Digging deep into the story of British Home Children ..... the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge

Now, for the last year I have had access to the archives of one of the children’s charities who migrated young people to Canada.

In the back yard off Francis Street, 1873

At which point I have to state that the records were, and remain confidential, and that at no time in the course of the research will any names appear in the forthcoming book.

The charity is the Together Trust, but started out as the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuges in 1870, and they have commissioned me to write their history to coincide with their 150th anniversary in two years time.

They began by offering just six destitute boys, a bed and breakfast in a refuge on Quay Street, before turning them back out in the morning.

14 Major Street, 1905

Within a decade they had expanded to include girls as well as boys, had established purpose built homes for children, offered vocational training, took abusive and neglectful parents to court, campaigned for better conditions for children selling goods on the streets and migrated some to Canada.

But migration remained a very small part of the their activities which also included holiday homes on the north west coast, a special home for disabled children and a commitment to meet prisoners released from Strangeways Prison offering them a meal and help.

During the last 150 years they have changed and adapted to the growing involvement of the State in child welfare and stopped migrating young people in 1914.

But with my own BHC relative and in interest in the policy of migration stretching back to 2008, the first fifty years of their history is what fascinates me most.

On admittance, date unknown

And trawling the archives has offered up some discoveries which have corrected my first very belligerent attitude to all the children’s societies.

I now have a greater respect for those who considered migrating some children which was done after careful thought and much monitoring on the ground in Canada.

And I have become profoundly moved at the awful choices some parents had to make, choices to pass a child into their care.

As it turns out, most opted for short time provision in one of the charity’s homes in Manchester and Salford.

The records for those who were found destitute on the streets, tell of awful family backgrounds and of months with nowhere to live other than a railway arch or stair well in a tenement.

Christmas Doings from The Worker, 1880

The surprise is that many of these were in full time employment but at best shared a bed and a room in a lousy lodging house or were actually homeless.

But as interesting as the archives are, there is a bigger picture and that includes the different reasons for why children were migrated, set against the prevailing ideology and that love affair with all things rural, which all play a part, as does the demand for cheap child labour and the prejudice of some in the establishment towards the poor.

And in to that mix you can add that the contemporary opposition to migration.
True, the research has only thrown up the case of the three socialist Guardians on the board of the Chorlton Union which administered the Poor Law for south Manchester, but their opposition was reported in great detail by the media.

At the prison gates, circa 1900

Part of that opposition was on a principled basis and arose from a critique of the prevailing social and economic system and from a concern that the monitoring of “workhouse children ” sent to Canada was poor and that some children were unhappy.

So the book and the research is about just one charity working in the twin cities of Manchester and Salford and as far as migration goes limited to the period 1870-1914, but there is the bigger context which helps explain the policy.

And that is a start.

Location; Manchester, Salford, & Canada







Pictures; courtesy of the Together Trust, http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/p/about-together-trust.html