Now I am not one of those people who automatically look for a darker motive in the actions of others. And so I can see that those who were engaged in the resettlement of children from the streets, orphanages and workhouse institutions were genuine in their concern for the well being of these young people and worked hard to ensure that the outcome was for the good.
There is no doubting the sincerity of people like Miss Macpherson, Dr Barnado and John T Middlemore who were driven by deep religious convictions and a sense of horror at the blighted lives and poor futures of the young people they encountered.
Or the concerns of Poor Law Guardians at how the children they sent to Canada were being treated. More than once members of the Chorlton Union during the early years of the 20th century called for a halt to sending any more workhouse children. They were uneasy at the letters sent by children complaining of bad treatment and were appalled at the lack of regular reports from the Canadian authorities on the welfare of the young people who they had resettled.
But I have begun to wonder at the relationship between the costs of maintaining a child in the workhouse compared with the cost of resettlement in Canada. I have to confess it is early days and all I have so far are a few reports but I think it is enough to prompt some research.
In the April of 1910 the secretary of the Manchester Boys and Girls Refuge argued that in pure monetary terms it was cheaper to send children to Canada. “As to the expense, to maintain a child in the workhouse school or in a charitable institution cost at least £15. In some Poor Law Unions it had gone up to £30. Allowing an average stay of four or five years the total expenditure was at least from £60 to £75 for each child. The cost to emigrate a child was £12, and for this the first and final sum he or she was provided for during life.” All of which was a fine balance sheet calculation and one which was strengthen by the fact that “only 3% of the number of children whom they had emigrated could be put down to failures.” So “on the ground of economy alone this juvenile emigration was a saving to the country.”*
Moreover the London Guardians had observed that after just two years from the start of the scheme in 1870 the numbers of “pauper children attending workhouse and district schools [was} less than in the previous year [and] has probably been occasioned in a great measure by the extension of the boarding out system and partly also by the emigration of a considerable number of children to Canada.”**
Now this represented a considerable saving as the cost of teaching the 39,542 children in their care had been £36, 778 in 1871, but during the following year “the number under instruction was 2,032 less than in the previous year.” I will leave you to do the sums. The Guardians reported that it cost 18s 7d [86p] per child.
Of course you have to be careful. It would be easy to reduce this to a crude and simplistic equation which turned merely on the cost of a child and while I have no doubt this was a consideration it is also clear that there was a genuine belief that by lifting the children off the streets and out of the institutions they were being “rescued from degrading and dangerous surroundings.”***
And for a charity mindful of its expenditure and its donations and a government body charged with the sound use of public money any argument which drew on “value for money” was an attractive one and one that organisations might feel duty bound to make.
We of course might think that the care of our most vulnerable children then as now is about more than a balance sheet. It will be an interesting line of enquiry but in the meantime I shall finish with those lines from the Brecht poem,
So many particulars.
So many questions.
Picture; Manchester Boys Refuge, Quay Street 1910, m68184, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
*Manchester Guardian April 10th 1910
** Manchester Guardian June 14 1872
*** Manchester Guardian April 10th 1910
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