Saye Vernier Griffith a British Home Child Farmer

I have been thinking about the farmers who received the children from Britain into their homes and set them to work on their farms.

Now quite rightly a lot of work has gone into recovering the lives of the children who by and large have slipped into the shadows.

Their stories, experiences and something of what they did with themselves are at last there for us to read.  But not so the farmers.  Some are judged to be the villains while most just saw an opportunity to avail themselves of cheap labour and became part of a much bigger exchange of youngsters from the streets, orphanages and workhouses of Britain to the open lands and small towns and communities of Canada.

This will be no easy task given that I am over 3,000 miles from the source material.  But you can cut corners.  There is the excellent book by Joy Parr, Labouring Children,* which places the British Home Children scheme into the wider economic and cultural context of the period both here and in Canada and much attention is given to its impact on the rural Canadian economy.

Then there is the Library and Archives Canada** which I have happily roamed over.  Finally there are my Canadian friends many of whom have been bevering away for years searching, recording and describing the lives of these young people.***

And so I want to start not with the grand design but with one of the two farmers who I am close to.  He was Saye Vernier Griffith and he farmed out by Sheffield in Sunbury County N.B.  In 1914 he applied and was given a BHC who was my great uncle.

He was born in 1876 and he was first generation Canadian.

His farm was close to the St John River, but at present I have no idea of its size or what he farmed but given that potatoes and dairy farming are the main source of agriculture I guess that was what he did.  Now potato farming can be labour intensive and given that during the period from 1870 to 1921 the rural population was in decline the attractiveness of a boy from Britain to work for just $3 a month must have appealed to Saye.

And the same must have been true of other farmers, a fact which did not escape the attention of William Skivington  the Poor Law Guardian  who asserted that in 1910 for each of the 2,300 children sent to Canada that year  there had been seven applications by farmers.****

I am not sure I would have taken to old Saye, who certainly did not take to my great uncle and requested his removal on the allegation that he suspected the boy of burning down the barn.

Or perhaps Saye Vernier Griffith was just set in his ways.  He was after all 38 when he took in my uncle and 54 when he got married.

His wife moreover was just 23.  I have no idea about the success of the marriage but there were children.

Saye died in 1952 aged 76 and the farm appears to have been sold before his death.

Not a lot to go on but a start and the beginnings of looking into the lives of the men and woman who took the children of Britain for the farms of Canada.

* Parr, Joy, Labouring Children, British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924, 1994, University of Toronto Press, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/labouring-children-book-on-british-home.html
** http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/index-e.html/
***Of these there are many but I would recommend http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/index.html which is a growing source of research and stories and pictures.
**** Manchester Guardian April 4 1910
Pictures; from Libraries and Archives Canada, from the collections of Andrew Simpson and Angela Faubert