Adelaide and had heard about the service
from a friend who had taken a trip to Britain.
Madeline's letter said that she had been taken from a
children's home where she had been living because her parents
had died when she was four, and sent to Australia.
So when Humphreys read this letter, she thought Madeline must
be mistaken or misremembering that there had to be some
(13:57):
other explanation, because the idea of a four year old
being sent from Britain's to Australia without a guardian there
was just frankly unbelievable. Not long after that, though, another
woman at a Triangle meeting who had been adopted as
a child, told a story of basically remembering as an
adult that she had had a brother. When she managed
to track this brother down, it turned out he also
(14:19):
had been sent to Australia. Even as she started searching
for birth records and the records of Madeline's parents deaths,
Humphrey thought this must all have been some kind of misunderstanding,
But after looking for birth records one day at St
Catherine's House, which is where all the birth, death and
marriage records were kept, she walked to the nearby Australian
(14:39):
High Commission House and asked about the records of children
who had been sent to Australia after World War Two,
and the wording of the answer that she got sent
off some alarm bells quote the records of the children
had been sent to Canberra that made it sound like
there were many, So she started to do some more investigating,
(15:00):
put ads in Australian newspapers asking for people who had
been sent to Australia from children's homes in the forties
and fifties to write to her, and soon it became
clear that there was just a vast tangle to uncover.
She teamed up with Annabelle Fareman, who traveled to Australia
to do more research, and Bell Fareman was a journalist
who was going to write articles about what they discovered.
(15:21):
While she was in Australia, Humphries meant more people who
had been sent to Australia as children, and once they
were in Australia, they had wound up in institutions and
all of them believed that their parents had died. They
had no birth certificates, they had no other ties to
their home, and many of them weren't even sure of
what their own birthdays were. Eventually, Humphries worked to establish
(15:43):
the Child Migrants Trust to help reconnect these now grown
children with their families back in Britain. This became an
actual organization and working there became her full time job.
Many of the children's records were destroyed as schools closed
down or charities ceased to oper rate. Some of these
records were falsified or even lost when the children were
(16:04):
originally sent to Australia, and one of the difficulties that
arose was that once children were reconnected with their birth parents,
they had trouble traveling to Britain to meet in person.
With no birth certificates or other documentation, they couldn't get passports.
Humphries really worked just she worked herself to exhaustion repeatedly
(16:24):
doing all this. She also got as the allegations of
abuse became more public. She got death threats and multiple
death threats, threats to her family. Um Like, she really
continued to do this work as people were uh showing
up at her hotel rooms trying to break in because
(16:45):
she was speaking out against abuse that children had suffered
at the hands of religious care institutions. The whole thing
is pretty horrifying. Um. In addition to many many trips
to Australia, she also traveled to Canada and to Zimbabwe,
which was during the time of the migrations known as Rhodesia,
(17:06):
to meet with former child migrants in both of those places.
And we haven't talked as much about child migration to Rhodesia,
but based on the accounts that she heard there, most
of the child migrants that were sent to Rhodesia were
sent to school and treated as a privileged class, although
they still did not know who their families were. The
(17:26):
migration to Rhodesia seems to have been orchestrated, at least
in part to make sure that there was an ongoing
white upper class in British African territory. A documentary drawing
from Humphrey's work came out in It was called Lost
Children of the Empire. A drama followed which was called
The Leaving of Liverpool. And as each of these aired
(17:47):
in Australia and in Great Britain, people just came out
of the woodwork in both places trying to connect with
their lost children and their lost parents. Humphries also wrote
a book which was originally called Empty Cradles. It is
now retitled as Oranges in Sunshine after the movie that
was made based on it. Kevin Rudd, who was then
(18:08):
the Premiere of Australia, publicly apologized for the child migration
in two thousand and nine, saying we are sorry sorry
that as children you were taken from your families and
placed and institutions were so often you were abused. Sorry
for the physical suffering, the emotional starvation and the cold
absence of love, of tenderness of care. Prime Minister Gordon
(18:30):
Brown apologized for the program also in he said to
all those former child migrants and their families, we are
truly sorry they were let down. We are sorry they
were allowed to be sent away at the time when
they were most vulnerable. We are sorry that, instead of
caring for them, this country turned its back, and we
are sorry that the voices of these children were not
(18:52):
always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And
we are sorry that it has taken so long for
this important day to come and for the full and
unconditional apology that is justly deserved. Uh, that's so long,
Like literally twentysomething years. Margaret Humphreys had been trying to
get someone to acknowledge what was going on before the
(19:15):
official apology came, and in that same statement, Brown announced
a six million pound fund which has kept the Child
Migrants Trust working to connect children with their families. Humphries
and the Child Migrants Trust continue to do this work today.
She was actually named to the Order of Australia. She
was the first British citizen outside of the Royal family
(19:36):
to be so named. She was later named the Commander
of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Thanks
called The Midway for making us have to talk about
I do love that show, but especially with Christmas episodes,
there's always just this like some kind of social or
historical horror that stabs you in your heart part while
(20:00):
you're watching See I'm safe because I'm I'm phobic about
all babies and childbirth. Things I don't watch Call the Deadlights,
so I am safe for these cruel, cruel episodes. Do
you have a spot of a listener mail for us?
I do have a spot of listener mail. Uh, and
it is about time capsules. It's from John. John says,
(20:22):
first off, love the podcast. Now let's talk about time capsules.
Time capsules are actually the reason why I started listening
to your podcast. Well an art project that deals with
time capsules, about six hundred and ten of them. I
currently work in the archives at the Andy Warhol Museum
as an imaging technician. Starting in nineteen seventy four and
until seven, Andy Warhol field containers made like cardboard boxes
(20:44):
with different items from his life. He had a few
possible plans for them. One was to turn all the
items into an art show someday, and another was to
sell each box off as a piece of art, but unfortunately,
he unexpectedly died before any of that could happen. They
consist of newspapers, photographs, artwork, letters, invitations, uncash checks, an
(21:05):
inflated birthday cake, a picture of Rob Low wrapped only
in a stuffed animal snake, probably the best thing ever.
John Michelle Bosciot's birth certificate, and countless other items, including
stuff from when he was a child growing up in
Pittsburgh until his death. In these boxes contain more than
three hundred thousand items. The museum has been working to
archive and catalog everything they're in these time capsules. There's
(21:28):
a great This American Life about the project. My job
at work, My job is to work at trying to
digitize this entire collection of items. A pretty cool job,
if I must say. But I do spend a lot
of time just mind loosely scanning things. So I started
to listen to podcasts. It was a few months in
before I found yours, but when I did, I was hooked.
That's exactly what I was looking for. My favorite episode
(21:49):
being The Night Witches, well one of my favorites. When
I saw the Time Capsule Capsule episode, I've perked up
with delight. I didn't think that you would touch on
Andy Warhol, but it was still exciting for me. Thank
you for providing me with such joy through history. And
then He finishes up with an episode suggestion, I had
no idea that that was even a thing. Well, I
(22:11):
feel stupid because I really love Andy Warhol, and you know,
curse Valerie Salonas for robbing us of the eventual plan
for this one. But I had completely forgotten about it
as well, So it was a nice like, oh my gosh,
I totally forgot that. Yeah, I. Um. We've gotten quite
a number of letters from people about specific time capsules
(22:32):
or specific projects of this nature. Um, and some of
them are like, I'm surprised you didn't mention this. There
was just there was way too much stuff for us
to mention every time capsule, even just every super interesting
cool one. There are lacks of them. Yeah, So if
you would like to write to us about this or
any other uh episode, we were at History podcast at
(22:54):
how Stuffworks dot com. We're also on Facebook at Facebook
dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter at
miss in History. Are tumbler is missed in History dot
tumbler dot com, and we're also on interest at pinterest
dot com slash missed in History. You can come to
our parent company's website, which is how Stuffworks dot com,
and you can look up all kinds of stuff about
the history of foster care and adoption, which, as we
(23:14):
have learned through some episodes in this podcast, was not
always a great history. You can also come to our website,
which is missed in history dot com, to find show
notes and archive of every episode that we have ever done,
and other cool stuff. You can do all that and
a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com
or missed in history dot com for more on this
(23:37):
and thousands of other topics because it has stuff works
dot com.
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