Child Labor, Exploitation and Xenophobia in the British Home Children Movement

Palma !1 “Obstinate, Impertinent, Ill-Conditioned”: Child Labor, Exploitation and Xenophobia in the British Home Children Movement A Senior Project presented to the Faculty of the History Department California Polytechnic State University – San Luis Obispo In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts in History By Hannah Palma 9 June, 2020 © 2020 Hannah Palma Palma !2 Table of Contents I. Introduction 3 II. Conditions in Victorian London 5 A. Need for Alternatives III. Origins of the Home Children Movement 9 A. Key Players IV. South Africa 17 V. Australia and New Zealand 19 VI. Canada 21 A. Documentation of Home Children Immigration B. Indentured Servitude vs. Adoption C. Were Home Children Truly Orphans? D. Case Study VII. Experience of Immigrant Children 26 A. Treatment B. Education C. Resulting Shame and Stigma VIII. Lengthy Timeframe of the Home Children Program 30 IX. Idealized Program vs. Reality 32 X. Conclusion 36 A. The Young English Immigrant Experience B. Patterns of Immigration in History Bibliography 40 Palma !3 Introduction The Home Children movement, in which 100,000 British children were shipped overseas to South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, lasted from 1869 until the 1970s. Proponents of the program touted the children as orphaned ‘waifs and strays’ whose last hopes for survival were open spaces and clean air beyond urban British cities. In this thesis I argue the reality of the Home Children program is much darker than how it is portrayed by its proponents and supporters, and the poor treatment of Home Children by their foster families and society as a whole is just one example in the macrohistory of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment. Although supporters proclaimed the children were on their way to better lives, many knowingly exploited the desperate need for labor and domestic service in the colonies. Many children were separated from siblings upon reaching their destinations and worked as indentured servants to families in their host country. Although some children led fairly happy lives in their new homes, most faced overwork, neglect, and abuse at the hands of their foster families. The Home Children movement, which lasted almost one hundred years, is little-known to most people in the twenty- first century who are not descended from a Home Child themselves. In this thesis I hope to illuminate the suffering and resilience of the children forced to partake in this program, and honor their memories by exposing the truth of what they endured. One challenge facing the researcher on this topic is the overall lack of scholarly sources. Most of the literature on the subject comes from descendants of a Home Child seeking to memorialize their ancestors and the trauma inflicted upon them. Other information about the Home Children may be found in a chapter or two of academic works dedicated to nineteenth- Palma !4 century child labor in Britain. This overall lack of scholarly sources referencing the Home Children further fueled my desire to center these children at the heart of my senior project. This thesis investigates several issues including, but not limited to, the following: how many of the children who were adopted were truly orphans; if the program reveals any patterns about the macrohistory of immigration; why the program lasted for as long as it did; and whether there were any attempts to expose the program’s abuses that resulted in a mass governmental cover-up. I seek to answer these questions with careful investigation of primary sources from the program’s supporters and case studies/accounts from the children and opponents of the program. Discrepancies between the supporters’ claims and accusations from its detractors and testimonies from the actual children involved, suggest the possibility of a mass cover-up of the severity of the abuses. Accounts of the general public’s attitude toward the Home Children may also contribute to the macrohistory of global immigration and the separation of families. For families adopting a Home Child, did they proceed with the adoption knowing the child may still have family members back in England? Were they even informed of the child’s background prior to adoption? Of the adopted children with families, how many were old enough to inform their adoptive parents they were not, in fact, orphans? One of the most important factors motivating my research is empathy. As a person marginalized on multiple axes myself, I intimately understand the danger of forgetting or ‘rewriting’ history as a means of erasing the voices of the most vulnerable members of a society. The Home Children faced stigma, hostility and exploitation upon their arrival to their new home countries, problems that are still all-too-common for immigrants in Western countries today. If the stories of the most marginalized people are forgotten in the overall history of a region or Palma !5 society, then such histories are not whole, truthful records of the past. I hope to augment the available information of the Home Children, investigate their voices and add to their truths. The Home Children movement is little-known, yet examining it in careful detail may reveal much in the history and patterns of immigration and societal attitudes toward it, in the past and present. The forced separation of British families in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is strikingly similar to the separation of children from their parents at the Mexican—United States border in the twenty-first century. In order to gain a full understanding of the complexities and nuances of immigration today, it is important to look to the past for patterns that may help us move forward and foster an environment of compassion and advocacy for immigrants. Conditions in Victorian London One of the first questions that comes to mind when one learns of the Home Children program is why. Why was such a program deemed necessary in the first place, a program that tore families apart and doomed many children to years of abuse and neglect at the hands of people assigned to protect them? While such a movement may be considered outlandish or unthinkable by twenty-first century standards, life was very different one hundred and fifty years ago even in an industrialized nation like Great Britain. To gain a full understanding of the motivations behind proponents of the program and the parents and guardians who allowed their children to be sent overseas, it is helpful to consider the conditions in which lower-class Victorian Britons lived, worked and died. Forced to eke out some semblance of an existence for themselves and their children, poor parents jumped at the chance to send their children away to Palma !6 work on farms in the open spaces and fresh air of the colonies of Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand.1 Victorian London’s atrocious living conditions owe most of the foundations of its existence to the Industrial Revolution. Prior to the second half of the eighteenth century, Great Britain was stagnant and underdeveloped, a country of farmers and agriculturalist laborers struggling to make ends meet. The tide began to turn, however, around the 1780s, and inventions such as the spinning jenny, the flying shuttle, and the power loom promised great change in the daily lives of working-class Britons.2 By the 1830s, there was an even greater explosion of technological advancement in Britain: the textile industry was booming, and factories were constructed in order to meet the high demand.3 Roads, canals, and railroads were built to accommodate factory construction and the growing popularity of the steam engine. Slowly but steadily, London was urbanizing. The social and economic effects of the Industrial Revolution were staggering. Farmers and laborers who previously had no other options suddenly found themselves with alternative ways to provide for their families. Factory employers needed workers to operate the machines, and someone needed to provide the labor in creating new roads, canals and railroads. Women, previously confined to the home, realized the industrial boom offered them a chance to escape 1 Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrants to Canada, 1869-1924 (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1980), 22. 2 Lernard R. Berlanstein, The Industrial Revolution and Work in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), xi. 3 David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 40. Palma !7 the drudgery of domesticity.4 Many unmarried women took jobs in textile factories, where they operated (often fickle and very dangerous) machinery.5 Due to the demand for ‘unskilled’ labor, many rural families flocked to London and other industrializing areas. Population soared, and urbanization began to take hold in Britain. Need for Alternatives In spite of the massive uptick in technological advancements, the effects of the Industrial Revolution were not all positive. Due to the influx of people traveling from the countryside to London, the city quickly became crowded and overpopulated. The sheer number of human beings crammed into one area had devastating consequences: disease ran rampant, the stench of untreated sewage was overwhelming, and rivers turned green from factory residue. Housing was another serious issue: people were moving to the city so quickly that landlords were unable to accommodate all of them. Many families were forced to live in filthy slums, where clean drinking water and sanitation were horrifically lacking.6 It was the lives of the children, however, that were arguably the most negatively impacted by the Industrial Revolution. The demand for manual labor in factories led to children operating the dangerous machines within, risking their own lives to do so.7 Other children were forced to seek work elsewhere: girls often sold matches in the streets, while some boys shined shoes and 4 Louise A.

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