What price a British Home Child? Part two “the price of everything and the value of nothing"

I reckon Oscar Wild’s definition of a cynic as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing” is as good a starting point for an exploration of who made money from British Home Children. 

There was of course a price paid to send and settle each child but how can you really calculate the value of a child or for that matter the balance between those who did well and those that suffered?

Now this is a theme all of us reflect on from time to time, and it raises that simple question of who made out of these children?

It would be easy to target those individuals and charitable organisations who sent the children.  But I am not so sure.  Maria Rye was one of the first to be involved and took according to Roger Kershaw* about 10,000 across the Atlantic from 1870 to the turn of the century was paid £10 for each child she took out of the workhouse, which he estimated would be the equivalent today of £450.

But she came from a wealthy background and I doubt that making money was her motive.  But for some the financial dimension was important, not so much because of what could be made but rather what could be saved.

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 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.

And we do have to make some sort of distinction between those taken from the streets, those from institutions and the workhouse and those "rescued" from their own homes.

So a lot now turns on that crude calculation.  We know the cost of maintaining a child in the workhouse but need figures for the cost of running the training stations in the UK and receiving stations in Canada, set against the expense of sending them across the Atlantic.

Nor should we miss out in the calculations the benefits to those who took children as farmhands and domestic labour.  True there was a financial commitment on their part to feed, clothe and later pay them, but was this going rate cheaper than what they would have to pay out for non BHC labour?

And if we accept that the motives of many who sent our children across the Atlantic were driven by deep religious convictions and a sense of horror at the blighted lives and poor futures of the young people they encountered, are we saying that the same considerations were not present amongst those who took the children in?

I cannot accept that the three who agreed to take my great uncle in 1914 were entirely hard faced money grabbing individuals.

So, there is a lot more to play for. 

It may of course be that all of this is a niceness which may satisfy a piece of sound historical research but cloud the issues of principle about the moral correctness of sending them in the first place or of their treatment in the farms and homes in Canada.

But I rather think we need the detail even if it is uncomfortable, and challenges sometimes what we think about BHC.

So I would welcome any suggestions of where I can look for material on the average wages for juvenile labour in Canada in the last quarter of the 19^th century into the next, and the economic background to small time farming, especially in those areas where most children were settled.  I shall continue to plug away at what I can find here, amongst the Poor Law records and the archives of the Manchester Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge.

Picture; from a design by Lori Oschefski and Manchester Boys Refuges, Courtesy of the Together Trust and  Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m68158 & m68185

* Roger Kershaw, Child emigration to Canada, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/podcasts/emigration-to-canada.htm?mid=57

**Manchester Guardian April 10^th 1910

*** Manchester Guardian June 14 1872

**** Manchester Guardian April 10^th 1910