Hard lives for home children

Opinion

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This article was published 27/06/2011 (5219 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — The elderly man sat in front of me, his rheumy eyes and round, ruddy face giving me no inkling of what he was thinking. His hands were neatly folded in his lap. I had been told he was a home boy and I, a kid reporter at the Winnipeg Tribune, was supposed to interview him.

I’d been given half an hour to look up home children in the Tribune’s library. Apparently, they were orphans and other children brought over by charities to stay with Canadian families and work as domestics or on farms. Some of them were as young as five.

I only learned later that Alex, the home boy I was supposed to interview, had been harshly treated in various homes; that he had been told endlessly to sit quietly with his hands folded; that his keepers — all devoted Christians, I’m sure — had drained most of the joy and vitality out of him.

I asked some questions; he answered quietly in monosyllables. The interview was a failure because I wasn’t prepared.

I thought about the interview last month when I went to a dramatic musical, Homechild, put on by Goya Theatre Productions in a new theatre at Ottawa’s Centrepointe leisure and entertainment centre.

The musical’s book, music and lyrics were written by Barb Perkins of Erin, Ont., whose grandmother and three of her eight siblings were sent from Wales to Canada in 1907. In the 50 years after Confederation, about 80,000 British children were shipped to Canada to alleviate the stress on Britain’s overburdened social welfare system.

“Much of what happened to these children,” says Perkins, “was a well-kept secret… one that had been quietly ignored in Canadian and British history books, even though 10 to 12 per cent of the Canadian population are descendants of home children.”

Her great-grandmother, says Perkins, did “everything in her power” to maintain the family of nine children after the untimely death of her husband, a fisher. Through “a series of unfortunate circumstances,” the children were sent to Canada with a large group of orphans from the Barnardo Homes.

Thomas John Barnardo was trained in medicine and theology, but after failing to get to China as a missionary, he set up in 1870 several refuges for children in London’s East End. His organization sent roughly 30,000 children to homes he established in Peterborough, Toronto and a farm at Russell.

The movement to send children to Canada started much earlier, however. In 1826, an obscure police magistrate, Robert Chambers, told a British parliamentary committee: “I conceive that London has got too full of children.” His solution: Send the children to Canada to be farm labourers. Kenneth Bagnell, in The Canadian Encyclopedia, calls it one of the most Draconian movements in the history of emigration.

At its peak, dozens of individuals and organizations were sending children ages four to 16 to Canada. Most of these efforts had three problems: They didn’t check out the people getting the children very well, they didn’t review how the children were doing, and they didn’t keep adequate records about families who treated children badly.

Many of those engaged in the various schemes, says Bagnell, were victims of “a naïve dream, with no understanding of the needs of a child and no awareness of the conditions in which they were placed.”

By the 1920s, people began questioning the handling of immigrant children. Charlotte Whitton, director of the Canadian Welfare Council and later a colourful Ottawa mayor, said the programs were inhumane. J.S. Woodsworth, the Winnipeg MP, told the House of Commons: “We are bringing children into Canada in the guise of philanthropy and turning them into cheap labourers.”

Most programs were finally prohibited in 1925.

The Great Depression also helped end Canada’s love affair with child labour. Most provinces had legally excluded children under 14 from factory and mine employment by 1929. The Depression pushed more of them out of the workforce because adults were insistent on getting their jobs.

In a new book, Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, Roy Parker dismisses the myth that children are survivors by nature. They have, he says, “their own, unique histories, however brief and fragmentary, that remain a crucial part of their sense of identity.”

In another new book, Heavy Burdens on Small Shoulders: The Labour of Pioneer Children on the Canadian Prairies, Sandra Rollings-Magnusson says all children — immigrant and native-born — were treated, like women, as “economically invisible labour on the farm.”

Perkins, author of Homechild, says we should also remember the parents of the home children: “It’s terrible to lose a child who’s still alive in the world.”

 

Tom Ford is editor of The Issues Network.