At it its simplest it centres on the premise that it is right to “rescue” children from poor and often dangerous conditions and offer them a new life. Put like that I suspect few of us could complain, but of course that is not how it worked and great harm was done to many of those who were sent.
Apologists for the scheme often point to the danger of trying to judge a past moment in time by our own standards. Now I have already argued elsewhere that there were those who raised serious objections during the very period it all happened.*
And these were not just those whose children were sent, or journalists scenting a story but the very people charged with the responsibility of administrating the scheme. These were the Poor Law Guardians who participated in the scheme by nominating children and paying for them to be sent.
My great uncle was sent by the Derby Poor Law Guardians who charged the Middlemore organisation with his care from Liverpool, to Halifax and onto the three farms he stayed between 1914 and 1915. Now this research is still in its early stages and at present has been drawn only from reports which appeared in the Manchester Guardian from 1872 through to 1910. But they do begin to show the unease and outright hostility by some of the Guardians.
As you would expect there were a number of different arguments and perhaps the most unsettling for me is that put forward by Mrs Sale at the 1903 Poor Law Conference when she said “She did not care for it, for it took away the best and left the worst and feeblest at home.” A concern echoed by a member of the Chorlton Union who felt that while “Canada would not have the mentally deficient we were sending the cream of the proletariat and building asylums for and crowding the streets with the others.”
It was for some a compelling argument but one that was turned a little on its head by the renowned Canadian medical expert who counselled “we are deliberately adding to our population hundreds of children bearing the stigmata of physical and mental degeneracy.” Back here there were those who could see the merit in providing new chances for the poor and abandoned children but feared for the future in that “this country would suffer from the loss of these children.”
This was compounded by the growing unease that once in Canada children aged between 10 and 12 were not adopted as some Guardians believed but worked as hired hands which it was pointed out was against the law in Britain. Here in south Manchester the Chorlton Union were also very unhappy that there was a gap of two years before reports on the children they sent were received which led for calls in 1905 for the Union to abandon its participation in the settlement of children in Canada. This had followed on from a similar discussion the year before when concerns was expressed at letters of complaint sent by the children themselves.
More perceptive was the assertion from one of the most vocal opponents on the Chorlton Union who in 1906 suggested that the policy was “was easing the congestion of our social conditions. It was like lifting of the safety valve, and if it were not done conditions of labour would arrive at such a state that there would be revolution.” Now there will be those who might feel this was at best an exaggeration and at worse downright class politics, but it would be well to remember that we were entering a more volatile period in labour relations which in the years around 1911 led to huge industrial unrest and the dispatch of troops to Manchester, Liverpool and the south Wales coal fields.
But and there is always a but, there were others who saw virtue and hope in the policy. As early as 1875 one correspondent to the Manchester Guardian defended Miss Mapherson “whose primary objective has been to rescue from their degraded condition those destitute children wandering homeless, and so little cared for streets, to gather them into homes where they are fed, clothed and taught, and carefully trained for future life in Canada.”
A view endorsed just twenty years later here in Manchester where a conference on the work of the Manchester Boys and Girls Refuge reflected “they were doing good to the children, relieving the overcrowded population at home and conferring benefit on the land they went.”
Now the debate on the merits of the programme will continue but at least we can now say that in judging the resettlement of 100, 000 British children in Canada we today are just continuing the exchange of views which were in full swing long before my great uncle left Derby for Halifax.
Pictures; from the collection of Lori Oschefski and Boys Refuge, Old Refuge Yard, Francis Street 1873, m68158, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
*Some of the blog posts
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/when-sorry-can-be-enough.html
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/who-will-speak-for-british-home.html
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/our-families-in-their-workhouses.html
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