A British Home Child who had a choice?

I think my great uncle may have been an exception to the rule. The decision to send British Home Children* to Canada and later Australia only played lip service to the idea of freedom of choice.

Exactly how it was explained to children in orphanages and workhouse institutions will always be a little in doubt. There are stories of some very young children being shown the shapes of countries as a way of making them choose a destination and there are anecdotal tales of children returning home to find their parents gone and the deal with the agencies done and dusted. To what extent pressure was put on some parents is hazy but Bernardo was reported as referring to “philanthropic abduction” as the motive and the means by which some children were offered up for shipment to Canada.

And recently I spoke to a fellow researcher who herself was nearly sent to Australia in the 1960s and was only saved by the intervention of her grandmother.

All of which marks my great uncle out as a little different. He had been born in Birmingham in 1898 to a couple who if I am kind were unpredictable and possibly not well suited to bringing up a family. On their separation my great grandfather stayed in Kent later to marry and father a family of five, while my great grandmother headed back north to have her last child in the workhouse in 1902.

During the next ten years the surviving four children grew up in various institutions and despite a brief period with their mother were taken back into care in 1913 after great grandmother was judged "unfit to have control.”
All of which took its toll on the children. Sixty years later my great aunt wrote that “I will say our lives were not too bad at the homes in Derby but I went to 6 different schools and I know that your grandfather went to some of them and according to the teachers they hoped I was not like him.”

Which I suspect explains why at the age of 14 he was sent to a naval boot camp in the form of the Training Ship Exmouth. These places were designed to offer basic training in seamanship in a highly disciplined environment.
My great uncle was also destined for the same place but appears to have jibbed at the idea which is why I think at the age of 15 he was offered the alternative of settlement in Canada as a British Home Child.

I have no idea how it was put to him or whether he was offered other alternatives. But I doubt it, after all the Guardians of the Derby Workhouse will not have had many options for a wilful young lad. So it was a choice then between naval boot camp and the wide open land of Canada with the added attraction of a sea journey.

I suppose the added irony is that he made a second free choice and that was to run away from his third placement and join the Canadian army just one year in the Great War.


Pictures; from the collection of Lori Oschefski

*British Home Children is the name given to thousands of young people from poor backgrounds who were settled in the former colonies of the British Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries.