Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  ‘Unlike the convicts who formed the first white populations in Australia, these children had committed no crime beyond being born without hope. For this, their reward was exile.’

  It was a powerful article – far more aggressive and accusatory than I had envisaged. Annabel had obviously put a lot of thought into it. At the end, she announced the creation of the Child Migrants Trust.

  The following morning when I arrived at my office at nine o’clock, I had no idea what awaited me. There were press photographers on the pavement, and journalists had been calling all morning, jamming the switchboard. By mid-morning the calls were also coming from Australia, and County Hall had taken more than a hundred enquiries. It seemed that every newspaper, radio and TV station in the country wanted to interview me.

  Fortunately, I had pre-warned the Director of Social Services about the articles, but the overwhelming reaction was still embarrassing. I had my own work to do but this was proving to be impossible.

  To minimize disruption to the department, I had to get journalists away from my office. I went home and the circus simply followed. With only one telephone, it was chaos. Some journalists took hours to get through, growing angry and frustrated, and others simply arrived on the doorstep.

  Annabel, too, seemed to be under intense pressure. She had identified many of the agencies that had sent children abroad, not only the Christian organizations but also the local authorities. A follow-up story was planned for the next issue and had been trailed in the first feature. According to Annabel, Barnardo’s had contacted the Observer, asking to see an advance copy. The editor refused.

  It was obvious that the charities were besieged by the media. The Observer’s revelations must have hit them like a bombshell. After all these years, out of the blue, their past practices had been exposed. They must have been thinking, Why now?

  During the following week the national newspapers were full of letters and comments. These were a mixture of outraged responses from readers and attempts by the charities to defend themselves.

  Stephen Carden, Chairman of the Fairbridge Society, wrote in the Observer:

  ‘If an advertisement of the kind shown in the article is put in a Sydney newspaper by a social worker responses are likely to be mainly from malcontents. The article has been based on those responses completely ignoring the fact that the vast majority of the 2,500 children sent to Australia by this society will be eternally grateful for the opportunity they were given …

  ‘As regards the allegations made about life at the farm school at Molong, it is of course impossible to confirm or deny them after all these years. It is, however, fair to point out that there is a danger of such occurrences in any institution for young people, and the vast majority of those who were brought up there have made no such allegations …’

  Meanwhile, Australian correspondents in London had wired the story to their home newspapers and the Observer article was republished in full by papers in Sydney and Melbourne. Within a week mail was being delivered by the sackload, much of it postmarked from Australia.

  The tone was set in the first few words of each:

  ‘I am an orphan, could you please help me find my mother. I don’t really know where to start, I’m so nervous. I don’t have a birth certificate. I don’t have anything …’

  Another began: ‘I’m shaking, shaking as I write this letter. This is the first time I’ve allowed myself to think about some of these things again …

  ‘I’m so angry with the agency that sent me out. I’ve written to them from the age of twenty and got no satisfactory reply, ever. They’ve just swept me under the carpet. And that hurts. I mean, they haven’t told me anything. If I ever get to England, I would go to them and say, “Look what you’ve done to me.”’

  * * *

  I struggled to read and answer all these letters, but it was becoming more and more difficult to find the time. It was clear that the Child Migrants Trust was a full-time concern.

  Not everybody in my department understood the issue. The Director of Nottinghamshire Social Services said it was all very fascinating but it happened a long time ago and didn’t really concern Nottinghamshire.

  However, the politicians felt differently. Having read the articles, Joan Taylor, the Chairperson of the Social Services Committee rang me.

  ‘It’s dreadful, absolutely dreadful. And to think you used your annual leave to investigate this. It’s not right. Write me a report for the committee about your Australian trip.’

  Seven weeks later I delivered my first report to Joan and her committee. It was rare for a social worker to address the politicians directly and I was nervous about getting the message across.

  I told them of the desperate need for a professional social-work service to help the former child migrants.

  ‘Many of them have struggled for several decades to have some information concerning their backgrounds, and the reasons why they were sent across the world. Their letters reflect both a desperation and a despondency.’

  When I finished, Joan Taylor asked me what I wanted to do for these people.

  ‘I need time,’ I said.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘I don’t know. What about a year?’

  ‘What about two?’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, very surprised.

  ‘Would you like a secondment? Would you like to just go away and get on with it?’

  ‘Yes, I’d like that very much.’

  ‘I’ll approach the committee,’ replied Joan.

  * * *

  At the end of November, I cleared my desk and left the department where I’d worked for fifteen years. At home I’d turned one of the bedrooms into a small office. The following morning after I packed the children off to school and Mervyn went to work, I sat in an empty house and wondered, Is this it?

  I had no typewriter and the only telephone was in the hall. There were sacks of mail waiting to be answered. I made a cup of coffee and sat down staring at the desk and filing cabinet. Where do I start? I wondered.

  My salary and some travel expenses were being paid and the Observer article had generated several hundred pounds in donations, but this wouldn’t last long when I started trying to trace the families of child migrants.

  I also knew that at some stage I would have to approach each of the charities involved with child migration and try to establish the full extent of their role. I hoped they would accept their responsibilities; that they would help the trust both financially and by giving us access to their archives.

  The latter issue was vital. I knew the charities and orphanages must have kept files on individual children. And these would contain precious details about who placed the child in care; the names and addresses of parents or guardians, birthdates and correspondence.

  If I could get access to these files, the task of finding families and filling in the missing years would be far easier. Time was my enemy.

  The initial signs, however, weren’t promising. When I had first asked after Madeleine’s files, the children’s home had insisted the information no longer existed; and, similarly, the major charities had shown no interest in opening up their archives to someone who had revealed their past activities in such an unfavourable light.

  I had also interviewed several child migrants who had requested access to their files and either this had been denied or they had been told such information no longer existed or had never been kept.

  My standing with the charities was made very clear when I was invited to speak at a professional conference in London on adoption issues attended by social workers from charities and local authorities. I could feel the frost when I arrived. You always know that your views are considered ‘different’ at a conference when you break for coffee and finish up standing on your own. I knew I was being ostracized because no-one, but no-one, would come anywhere near me.

  The problem was that I’d broken a taboo and spoken out against the charities. Everybody at that conference either knew people who
were working for the agencies or were themselves working for them – for Barnardo’s, the Church of England, or whoever. I was criticizing their employers, or potential employers, and it wouldn’t advance their career prospects to be seen talking to the likes of me.

  As I was getting ready to leave a woman came up to me who apparently worked for a Catholic charity.

  ‘So you’re Margaret Humphreys, are you? You’re the Margaret Humphreys?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right,’ I said. ‘There’s only one of me.’

  She said: ‘Well, I thought I would come up to you before I leave this conference and say something to your face. I want you to know that because of you, Monsignor Crennan in Sydney has been very ill. Those dreadful articles in the Observer weren’t truthful and they upset him deeply. He’s now a very sad man and it’s all down to you.’

  She was obviously upset and I didn’t want to make things worse. I simply told her that I too knew a lot of sad people in Australia.

  Although daily media interest in the Child Migrants Trust slowly waned, I found myself fielding calls from documentary – and film – makers who sensed an opportunity to bring some real-life drama to the screen.

  I was still wary of any publicity, and concerned that the issue was handled sensitively. There were benefits in publicizing the Trust but not at the expense of hurting the child migrants.

  On the other hand, a deep-searching documentary would give them a chance to tell their stories for the first time.

  I finally settled on Joanna Mack and Domino Films. Joanna was well known for producing a series called Breadline Britain, which gave moving, first-hand accounts of living in poverty in Britain. She had recently started to work as an independent producer, and she struck me as a quiet, thoughtful person who listened attentively to others. Her calm professionalism reassured me.

  Joanna and I both agreed that I had to stay close to the production to ensure that the child migrants were given professional counselling and were ready to be interviewed. This meant that Domino Films would pay for me to visit Australia again, as well as Canada and Zimbabwe.

  However, we set strict boundaries. Joanna would work on the documentary and I would help her, but Domino Films would not be involved in my own work. My clients were off-limits unless they themselves chose otherwise.

  I planned to leave after the New Year and spend a fortnight in Australia but before then I had to find some way of dealing with the sacks of mail arriving each week. The workload was impossible.

  Thankfully, it was made a little easier by Yvonne Barlow, a friend who had also been a member of Triangle. She offered to help with the searches at St Catherine’s House.

  Yvonne knew all about a person’s need to discover their roots. In 1977, while holding her new-born daughter, Lucy, in her arms, Yvonne had suddenly realized that she herself had been adopted. Not surprisingly, it came as an enormous shock.

  Because of her own search, she knew her way around St Catherine’s House. She also had the patience and total commitment that it took to plough through volume after volume. Yet, from my point of view, she had two even more important qualities – I could trust her and she didn’t mind taking IOUs.

  With someone to mind the office, I felt happier about going away. I even managed to enjoy the lead-up to Christmas, opening the cards that arrived from child migrants in Australia.

  It was so cold on Christmas Eve that we had a log fire blazing in the hall. Rachel and Ben had decorated the tree; the presents were wrapped, and the drinks were flowing. At about 6.00 p.m. there was a knock at the front door.

  I opened it and found a half-frozen man standing on the doorstep, holding a torn newspaper cutting in his fingers.

  ‘Are you Margaret Humphreys?’ he said in a broad Australian accent.

  I owned up immediately.

  ‘You the person in this article?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded, wondering where on earth this man had come from.

  ‘Well, I just got off a plane from Australia and I haven’t been back here since I was five,’ he said through chattering teeth. ‘I’ve been all over trying to find you. Here’s my birth certificate – I want you to find my mum.’

  I looked at him, barely considering it credible and said, ‘How about we leave it till Boxing Day?’

  9

  I had another visitor that Christmas. Harold Haig had flown to England to see Marie and also to work with me in the search for his mother. Full of excitement and fear, he couldn’t sit still in Australia.

  On a bitterly cold day early in January 1988, I took him on his first trip to St Catherine’s House. We caught the 6.00 a.m. train from Nottingham and with us were Yvonne and Paul Harrison, the Australian who’d arrived on my doorstep. On the train, I opened my briefcase and, over coffee from the buffet car, explained how St Catherine’s worked and what we had to do that day.

  In Harold’s case, we had to find a record of the birth of his mother, Elizabeth Ellen Johnson, somewhere between 1904 and 1921. Marie was born in 1937 and I reasoned that their mother would have been no younger than sixteen and more probably eighteen at the time. Similarly, I thought she was unlikely to have been older than her mid-thirties. Seventeen years is a huge time period involving literally millions of births, but we had to start at the beginning and find a certificate.

  As the morning wore on I noticed how despondent Harold became at the sheer scale of the task. In his eagerness, he had imagined that we could find his mother immediately; that he would open the first bound volume and ‘Elizabeth Ellen Johnson’ would be written there, as if waiting to be found.

  At lunch-time we went for a walk and had a coffee and a sandwich. I doubted if Harold had the strength or experience to take much more. I was fearful he would throw in the towel and walk away, so I suggested that he spend a while helping Paul Harrison in his search.

  Later that afternoon, when he found a relevant entry for Paul, I could see in Harold’s face that his happiness was overshadowed by his disappointment at having found nothing about his own mother.

  At four-thirty St Catherine’s closed and we all trudged to St Pancras Station. Harold looked tired. I wasn’t sure if he would be able to cope. Almost all of his life he had been angry and getting nowhere, hitting one wall after another, but at least now a small part of him seemed to be holding tight to the belief that we would finally find his mother. He said, ‘I can’t run away this time. I understand, in some way, that this is my last chance; the last chance of finding out about myself. I know that if I did run away, I would never come back.’

  I told Harold, ‘If we’re going to do this, we’ve got to do it all. We can’t just take a chunk and leave the rest. It may take days or weeks or much longer, but we have to go through all the twists and turns.’

  The search for his mother’s birth certificate did indeed take weeks, until we had exhausted every avenue. It was the same story with his father. We could find no record of him being born. Nor was there a marriage certificate for them at any time, anywhere in England, Scotland or Ireland.

  This bothered me. I lay awake at night wondering what we had missed. The search had cost a great deal of money in train fares and copies of promising certificates, but we had nothing to show for it. Harold’s birth certificate included the names of both mother and father. They should have been relatively easy to find. What had we missed?

  There were several possibilities. Perhaps both were born overseas; or neither had used their real name on Harold’s birth certificate; or maybe they presented themselves as a married couple but were actually unmarried. It could have been any of these things, it didn’t matter. The reality was that it meant more pain and frustration for Harold. If St Catherine’s held the answer, we didn’t have the key.

  Harold returned to Australia in February, totally exhausted and no closer to discovering his mother. I knew I had to look elsewhere so I started trawling the various charities that might have known about his past. In particular, I went looking for the man called Colonel Ha
le, whose name we had seen in the admissions book at St John’s in Melbourne. I had hoped he would be a relative or godparent, but I soon discovered he was the head of the children’s committee of a local authority.

  This is what amazed me about Harold’s story. He wasn’t sent abroad by a charity, he was sent by East Sussex County Council. He was in local authority care and ultimately the responsibility of the British government – so much so that the Home Secretary had personally to give his consent before Harold could be sent overseas. This bureaucratic chain of command meant that something had to have been written down. It was policy not accident. So where were the files? Where was the Home Secretary’s report?

  I contacted an archivist at Sussex County Council and asked him if he could find out if they held a file on Harold Haig, a child who had been in their care many years ago.

  He was very co-operative, although I doubt that he appreciated the importance of my questions. At the same time I began putting pressure on the Department of Health to reveal what the Government knew about sending Harold abroad. I needed to know why he was taken into care and who placed him there.

  Harold had every right to know these things. He wasn’t adopted so parental rights hadn’t been severed by law and there was no legislation preventing him finding out about himself.

  East Sussex County Council had no details of Harold or his parents, and the Department of Health continued to maintain that it had no records.

  What could I tell Harold? It had been almost a year since we started the search and he was living so near to the edge that only blind hope was keeping him from falling. And then, one night, I suddenly remembered the Salvation Army, who had arranged Marie’s adoption in 1947. How had it managed, back in 1963, to find Harold when Marie had asked after him?

  I rang Harold, waking him at some ungodly hour.

  ‘Listen! How did the Salvation Army find you? How did they know you’d gone to Australia? Write to them. Ask them if they have a file on you. Ask them how they found you.’