Ships of Hope and Deported kids
It seems an extraordinary solution to child welfare problems – to ship the youngsters off wholesale to the New World.
But a lecture next week at the Ragged School Museum will reveal that was exactly what London did with its deprived children for more than 300 years.
More extraordinary still, the export of cockney kids only ended for good in 1952.
But it was all done with the best interests of the children in mind. That can be seen by the identity of one of the prime proponents of resettlement – Thomas Barnardo.
Barnardo is rightly famous for the organisation he started in Hope Place, Stepney (just off Ben Jonson Road) in 1868. Barnardo’s is today one of Britain’s largest child welfare organisations, though many know it best for the homes it used to run.
The homes were only one of the solutions Barnardo hit on to relieve the suffering of East End children.
The idea of a new life in the wide open spaces and fresh air of the Colonies must have been appealing to the likes of Barnardo, who desperately wanted to get kids away from the pestilence, disease and crime of Victorian east London.
In fact, he was only continuing a process that had begun as early as the seventeenth century – records show that in 1618 the City of London sent 100 children to the new colony of Virginia.
In the nineteenth century Canada became a popular destination for local deprived children. By the 1880s, conditions in the East End were so appalling that Barnardo, who had been running homes since 1870, began to see the virtue of getting them away from the capital altogether.
There was, of course, also the appeal of providing workers for the new farms in Canada – a country of big farms and few people. His first party of boys left for Canada in 1882, while the first girls were sent in 1883.
Farming out
Then, in 1887, Barnardo’s work in Canada was given a boost with the acquisition of Manitoba Farm. The 7,000-acre spread became a training farm for boys coming over from England. The girls, meanwhile, were housed at Hazelbrae, a spacious timber-framed house, before being farmed out to families.
By the time of the doctor’s death in 1905, Barnardo’s had shipped 18,000 children to Canada.
Some thrived, but some did less happily. Look at the contrasting fates of two boys – William Carter and James Carver – sent to Canada in 1884 from the Barnardo’s home in Stepney Causeway.
William was described as a dark-eyed, intelligent but diminutive child when admitted to the Stepney Home when he was eleven and a half.
Both his parents were still alive – his father had been a boiler-maker, but had not recovered from the depression of losing his job, while his mother tried to support the family by selling whelks in the streets.
After two years in Stepney he went to Canada and was apprenticed to a Mr. Duff. He became a teacher and, by 1900, he was second-in-command at the Chatham National Bank in New York.
James fared less well. He was admitted to Stepney after the death of his father, a bee-keeper.
After a year he sailed to Canada, where, having failed to stay with any placement, he ended up in prison and by 1900 was reported as “being on the tramp”.
As well as Barnardo’s home in Stepney Causeway, another important site was the Labour House for Destitute Youths in Commercial Road.
Here boys learned practical skills such as woodworking in preparation for going to Canada.
One successful graduate was Henry Butt, who applied personally to the Labour House in 1888, by which time he had been reduced to begging on the streets.
After training, Henry was sent to Manitoba Farm, then found employment 200 miles further west.
By 1891, he was able to report that: “I am getting on first-class. I am busy ploughing at present and I like it very well, and I am going to learn all I can about the country.”
Though opposition was growing in Canada, often leading to prejudice against the children, Barnardo and his fellows rated emigration a success, and began to look at similar schemes in Australia and South Africa.
But by the 1940s, the fashion was turning against such traumatic removal of children from their home country, and the programmes ended in 1952.