Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

by Margaret Humphreys

  I wondered again if this is what people meant when they accused me of not putting child migration into its historic context.

  The Oversea Migration Board’s 1956 report included details from a 1955 Fact Finding Mission appointed by the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations to investigate the Australian institutions.

  We heard often in the course of our discussions the widely held view that many children, whom life had treated badly, would benefit by transfer to a new country where they could be given a fresh start, away from old scenes and unhappy associations. Few with whom we spoke seemed to realize that it was precisely such children, already rejected and insecure, who might often be ill-equipped to cope with the added strain of migration.

  This, of course, was not what the Oversea Migration Board (or the government of the day), wanted to hear. Its reaction?

  We are quite out of sympathy with the suggestion that children already in care in this country should be restrained from emigrating to Australia because of the conditions in that country.

  The Board did, however, accept some of the recommendations – brothers and sisters should be kept together; voluntary societies in Australia should be supplied with full information about each child (although not particulars of family history); and, wherever possible, child migrants should be placed with foster parents.

  In my experience the first of these proposals was adopted but the latter two were ignored.

  However, it is the main recommendation that was most telling. It had a familiar ring to it. ‘Voluntary societies in Britain should obtain the consent of the Home Secretary before any child migrant is sent overseas.’

  The Board disagreed.

  We have already stressed the scarcity in the UK of children who are both suitable and available for migration. We fear that if their recruitment was hampered by the need to submit each individual case to examination by the machinery of a government department the numbers would become progressively less …

  We believe that for political, strategic and economic reasons it is important that migration from the United Kingdom to the Commonwealth should be maintained.

  The British government did eventually regulate the voluntary societies. Legislation was passed on 7 January 1982 – fifteen years after large-scale child migration had ended.

  As I studied the documents and correspondence, the steady decline of child migration was painfully plotted out. It slowed in the mid-fifties when the Oversea Migration Board, among others, discovered difficulties in finding children.

  ‘… the social and economic pressures in this country which led to the emigration of unaccompanied children … have disappeared,’ the 1956 report stated. And it went on to reveal that ‘the demand for children for adoption [in Great Britain] exceeded the numbers available’ and that the great majority of children in the care of the authorities ‘could be placed in this country in what were regarded as satisfactory foster homes.’

  Why then, I asked myself, did child migration continue?

  It was the same story when I looked at Australian records. The Chief Migration Officer of the Australian High Commission in London journeyed around Britain during 1955 trying to convince local authorities to send more of their children to Australia.

  In Manchester he reported that ‘… great stress was placed by Child Welfare Authorities in the UK today on a parent substitute, and the “cottage mother” system had definitely fallen into disfavour in Britain.

  ‘The long-term object was to return, if at all possible, the children concerned to their mothers and fathers …’

  It was the same story in Birmingham. ‘The Town Clerk stated that even if the parents were bad parents the Children’s Committee was most averse to sending children 12,000 miles across the other side of the world to Australia.’

  Obviously, the local authorities had woken up to the perils and inherent cruelty of child migration but, sadly, not so the charities.

  In December 1954, the Catholic Church asked the Australian government to lower the minimum age of child migrants from five to three, because the orphanages had empty beds. Thankfully this request was denied because ‘… the long voyage to Australia involves an element of risk with very young children which is not justifiable. Even in the case of infants travelling with their parents, deaths do occur from time to time from shipboard illnesses, and sickness from the rapid climatic changes is frequent …

  ‘Perusal of our records show that there are only two current nominations for children aged three … On the other hand twenty-six children aged four, and eight aged three have arrived here under the post-war child schemes.’

  Australian welfare officers were also beginning to question the wisdom of the schemes. In August, 1959, the Acting Assistant Director of the Child Welfare Department in WA, wrote a report for the Commonwealth Immigration Advisory Council.

  ‘Whilst the standard of institutions receiving children, so far as material needs is concerned, cannot be questioned, there is a deep emotional factor lacking. Children have displayed considerable disturbance …

  ‘After-care service for institutionalized children is very important … The contact by nominating bodies is not consistent enough, resulting in the children becoming involved in failure to settle in a satisfying home and suitable job and, in fact, in some instances, becoming “drifters”.

  ‘… the number involved colliding with society is still too high …’

  The report goes on to say that the Department favoured the use of foster families instead of institutions but unfortunately, ‘institutions nominating children are not anxious to pursue the boarding-out policy, although it is felt that practically all children could be adequately fostered if the institutions were not loath to part with them …’

  Why would anyone in child care want a child to remain in an institution when there was a possibility of a home life? Surely it could have nothing to do with the Government subsidies that accompanied each child?

  The Governments, the charities and the churches involved, can not have failed to hear these warnings.

  There was now no possible reason to take innocent, defenceless children from their homeland and transport them to institutions on the far side of the world.

  So what was done? They continued to send and receive children – not for eight weeks, or eight months, but for another eight years.

  40

  There was never any doubt in my mind that the child migration schemes were enormously misconceived and had disastrous consequences.

  There was also ample evidence of information such as birthdates, names, dates and addresses being totally at odds with the official documentation. I would have liked to put it down to shoddy record-keeping and poor handwriting, but the sheer volume of mistakes made this seem improbable.

  Some children were allocated new names and dates of birth when they arrived in Australia because their records were ‘incomplete’. One thirteen-year-old actually had his first name changed because too many other children at the home had the same name.

  As I battled to find the families of child migrants I began to consider if some information had been deliberately falsified to cover the tracks of child migrants and make it difficult for parents or relatives to ever find them.

  Was this also a reason for telling children that they were orphans?

  Countless speeches, papers and history books refer to the child migrants as underprivileged, oppressed and orphans.

  ‘Orphans Arrive Here to Start Their Life Afresh’, declared one newspaper headline. ‘War Orphans Arrive Today’, said another.

  There is a 1947 newspaper story asking for families to take a migrant child home for Christmas. Three small boys, each about seven years old, are pictured sitting on a motor cycle and the caption announces:

  Look! We’re all ready to come. You see there are nearly forty of us who have never had a home. Our Mummies and Daddies were killed during the war and now we have come out here to Australia. We know you’d love to have one
or more of us for Christmas …

  Similarly, a booklet celebrating the history of Clontarf has a cover photograph showing the entrance to the institution. The caption states:

  The portals through which 2,451 Orphan Youth have passed to become worthy citizens of Our State.

  The Catholic Church doesn’t use the dictionary definition of the word orphan – they consider it to be a generic term that means whatever they want it to mean.

  Of course, calling children ‘orphans’ made the schemes seem far worthier. Orphans tug harder at the heart strings than other children. They’re all alone and need to be ‘rescued’.

  But is it a cruel and calculated deception? The philanthropists and child ‘care’ agencies appear to have wanted to sever any links the children might otherwise have had with their families or country. They were so successful that many migrants are still totally convinced their mothers and fathers are dead.

  Yet after researching thousands of cases in the past seven years, I can safely say that I have found only one child migrant who could properly have been called an orphan.

  Many of the charities have been upset by my use of words like ‘deceit’ or ‘deception’, but quite frankly I can’t think of what else to call it. If you tell a child that his or her parents are dead, when it wasn’t true then and isn’t true now, then surely that’s deceit.

  Likewise, attempts by parents to find their children were met with more lies. Many were told their son or daughter had been adopted; or worse still, had died. Few knew their youngsters had been transported out of Britain.

  Is that not deceit and deception?

  Another disturbing fact emerged when I discovered that there had been approaches from Australian families willing to adopt young migrants. An Adelaide newspaper reported in January 1949 that:

  Several offers have been made to adopt British war orphans who arrived in the Ormonde and are now living at Goodwood Orphanage. But they are not available for adoption.

  A spokesman for the Catholic Social Service Bureau said today that whether British children were available for adoption depended on the approved organization responsible for nominating the children. In this instance the Catholic Church had no intention of making them available for adoption. The children would be reared at the institution under the care of the Catholic Church until placed in employment under supervision, he said.

  Over the years, many migrants tried to retrace their footsteps, but too often the lies continued. Again they were classed as orphans; or told their mothers had abandoned them at the hospital or were killed in car crashes. Many have the evidence of such lies in writing.

  One of them is Albert Stanhope, a former child migrant who came to see me in 1993. Albert is quite wealthy in material terms. He’s a middle-aged real estate agent now married with three children.

  When I interviewed him I found him to be a very articulate man, although quite withdrawn. He perched uncomfortably on the edge of a chair, glancing nervously at his hands, with his briefcase between his feet.

  Within about ten minutes he sat back and quietly said, ‘I wonder if I have any family.’

  Albert arrived in Australia aged seven. He had an appalling childhood and was full of so much hurt that I realized he was going to need a lot of counselling.

  On his next visit Albert brought his birth certificate which he had managed to obtain as an adult. I spent a long while trying to draw him out about his childhood, but Albert wouldn’t say much.

  He just told me, ‘If ever those brothers have a go at you, Margaret. If ever they go public and have a go at you. I’ll finish them.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘Never mind why, I’ll finish them.’

  He’s said the same thing on more than one occasion. I can only assume something pretty terrible happened to him.

  As it turned out, I found Albert’s family quite quickly. And the search uncovered a series of documents relating to his emigration. The details speak for themselves.

  In August 1946, a young secretary and single mother, Patricia Stanhope, wrote this letter to an orphanage in Liverpool.

  Dear Madam,

  Can you please tell me if there are any places for my little boy in your care? It has been so hard to find work and now that I have a factory job in Bristol I am unable to keep him with me. He is four years old at the moment and hardly any bother. If you could look after him for a little while, until I get myself set up, then I will collect him. I am quite willing to pay for his keep. I hope you understand, I don’t want him adopted. Please just look after him for a short time.

  This reply was written on 18 September.

  Dear Mrs Stanhope,

  Thank you for your letter received on Tuesday last. We may have a vacancy for your little boy and I enclose an application form. We require full details of your background and new employment. A reference from your employer would be of assistance.

  If these are satisfactory, I can give you a decision at the beginning of October.

  There is a memo, obviously written during a conference, which explains why Patricia Stanhope had to put her baby in care. It reveals that her father died in the first World War and her mother raised three children on her own. Patricia, the eldest, took on the responsibility of looking after her brothers while her mother worked six nights a week as a nurse. As a result, Patricia didn’t finish school. She fell pregnant not long after her mother died.

  A position was found for baby Albert, and Patricia handed him over. She worked hard at her new job, trying to save enough money to bring him home.

  She visited the orphanage every fortnight, but the train fares were expensive and the meetings so emotional that she began to visit less and less as the months passed.

  Eventually Patricia fell in love with the factory owner’s son, who wanted to marry her. She broke down and told him about Albert, fearing he would disapprove but instead he told her to fetch him back. He was part of their family.

  19 February, 1950

  Memo: telephone call from a Mr Henry Archer, who claimed to be the new stepfather of Albert Stanhope. Apparently, Miss Patricia Stanhope has now married Mr Archer and wants to pick up Albert immediately. She was told that he was no longer in this country.

  Four days later, a letter arrived.

  Dear Sir,

  I don’t know where to begin. My distress and shock could not be greater at the news that my wife’s child has been emigrated without her written or verbal consent. No adoption papers have been signed by her and, in fact, I have a copy of a letter she sent to you on the 6th of August, 1946 in which she expressly states that her child is not to be adopted.

  On whose authority was he transferred overseas? Why was this done without my wife’s permission? These are questions to which I demand a full explanation. I also demand that you inform us of his precise whereabouts and begin immediate steps to have him returned.

  He is my stepson and will be brought up in a loving household.

  Surely you must realize that his mother wants him back. She stated as much when he was placed in your care.

  I ask you for an immediate reply and return of the child.

  Yours faithfully,

  H. Archer.

  A mother had lost her child. A dreadful mistake had been made. Yet there was no sign of remorse or an apology from the orphanage. This letter was written by the person in charge.

  4 March 1950

  Dear Mr Archer,

  Thank you for your letter dated 23 February, 1950. You may not be aware of all the relevant facts of the decision to emigrate Albert Stanhope. He was placed in this orphanage on November 9th, 1946. Our visitors’ book shows no record of anybody visiting the boy between January 1948 and November of that year. We had no letter from Miss Stanhope in that time explaining her absences, nor was any money forwarded to maintain Albert’s upkeep.

  This was an act of deliberate desertion and it was evident that someone had to assume parental rights and act on the child’s behalf. Rather
than be upset, your wife should consider herself fortunate. Albert is alive and well and enjoying a far healthier and brighter future. This is in no way due to your wife. Her actions harmed his welfare and we sought to protect him.

  Albert was sent to Australia in 1949 under the child migration scheme. He is now under the jurisdiction of the Australian authorities and no concern of ours.

  I would warn you against making any attempt to retrieve him. He has settled into a new life and is very happy. Any attempt to remove him would be detrimental to his well-being.

  The last document I uncovered was full of frustration and anger. It asks the same questions that I have asked for seven years. Questions that can never fully be answered because there is no defence for what was done to these children.

  12 March, 1950

  Re Albert Stanhope

  Thank you for your letter. It was a foul and appalling attack on my wife. You simply overlook the fact that a child still belongs with his mother, not you or anyone else, and that he has been taken out of this country illegally.

  I was shocked to read such a letter from a member of a religious order that prides itself in caring for others and preaches forgiveness. How dare you accuse my wife of deserting her child. How dare you send him overseas illegally.

  This surely is illegal and I am already seeking instruction on such matters.

  In the meantime, I advise you and your Church to employ whatever powers you possess and return Albert to this country.

  Yours faithfully,

  H. Archer.

  Albert Stanhope didn’t come home – not for another forty-three years. As his mother fought for him, he was seven years old and destined to grow up in the misery of an institution.

  At some point his parents gave up, bowing to the pressures imposed on them. Patricia, however, never stopped grieving for her son. She, at least, knew he was alive, others were told their children had died.