Child Migration: An Overview and Timeline

[From:  National Archives of Australia]

In the heyday of British imperialism, Father N Waugh, Director of the Archdiocese of Westminster ‘Crusade of Rescue’ waxed lyrical when he thought of the child migration work of the society:

A double service is rendered to religion, humanity and civilisation, in carrying off the children of distress to the open lands beyond the sea, to live in the open, to work with nature, to wrestle with forest, field and stream, to forget the fetid city slums, to think and strive and pray in the open, to grow strong and self-reliant, to be the guardians of the outpost of civilisation, religion and new endeavour… every child a pioneer of the Empire.[2]

In his rich hyperbole Waugh expressed the commonplace notions surrounding contemporary child migration. He was probably unaware of the grim origins of this three-hundred-year-old policy of despatching unaccompanied children – abandoned, illegitimate, poverty-stricken and delinquent children – from the mean slums of British cities to cultivate and populate the wide-open spaces of the Empire. Moreover, Waugh and other child migration enthusiasts were long deceased before the controversy erupted over the last phase of child migration – the despatch of some 3 200 children from Great Britain and Malta to Australia after World War II.[3]

Child migration had a long and chequered history surrounded with controversy and marred by scandal. It was, actually, never a single policy pursued continuously: rather it was a complex tangle of competing private schemes, government initiatives, charismatic personalities, muddled priorities and confused agendas. It was critically affected by the economic, political and social pressures of particular times.

The first 100 children – ‘vagrants’ – were despatched from the London area to Virginia in the Americas in 1618, their passage arranged by the City Fathers, while the last nine children were flown to Australia in 1967 under the auspices of Barnardo’s. It follows that the origins of child migration were linked to Britain’s acquisition of an empire in North America during the early seventeenth century. In the wild, untamed, thinly-populated continent, there was an insatiable demand for men and women to populate and exploit the new territories. The demand was so great, and the perils of the sea journey and the initial pioneering so desperate, that those whom it was convenient for England to send abroad – the convicted felons, the parish poor and abandoned children were considered suitable and many were despatched.

It was in January 1615 that the Privy Council issued a warrant to exile certain convicted felons to the New England colonies and four years later that these provisions were confirmed and extended by a further order from the Council.[4] Child migration was commenced – in 1618 – in this context as state officials cast around for other sources of labour in the colonies. Later in that year, the Virginia Company requested a second consignment of ‘vagrant’ children (ie street kids) and the City Fathers cooperated in procuring them – by having the constables arrest vagrant children and place them in the Bridewell or gaol until ships were ready for their departure.[5] However, many of the children did not wish to go and under challenge it became clear that the first group had been despatched illegally. The City made urgent representation to the Privy Council and on 31 January 1620 the Council gave its approval to despatch the ‘recalcitrant’ children:

We are informed that the City of London, by Act of Common Council, have appointed one hundred children out of the Multitudes that swarm in that place, to be sent to Virginia, there to be bound apprentice… there are, among their number divers (children) unwilling to be carried thither, and that the City want authority to deliver, and the Virginia Company to receive and carry these persons against their will. We authorise and require the City to take charge of that service to transport to Virginia all and every of the aforesaid children.[6]

This ordinance marked the legal beginning of child migration. The consent of the children or their parents was not an issue, although it is clear that many of the young people were runaways and abandoned children, beyond the interest or control of surviving parents or guardians.[7]

It was likely to follow that where there was a commercial need, ie, the desperate labour shortage in the colonies, then private enterprise was likely to follow the clear, unambiguous lead taken by the state authorities. There opened a ready cash market for any able-bodied man, woman or child who could be persuaded, fooled, forced or ‘spirited’ to the new colonies. In a word ‘spiriting’ was kidnapping, and for the next 150 years child migration operated on three levels: some children were sent to the North American or West Indian colonies by various Poor Law authorities and government bodies who worked within the 1620 ordinance of the Privy Council; a few were escorted by religious philanthropists; and the majority were kidnapped or ‘spirited’ from towns close to the ports for despatch to and sale in the colonies. There the children’s labour was purchased by planters and other farmers until the child reached majority, a procedure given a thin veneer of legality by the signing of indentures.[8]

The traffic in children being ‘spirited’ to the Americas increased during the civil wars of the 1640s, and the Puritan-dominated parliament on 9 May 1645 passed a strongly-worded ordinance against the practice.[9] Ships were to be searched by justices of the peace where there was reason to believe they held kidnapped children. However, there is evidence that this measure did little to inhibit the trade which ended only with the independence of the American colonies. The ‘Flying Post’ allegations of 1698 and the kidnapping of 500 boys in and around Aberdeen in the 1740s provide evidence for this.[10] By the following decade, Europe was plunged into a quarter century of warfare precipitated by the French revolution and the career of Napoleon Bonaparte. Abandoned children became the flotsam and jetsam of the war, and many who came to the notice of the penal system were transported to the Australian colonies, where about a quarter of the convicts were under eighteen years of age.

Kidnapping to philanthropy

By 1815 and the return of peace in Europe, the United Kingdom began to experience enormous and unprecedented social change accompanied by a population explosion which doubled England’s people during the first half of the century. The result was a predominantly youthful society. Those under the age of fourteen constituted at least one-third of the total population, and for most of the period, nearly forty per cent. Moreover, it was an urban presence; it was the towns and cities which were growing at an extraordinary rate.

Social tensions increased emigration from the British Isles and some philanthropists wished to use emigration to relieve the plight of destitute and abandoned children. As early as 1645 the Corporation for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England had promoted child migration, but its venture led to bitterness and recrimination and a second scheme in 1651 had to be abandoned. The first nineteenth-century religiously-inspired initiative was the Children’s Friend Society, founded by Captain Edward Brenton, a retired naval officer, in 1830.[11] Brenton had observed the destitute who lived on the periphery of London’s criminal underworld and realised that for many, a criminal lifestyle was simply a way of coping with extreme poverty and was an existence without prospects for a healthy, productive and law-abiding life. The solution was emigration.

‘Prospects’ was at the heart of the rationale for child migration. Many child carers, such as Brenton, for well over another century felt that poor, abandoned (and often illegitimate) children, already in parish care or private orphanages, would have better futures in the colonies. With the slogan ‘The Bible and spade for the boy; the Bible, broom and needle for the girl’, Brenton opened an agricultural school for twenty boys between ten and fifteen years of age at West Ham in Essex, later relocated to Hackney Wick. At first he received widespread support from prominent citizens and the press and for a few years the Children’s Friend Society flourished. A refuge for girls was established at Chiswick in 1834.

After a period of training in his homes, Brenton arranged the emigration of the children – some 700 of them – over the next few years, to the Cape Colony in the main, though some children were sent to Upper Canada in 1835 and placed in private homes by a committee of the Toronto City Council.[12] However, after this promising start, calamity struck the Children’s Friend Society: there were allegations of ‘slavery’, exploitation and harsh punishments of the young emigrants at the Cape. The bad publicity led to a public enquiry at the Cape. After Brenton died suddenly in 1839, the Children’s Friend Society lingered for only three more years. Support evaporated and no more children were sent.

As with later child migration advocates – from Maria Rye through Thomas Barnardo and Kingsley Fairbridge – Brenton had failed to realise the irrational in human life and the dark side of human nature. He and other middle-class reformers did not understand the dynamics of urban working-class life. They saw children abandoned in filth and squalor, mired in desperate poverty, abused by parents, relatives, guardians and employers, and were surprised when some youngsters clung tenaciously to their past attachments when often the objects of their devotion appeared so unworthy. It was a common situation.

Edward Brenton was the first nineteenth-century philanthropist to undertake child migration on a large scale and his pioneering work encountered the difficulties, misunderstandings and failures which were to bedevil other such drastic attempts at social engineering. Child migration schemes – from Thomas Barnardo’s to the Catholic emigration to the Western Australian orphanages of the Christian Brothers after World War II – were often awash with controversy. There was widespread suspicion that shadier agendas lurked behind the facade of charitable impulses.[13]

After the demise of the Children’s Friend Society, child migration remained small-scale for thirty years. In 1849, the Ragged School Movement, whose President was Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, received a grant of £3,000 to send 150 children to New South Wales. After this initiative, the Ragged Schools continued child emigration in a small way with their private resources until this aspect of their work was subsumed by the massive increase in child emigration after 1869 led by evangelical Christians Annie Macpherson, Maria Rye, Thomas Barnardo, William Booth and John Middlemore.[14]

Meanwhile, in 1850, an Act of Parliament permitted the Poor Law Guardians to fund the emigration of any child in their care subject to permission of the Poor Law Board. In addition, the permission of any surviving parent was to be sought where this was possible. When this was not practicable, it was necessary to procure the child’s agreement to his emigration, given before two justices of the peace in a magistrates court. In 1891, the Custody of Children Act gave the ‘rescue societies’ a legal framework within which to operate. Before this modern child migration had operated in a grey area.

Child migration peaks

Child migration peaked from the 1870s until the start of World War I. The 1920s emigration to Canada and Australia was small-scale by comparison, and the post-World War II child migration to Australia was minuscule. Some 80 000 children were emigrated to Canada before 1914; and only some 3,500–4,000 child migrants were sent to Australia after 1945.[15] Moreover, throughout the whole period – almost 100 years – the numbers of children emigrated were only a small fraction of the numbers of children in care throughout the United Kingdom.

The large increase in child migration after 1870 was triggered by desperate economic conditions over the previous few years: the social havoc caused by the 1866 cholera epidemic, the bad harvest of 1867 and widespread unemployment during a cyclic downturn in the economy. It was during this period that Annie Macpherson, Thomas Barnardo and William Booth commenced their work among the poorest and most destitute in the East End of London. To all of them, and many other religious workers, emigration seemed the one certain way for the desperately poor to better themselves.[16]

However, as well as the specific factors which led these people, and others such as William Quarrier (Orphan Homes of Scotland, Bridge of Weir, Glasgow), Robert Rudolf (Church of England ‘Waifs and Strays Society’) and Father Richard Seddon of the Catholic ‘Crusade of Rescue’, to favour emigration for their charges, there was a general climate of ideas which encouraged the sending of the children. The British Empire was reaching the peak of its expansion. This and industrial supremacy was exhilarating for some. On the other hand, amidst the rapid industrial expansion, there was for others a romantic longing for the simpler verities of rural life; a horror of the festering slums of the great cities; and a conviction that children of the lowest social class were better separated from their unworthy parents.

At higher levels of government and among some humanitarians was the realisation that emigration was a ‘safety-valve’ to tide over economic desperation in the British Isles, and to stave off revolution. Respectable middle-class society seemed threatened. Father Waugh wrote of ‘the verminous ill-fed hordes pressing closer’, while Samuel Smith, MP for Liverpool , believed that ‘the seething mass of human misery will shake the social fabric’ unless something was done to ease social tensions. Smith supported Barnardo’s Homes generously, but revolution was on his mind, not religion.[17]

Opposition to the policy

However, while 80 000 children were sent in this enthusiasm for child migration before 1914, these were only a small fraction of the children in the care of voluntary societies, the Poor Law Unions, or the industrial schools and reformatories of the criminal justice systems. Why were so few children sent? On the one hand, many inspectors and senior civil servants were proud of the British institutions they served, and they opposed child emigration because parental rights and children’s desires were often ignored. They disliked the rough-and-ready manner in which many of the private agencies operated. They suspected their motives and their charismatic styles of leadership which were likely to lead to scandals. Moreover, the civil servants knew that inspection and supervision of the children placed with Canadian farmers was casual at best and often completely lacking.

There were in addition other levels of opposition to child migration: many, if not most, Boards of Guardians were reluctant to see the children emigrated, since they argued, on principle, they could not fulfil their statutory responsibilities when the children left Great Britain. Moreover, they feared that only the fittest children would be sent, and they would be left caring for the remainder. Also, the emigration of the children from the workhouses, industrial schools or reformatories emigrated the jobs of the staff of these places. In the end, most of the children emigrated were sent by the private agencies, despite this opposition.

The Farm School movement and Australia

Child and youth migration to the Australian states came towards the end of a long experience with the policy elsewhere, although many of the early convicts could be seen as child migrants. In the early twentieth century, new migration enthusiasts involved themselves in the work, stressing that children should be trained in colonial homes before they were placed with colonial farmers. With this in mind, Mrs Elinor Close arranged the emigration of children to Nova Scotia and Thomas Sedgwick escorted parties of youths to New Zealand. However, the dominating personality of this phase was Kingsley Fairbridge, who was offered land at Pinjarra, south of Perth, by the Western Australian Government in 1911 to pioneer his farm school initiative. After an epic struggle Fairbridge and his supporters established this venture securely and other farm schools were founded over time at Molong, near Orange in New South Wales, and at Glenmore, near Bacchus Marsh in Victoria. This latter was the Lady Northcote Farm School founded in 1937.

With the outbreak of World War I, migration from the British Isles was suspended, and when it recommenced in 1920, the numbers of children sent were never on the same scale.[18] By 1920, powerful interest groups in Canada opposed the entry of unaccompanied juveniles and throughout the following decade child migration to Canada diminished. The Great Depression finally terminated their entry; no further juvenile emigrants were placed in Canada after 1932. However, as that dominion barred the entry of unaccompanied juveniles, the voluntary societies focused their attention increasingly on Australia where, in the buoyant 1920s, governments favoured their entry. Barnardo’s Homes sent children to New South Wales in 1923 and handled 872 during the decade; Fairbridge continued its work and 918 children arrived in Western Australia during this period. Meanwhile, in 1920, by an agreement with the states, the Commonwealth undertook the responsibility of recruiting, medically examining and transporting assisted immigrants, ie of all overseas activities, while the states agreed to requisition for the numbers and classes of migrants they required, and to provide for their reception, employment and after-care. Until 1946, the State governments were more responsible for supervision. It should be mentioned that there were many more youth migrants brought to Australia than child migrants: some 4 500 young men came to New South Wales under the Dreadnought Scheme before World War II and some 12 500 emigrated with the Big Brother Movement from 1925 to 1983. The focus on child migration in this introduction is because of the contemporary controversy surrounding the phenomenon.

The emigration work of the voluntary agencies was assisted in 1923 when so-called ‘collective nomination’ was widely extended, due largely to the efforts of Major C W Bavin, Migration Secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association, who toured the dominions in 1922 and 1923, interesting societies in overseas settlement. Previously, state-assisted migration had been conducted mainly under two systems, requisition and individual nomination. Under the former, the dominion government estimated the numbers and classes of immigrants required and requisitioned for them through their separate migration representatives in Britain. The migrants were selected and sent at assisted passage rates, and on arrival overseas were placed in employment by the immigration authorities. This class of migrant was referred to as ‘selected’.

Under the second system, individuals in the dominions, through the state immigration departments, might nominate relatives or friends in Britain as potential immigrants. If these nominees passed the required tests, they were granted assisted passages, and their nominators assumed the responsibility of placing them in employment, or of maintaining them until they were settled.

The aim of collective nomination was to extend this privilege to voluntary societies, and to allow them to nominate not only individuals but groups, not necessarily by name, but by numbers and classes of settlers they considered they were able to place in employment. This system was especially applicable to Commonwealth-wide societies such as the churches, the YMCA, Fairbridge, Barnardo’s Homes and the Boy Scout Association. Branches in the dominions had first-hand knowledge of local opportunities for young settlers; branches in England were in touch with deserving and needy young people likely to have new opportunities by migration. Young British people – even children and teenagers – were considered ideal immigrants. They were more readily trained and more adaptable to the new conditions and they had their whole working lives before them. The romantic and humanitarian aspect of bringing youth to Australia spread a warm inner glow.

During the 1920s, both the Dreadnought Trust and the Big Brother Movement – the latter founded by Sir Richard Linton in 1924 – encouraged the migration of young men, fifteen to nineteen years of age, for farm work, as did the Salvation Army. All these bodies were non-denominational or Protestant. By contrast, Roman Catholic child migration to Canada was only ten per cent of the total before World War I, but was to become more significant during its last phase. There was no Catholic child migration to Australia during the 1920s, though Catholic leaders in Western Australia were anxious to initiate a scheme centred on the Christian Brothers institutions in that state. The Brothers were a lay order within the church, heavily involved in education in Australia. However, enthusiastic planning and detailed discussions foundered on the unwillingness of the Commonwealth Government to approve a subsidy and the unwillingness of the English Catholic carers to send their children to the Antipodes when they had long-standing and successful arrangements over fifty years to send children to Canada.

The last phase

The Depression terminated almost all migration to Australia until 1937. However, the long-delayed plans to emigrate some English Catholic children to Western Australia reached fruition in 1938–39 when some 114 boys pioneered the Tardun scheme on a vast property near Geraldton. In 1937, Fairbridge, Barnardo’s Homes and other migration agencies recommenced their work. New farm schools were established at Molong, near Orange in New South Wales and at Glenmore in Victoria. However, with World War II, and in the wake of Japanese aggression in the Pacific, the whole migration scene changed in Australia. The Government encouraged a new enthusiasm for a comprehensive immigration policy after the ending of hostilities. Child migration was, at first, considered a major part of this new immigration policy, but it was not to be.

In 1947, nearly 500 child migrants were brought to Australia, most of them under Catholic auspices and most to Western Australia. Thereafter, Fairbridge and Barnardo’s Homes and many other bodies brought in some children but numbers remained small and diminished with the years. On the other hand, youth migration under Big Brother auspices boomed and over the next twenty years, this association sponsored up to five hundred young men each year to settle in Australia.

In 1950, some Maltese child migrants – all boys – were placed in Christian Brothers orphanages in Western Australia. During the next decade some 280 boys arrived under this scheme. Meanwhile, British officials and missions came to Australia to investigate child migration: John Moss in 1952 and a larger Home Office team in 1956. Moss tended to favour sending British children to Australia, but four years later the Fact-Finding Mission was much more sceptical of its benefits. Almost immediately, the British Catholic ‘Rescue Societies’ terminated all plans to place their children in Australia. Other societies sent a few children each year until 1967 but essentially, child migration was over.

Times had changed and the social conditions and attitudes in the United Kingdom which had led to many children being sent abroad were disappearing. Grinding poverty was being reduced and the social services of the welfare state were being extended. The social slur which illegitimacy had cast over mother and child was waning. In the event, only some 3,500–4,000 child migrants came to Australia after World War II, although some thousands of young adults were brought out by the Big Brother Movement, the Boy Scout Association, the Young Catholic Workers Movement and other similar agencies. Child migration ended because the policy did not correspond with the new social realities which existed after World War II. Changing times rendered it almost inevitable that there would be controversy over the last phase of the policy and there was.

In 1987, the Child Migrant Trust, founded by Margaret Humphreys and based in Nottingham (UK), commenced to publicise child emigration and to work actively to reunite former child migrants with their surviving parents and other relatives. The work of the Trust encouraged both popular and academic interest in the subject. Two British writers, Philip Bean and Joy Melville, published Lost Children of the Empire which brought knowledge of this phase of English child care policy to a wider audience, especially when the book’s findings were dramatised in a television documentary. In 1992, the ABC and BBC co-sponsored a television mini-series, The Leaving of Liverpool, which has been shown twice in Australia and once in the United Kingdom since that time.

In 1998, a British Parliamentary delegation visited Australia to enquire into child migration and meet former child migrants. It was led by David Hinchliffe, MP, and came under the auspices of the Health Committee of the House of Commons. Its arrival was accompanied by widespread publicity. Its report, findings and recommendations may prove to be the last act in assessing a policy which commenced nearly 400 years ago.

A child migration timeline