The tone shifted and those in the room paused. I looked over as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown walked through the door.
February 9, 2010
I had arrived home in the evening to my partially packed house after a long, fruitless weekend of searching for a new home, to find an unexpected urgent message from Dave Lorente, the founder of Home Children Canada. “Can you come to the formal apology that the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is giving to all British child migrants? It is just two weeks away. We need an answer tonight.”
The apology was an important issue for me, but never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I might actually be present for it. I knew the event was imminent, because it had been announced the previous fall that Britain would follow the lead of the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd. In November 2009, Rudd had given a formal apology for the wrongs experienced by all children, including the child migrants who found themselves in his country’s care between the 1920s and the 1970s. I had been waiting for the date of Brown’s apology to be announced, but Dave’s call made it so that my mother and I were among the first to hear about it, since the event had not yet been formally publicized.
“Well, yes, I could go.” I heard myself say without hesitation. I could drop my house search, my packing, and everything else, and go to London. I listened intently to the details, then recalled that my passport was due to expire. I cradled the phone on my shoulder and dug through my papers searching for it. Just as I thought, it would expire before our return date. My mind immediately started to make lists. First, forget everything and race to the passport office in the morning, then …
“Pat, are you listening? Can you bring a home child?” Dave’s tone urged me to pay attention.
“A home child?” His question caught me off guard since I had always called my mother a “child migrant.” It was the children sent to the provinces in eastern Canada who were most often referred to as home children. But child migrants and home children were really one and the same. I came to my senses. “My mother?”
“Your mother! She is still with us? Can she still travel?”
“Oh yes indeed!” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
“Absolutely perfect. The British High Commissioner here in Ottawa will be in contact with you in a day or two.” I listened to another twenty minutes of details, all of which I really wanted to hear, but I also wanted to hang up and phone my mother before she went to bed.
“Why are you phoning so late?” Marjorie sounded cautious, perhaps afraid of bad news that prompts calls in the dead of night.
“You will never guess. We have been invited to go to London to hear the British prime minister’s apology.”
“London, England? You are pulling my leg.”
“No, seriously, it is true. At least I think it is. It does seem a little unreal, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I can’t go. No. No, I just can’t drop everything and go. I have too many commitments. When does this take place?”
“It is scheduled for the twenty-fourth, which is two weeks tomorrow. We would have to leave by the twenty-first to have time to settle in before the big day.”
“No, I can’t.” Her voice determined.
“Well, can you at least think about it?” I begged, even though I found it difficult to be persuasive when I felt so uncertain myself.
“Yes, I will think about it. Goodnight.”
An email flashed on my computer as I hung up. More details of the trip, making it seem very plausible. I forwarded the email to my mother. Ten minutes later the phone rang.
“Okay, I will go.”
Letter from Malcolm Jackson, branch secretary, Fairbridge Farm School, June 11, 1940, to Marjorie’s mother. Jackson claimed that Marjorie asked for her siblings to join them at the farm school. When Marjorie saw this letter in 2009, she vehemently stated that she would never have said anything like that.
University of Liverpool Archives, Special Collections Branch, Fairbridge Archives, Arnison Family Records, D296.E1 .
I had always hoped for some formal recognition for the thousands of child migrants or home children sent to Canada. It was a little-known part of Canadian history. At one point there were up to fifty sending agencies in Britain shipping children overseas. While the numbers most commonly used for child migrants sent to Canada’s have varied widely from 80,000 to 100,000, Dave Lorente of Home Children Canada has pointed out that the Library and Archives Canada now has a list of 118,000 home children taken from ship lists that date back to 1865 at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/home-children/index-e.html. Many of the children had a difficult time accepting their new lives and all too often they found themselves in communities that did not fully accept them. A belief that the child migrants were of inferior blood led some of the new communities to not want these children to mingle with their own children. Home children were sent to Canada to work and then to find their own way once they were adults. It would not do to coddle them.
The farm school that my mother had been sent to was named the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. “Prince of Wales” was for the support the Fairbridge Society received from Edward, the Prince of Wales, and “Fairbridge,” after Kingsley Fairbridge, a man who advocated for the migration of Britain’s pauper children and for training them to become farmhands and domestic servants in the colonies. This farm school was established near Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The children were housed in cottages that held between twelve to fourteen children. Each cottage was headed by a cottage “mother,” and the boys and girls were separated. Between 1935 and 1948 the farm school received 329 child migrants.
A number of these Canadian Fairbridgians claim that being sent to Canada was the very best of luck, however many of them do not hold that sentiment. As a daughter of a child migrant, and thus having experienced firsthand the effect it can have on families, I believe the system of migrating children to be fundamentally flawed. The family is the nucleus of our society, and it was precisely the family support system that was torn away from many of the children and replaced with something quite inferior.
Isobel Harvey, a B.C. child welfare worker in the 1940s, visited the farm school in 1944 and presented a nine-page report on the conditions she found at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School at that time. The cottages were, in Harvey’s opinion, “planned on an outmoded plan which allows the cottage mother little opportunity to foster any feeling of home … most of the children appear in aprons designed by the school clothing head, one might imagine they were residents of an orphanage in the last century.”[1] Harvey’s report was written almost two years after they sent Marjorie out to work as a domestic servant. It appeared that life at the farm school had not improved since her departure. For many of the children, the farm school cottage life did not provide a real place of belonging. The various cottages Marjorie was housed in and the numerous cottage mothers she was placed under were a poor substitute for her own family.
I wondered what effect an apology would have on my mother. Marjorie and three of her siblings had been removed from their mother’s care in early 1937. She strongly believed that removing her from her family and sending her to Canada as a child had not been the best thing for her or for her family. I tried to envision how it would be for my mother to actually be present when Gordon Brown gave his formal apology. Would it hold meaning for her? Would it speak to her “heart,” the heart that was broken nearly seventy years ago? Would the spokesperson, the British prime minister, be able to speak for the heart of Britain? After all, Gordon Brown himself was in no way responsible for the years of child migration.