right you know, to split us up like that.” The man wore his uneasiness like a shield. “I had no one,” he muttered as he too walked away.
“I know. It happened too many times,” I replied after him.
I walked by an elderly man, cradling a framed photograph, his face lined with a record of a life long-lived. “It’s me mum,” he told me, pushing back a tear. “It took me twenty years to find her, and I only saw her just the once before she passed. Just the once.”
I found it difficult to know what to say. Others talked to me, but only in passing while they paced about. Wandering, waiting, wondering. Would they finally find what they were looking for? The room seemed crowded, but this group represented just a tiny portion of the whole number of children and families affected by Britain’s 350-year policy of migrating children to the colonies. Even though I knew better, I still found it difficult to believe that, at fifty-nine, I was older than some.
I kept my eye on my mother. Marjorie looked regal in her burgundy brocade jacket. Patient. She had been waiting for seventy-three of her eighty-three years for this moment. Nervous, stomach full of butterflies. Of this present group, it was just her and one other Canadian child migrant, along with three offspring and two spouses, invited to represent the more than 110,000 child migrants who had been shipped to Canada between 1833 and 1948.
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
