Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine) Read online

  The next day Harold took Marie, Annabel and myself to the Boys’ Home. We walked along the corridors, into the church and the dormitories, with Harold telling me stories of his youth.

  He explained how the large old building was used. The front of the ground floor housed the offices. At the back there was a large kitchen and dining-room on one side, and on the other, a large pantry which the boys would raid whenever possible.

  ‘Joined on to this was the sewing room and laundry, and a large quadrangle. The upstairs was used for the younger children – bedrooms, bathrooms and so on. The older boys – eleven years and over – had quarters next to the dining-room area. It was a large dormitory with a quadrangle in the middle. From floor to ceiling was half solid walls, and the rest covered by blinds. Great in the summer, a bit bloody cold in the winter.

  ‘It wasn’t meant to house migrant children, you know, but I was placed there with state wards from Melbourne.’

  ‘Was life strict?’ I asked.

  ‘There were certain rules to be obeyed and if you broke these you were punished,’ Harold said.

  ‘What sort of punishment?’

  ‘Strapped on the hands, maybe caned on the backside or given extra work to do. But the housemasters and the Revd Neale Molloy, who was in charge, were always fair. They never handed out punishment unless you had done something wrong; we were never treated brutally, or abused in any way.’

  ‘What was a normal day like?’ I asked.

  ‘Regimented, like all institutions. Get up around six-thirty, wash, dress, make your bed, and do whatever inside job you were assigned to – like sweep the dormitory, get the breakfast ready, set tables, make lunches. We would then have a ten-minute service in the chapel, have breakfast, and go to school.

  ‘Sunday mornings we would have Holy Communion after jobs and before breakfast. Two of the boys would be altar boys, so they’d prepare the bread, rolling out thick white slices and cutting them into squares, and prepare the wine. The stuff they used was cheap sherry, and after the service was over, and Mollie Molloy – as we called him – had departed, we would give it a go. Quite liberally sometimes. Perhaps that is where I got my love of red wine.’ Harold laughed, but, like his words, this too was tinged with sadness.

  ‘Were you lonely?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me put it this way: I had many friends, but I always felt alone. Not lonely. Alone. Particularly on visiting days.

  ‘When I was sent away from England they told me my parents were dead; that I had no family; that I was an orphan. I felt cold and empty. I never talked about these feelings – who could I talk to? Talking about your feelings wasn’t encouraged at St John’s. Perhaps they felt we didn’t have any, perhaps they did not see it as important – and how could I explain my feelings anyway? I didn’t understand them.

  ‘Love and affection are what you miss in institutions like St John’s. They don’t seem to exist. I can’t remember anyone putting their arm around me, giving me a cuddle, showing me that they cared.’

  Marie stayed close by Harold’s side as he spoke, occasionally touching his shoulder.

  When we reached the office of the orphanage I told him that I wanted to find out what records and documentation had been kept on him.

  The officer in charge of the home invited us into his office and I asked to see the admissions register. He opened a large book on his desk and began flicking back through the pages. Harold’s name was there, along with the date he arrived and the name of a Colonel Hale from Hove in East Sussex, who had authorized his admission. Harold thought this might be his godfather or a relative.

  That single line of hand-writing was all they could show us, despite the fact that Harold had spent five years at the home.

  By the time I left Melbourne I had notes on a dozen interviews in my battered briefcase. I still didn’t have any real official confirmation that the child migrants had been sent to Australia with the approval or knowledge of the Australian or British governments. Annabel, too, realized that she needed more evidence before she could turn shocking personal stories into an issue that deserved wider public attention.

  The Australia House official in London had told me that all the records for children sent unaccompanied to Australia were now held in Canberra. That was our next stop.

  Australia’s capital is like a lego city. Custom-built, halfway between Sydney and Melbourne, the streets are well planned and inhabited by the public servants who run the city, many of whom disappear every weekend and leave a skeleton population behind.

  Annabel and I found the Immigration Department by the colour of its green roof. Once inside, we were directed to a large library which housed the archives.

  ‘Do you have any material on child migrants arriving here from England without their parents?’ I asked.

  The staff were helpful but generally could find few references that might apply. We had a similar problem when we wanted to find the ships’ manifestos to see if Harold’s name appeared.

  ‘Are there any records of individual children?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said the senior archivist, ‘I don’t understand.’

  I explained what I’d been told at Australia House in London. The archivist shook his head.

  ‘If that material does exist, it would be handled by the individual state archives.’

  Finally, after trying various routes with little success, we were allowed access to packages of photographs kept under the category of ‘British Migrants Arriving in Australia’. These pictures were mainly of adults and families – the ten-pound Poms – who were given assisted passage to Australia after the Second World War.

  But among the faded black-and-white prints, there were pictures of children coming down gangplanks, clutching suitcases and blinking in the bright sunshine. Some of them looked no more than four or five years old.

  As Annabel ordered several prints to accompany her articles, I stayed at the desk, staring at the grainy images of boys and girls with bright-eyed, hopeful faces.

  8

  I had never spent such a long time away from home. I missed Merv, Ben and Rachel terribly, but my joyful home-coming was tempered by the knowledge that I had thirteen or so new cases and very few answers.

  I’d made a commitment to this small group of people and I had to keep my promise to discover their family histories, the reasons why they were migrated, and if they had any surviving relatives in Britain.

  Just how I was going to manage this while holding down a full-time job as a social worker with the Social Services Department, was another big question mark. I’d taken annual leave to go to Australia. It was considered a personal trip. Although I had informed my immediate bosses, I couldn’t expect them to give me any time off. I would have to use more of my precious leave to visit St Catherine’s House.

  Some colleagues didn’t seem particularly interested in what I’d uncovered. That was understandable, they were up to their eyes in their own day-to-day problems – social workers are operating at the edge most of the time and have very little left for anything else. I found myself closing off from them and being torn between people who needed my help at home and those who needed it in Australia.

  In the meantime, Annabel continued researching her articles, although publication was delayed when Margaret Thatcher announced a General Election for June.

  Within days of returning home, I began to realize that some of the information given to me by the migrants during interviews in Australia wasn’t accurate. Time and again, the most basic search for birth certificates drew a blank. Surely, I thought, they must know when they were born?

  I went through my notebooks, wondering what I was doing wrong. I checked and rechecked names and spellings. Still nothing. And then, on the train coming home from St Catherine’s one evening, I suddenly realized that these people had absolutely no evidence of when they were born, apart from their own childhood recollections.

  ‘Perhaps they don’t know,’ I thought out loud. ‘P
erhaps they’re celebrating the wrong date.’

  If I hadn’t been on the late train, I would have immediately turned around and gone back to London and started again. The next morning I was on the six-thirty train from Nottingham and I started checking five years each side of the date they’d given me. Slowly I started to find one after the other, in unexpected quarters, different years and puzzling districts.

  One man who thought he’d been born in London was, in fact, born in Newcastle. Another woman was three years younger than she thought and with a slightly different spelling of her surname.

  While I tackled the practical side of the searches, Merv had become fascinated by the official reasoning and logic behind the child migration schemes. He wanted to understand the guiding principles and where the idea had originated. He has an enquiring mind, not easily satisfied until every scrap of evidence, however small, has been unearthed and pieced together.

  We needed to go forward on both these fronts, because many of the migrants themselves had no idea why they’d been sent away from Britain.

  Merv registered at Nottingham University to do a doctorate thesis in the history of child migration, knowing it would give him greater access to archive material. He travelled to London and Oxford to search through public records and libraries.

  He returned home one evening and showed me a faded newspaper advertisement he had found in the Illustrated London News of 13 November 1954. It showed a cartoon of a young boy standing alone on a grimy cobblestone street, looking up at a vision of Australia with young children playing in the sunshine. The caption read:

  Left behind! His friends have gone.

  Will YOU help him to join them? It costs £30 – a

  Christmas gift that lasts a lifetime!

  The advertisement was for the Fairbridge Society and was endorsed by the society’s President, the Duke of Gloucester.

  By now Merv had discovered that the child migration schemes involved virtually all the major child care agencies and charities in the UK – Dr Barnardo’s, the National Children’s Home, the Children’s Society, the Fairbridge Society, the Salvation Army, Quarrier Homes – and a variety of social welfare agencies operating under the umbrellas of the Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Presbyterian Church and the Church of Scotland. Other groups were involved in a more limited way, like the NSPCC, selecting and referring children to the major agencies.

  The National Children’s Home! I thought. How bloody ironic – I used to give them half my pocket money every Sunday!

  Between 1900 and the Depression of the 1930s, children were primarily sent to Canada, but after the Second World War the charities and agencies began to concentrate on Australia and, to a much lesser extent, Rhodesia and New Zealand. They were joined by a large number of small organizations formed specifically to promote child migration.

  Merv had looked at the histories of several of the charities.

  ‘These people enjoy patting themselves on the back,’ he said, ‘they’re proud of what they do. They don’t withhold information.’

  He was right, of course. When he began collecting back-dated annual reports and brochures, particularly from the 1940s, he found glowing reports of child migration schemes. Children from Britain and Ireland were being ‘rescued’ from difficult conditions for the greater good of themselves and the Empire.

  The reasoning was simple enough. As victims of poverty, illegitimacy or broken homes, these children were regarded as ‘deprived’ and considered a burden on society. Similarly, they would grow up to be thieves and hooligans and probably finish up in jail. Already this urban flotsam was filling orphanages and poor houses – taxing the charities, religious orders and government welfare agencies which cared for them. In the last century, local authorities found it was costing them £12 a year to support a child in a parish workhouse, whereas for a single payment of £15 they could send them overseas and be absolved of any further financial responsibility.

  Britain’s cities, especially London, were overcrowded with poverty-stricken children who might be a danger to society. The colonies, however, had wide-open spaces crying out for more hands to work them. Two birds could be killed with one stone. Children could be rescued from vice and deprivation and be sent to populate the Empire and its dominions, where fresh air, hard work and religious instruction would make them fine, upstanding citizens. On the face of it, it must have appeared quite a good idea.

  ‘But at least it stopped a long time ago,’ I said. ‘There can’t be that many child migrants.’

  ‘You won’t believe this, Margaret,’ said Merv, shaking his head. ‘The last children went out in 1967!’

  I looked at him in total disbelief. Twenty years ago! It didn’t seem credible. The Sixties were a time of plenty in Britain. The economy was booming and there was no longer post-war poverty or terrible economic hardship. Why on earth would there be even a misconceived need to send a child abroad?

  Annabel Ferriman was also shocked by the news. She’d been calling me several times a week, keeping me informed of her investigations. The Observer planned to run its story over two weeks in July.

  For my part, I was growing increasingly worried about the mountain of work still to be done. I didn’t have the time or the money to carry out searches quickly enough. Every day saw the possibility that death would intervene and keep families apart for ever.

  David Spicer, a barrister for Nottinghamshire County Council, had been a colleague and friend of mine for many years. He knew I’d been to Australia and felt strongly about children’s rights.

  Although normally very calm, as I spoke to him I could see his anger rising. His sense of injustice is strong. ‘What can you do for these people?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve met some who think they’re orphans but their parents may well be still alive.’

  ‘How can we help them?’

  In sheer relief, I let it all flood out. Here was somebody who believed me. More importantly, he believed the migrants’ stories.

  ‘They can’t be rejected again,’ I said. ‘There must be some way we can help them understand their past and repair some of the damage. We can’t have the articles go out and not have something in place for these people. Even if only a dozen more cases come forward, it will be a dozen too many.’

  David thought for a moment, standing at the window of his County Hall office, looking out over the River Trent. ‘This is going to upset a lot of people. I’m not just talking about the charities. The average man or woman in the street is going to be outraged that we could have done this to our children. I think you should declare a charitable trust straightaway.’

  ‘What do I have to do exactly?’ I asked.

  ‘Just tell me what you aim to do and exactly how you’d spend any donations. I’ll draw up a trust deed, and you’ll have to appoint trustees.’

  ‘Can it be completed before the Observer articles?’ I asked.

  ‘It will have to be.’

  Over the next few days we met several times to prepare the trust deed and when it was almost completed David said, ‘OK, what are you going to call this charity?’

  ‘I don’t like the word charity,’ I said. ‘Some of these people have already suffered at the hands of charity. We need a word like “trust”. And there are lots of children’s charities but this one is about adults; adults whose childhood was taken from them.’

  David and I thought in silence, occasionally suggesting a name.

  ‘I’ve got it!’ I announced. ‘We’ll call it the Child Migrants Trust.’

  Only days before the Observer articles went out, the Trust was registered. David agreed to be one trustee and the other was Philip Bean, a senior lecturer in criminology at Nottingham University. Philip had spent time lecturing in Australia, and he and David had co-operated before on a project about homeless teenagers.

  The three of us started to organize ourselves, often meeting at a pub in the evening.

  On Sunday, 21 July, I woke early, got dress
ed and walked around the corner to my local newsagent. Loose change jangled in my purse. Before I reached the door, I noticed a poster behind a metal frame propped up against the shop window. There was an Observer banner and beneath it a large black-and-white photograph of a group of young children, with the girls in cotton dresses. The hairstyles and clothes told me they were children of my generation.

  I couldn’t open the newspaper until I got home. I carried it under my arm until I was inside the house and then spread it over the kitchen table. There was a small article on the front page pointing to a two-page feature inside which bore the headline, ‘Lost Children of the Empire’.

  ‘In 1954,’ Annabel wrote, ‘thirty-eight orphaned and abandoned children set sail on the SS Esperance Bay from Southampton to Sydney, Australia. No-one had asked them whether they wanted to go; they had simply been told they were going. No-one had told them why they were going; they were assured they would love it when they got there. No-one had told them what they would find in Australia; they were just shown pictures of kangaroos, and Aborigines with painted faces and long spears.

  ‘These child migrants were wrenched from all that was familiar, all that was homely, all that they knew, to be sent half a world away to fill the homes and orphanages of the British Commonwealth.

  ‘Although they did not realize it, they were the tail end of Britain’s child migration movement. For a century or more, Dr Barnardo’s, the Salvation Army and other Christian organizations had been sending children, plucked from poverty and deprivation, to children’s homes abroad …

  ‘Unlike previous generations who are no longer alive to tell the tale, the children who were sent after the Second World War are still very much with us and have chilling tales to tell. Many are bitter that Britain could have pursued such a callous policy so late into the twentieth century …