An article in the International Express 8.1.08,p.31,(Britain’s Exiled Children) shows just how callous the so called Anglo-Saxon race is to it’s lower class children. ……..
The Industrial Revolution,and the mass influx of country people into the new industrial towns in search of work,resulted in a large under-class of desperate families who were forced to send their children,some as young as 5 years,to work in the mines and factories. The stick was simply “you work or starve”.
A high lower-class birth rate produced too many children for industry to absorb,and like India now,the streets were full of homeless children fighting to survive in an uncaring world.
As with the so called “stolen generation”Britain’s “humanitarian”Upper and Middle Classes devised an answer to the appalling poverty of the new big cities.
Two Victorian women,Marie Wye and Annie Macpherson,pioneered a Child Migration Scheme where street children between the ages of 5 to 11,in 1869,were sent to Canada. The boys were to work on farms,the girls in service. The idea was laudable but the implementation of it was not.
By 1875 a report criticised child migration accusing the agencies of being little more than “schemes for providing cheap labour”and “making 100% profit”on each child sent out. Adoption meant in effect servitude. Despite the initial furore,so great was the child poverty problem that agencies were soon sending out even more children. Like black slaves in the past,brothers and sisters were separated,the boys to be farm labourers and the girls to go into service.
Barnados’was the biggest player which from 1882-1939 sent 30,000 children across the Atlantic. It is estimated that 5 % of their boys and 10% of the girls were sent to Canada without their parents’consent. By the end of the 19th Century the Canadians were tired of the scheme and treated these children as second class citizens.
The Toronto Evening Star fumed “No law too strict can be framed to prevent these waifs,handicapped by heredity,from mingling with the pure and healthy children of this country!
By the 1920′s,after taking in 100,000 child migrants,Canada outlawed such migration.
As with convicts,when the New World had had enough Australia stepped in and in 1913 the first contingent of 12 workhouse boys from the East End of London arrived in Australia.
The “farm school”scheme to train boys for outdoor work and girls for domestic service,had the Prince of Wales as patron and seemed a good idea. “The blunt reality”laid bare in a 1944 government report,was that the schools “were designed to train unwanted boys and girls from England to become labourers and servants on country farms”. For them there was no way up. They were considered inferior,Guttersnipes?
A Book was published on January 25th,titled,‘New Lives for Old:Britain’s Home Children,(National Archives) by Roger Kershaw.’The book does not harp on the outrage of moving small children across the world and then get the most work possible from their poor underfed bodies. They were not black,so what they were was their fault and to the inner city elite and academics they do not deserve sympathy. The scheme continued until 1967 and the English media always said what a wonderful chance it was for the children.
I cannot see either the English or Australian elite demanding that we apologise to these white children. They have already told us that they did it for the good of these hopeless white children and that is that.
Without question the children were exploited by many of the “foster parents’but then life was hard in Australia anyway.
Looking at a photograph of a group of post war child migrants they were all presentably dressed. Barnados’looked after orphans and unwanted children,after world war 2 the state looked after many of them. Orphanages were never nice and foster homes not always better,church,state or private,all had problems and the children sent to Canada and Australia were”just got rid of”.
The history of the treatment of unwanted children in Western Society was never goood and if the papers are to be believed no better now. So why should the aborigines expect an apology? We should apologise to all our children.
