CHAPTER 2

“Our Innocence is all a Sham” Fallen Women, Displaced Children and Public Sensibilities, 1850–1918

Children In England and Wales in the 1850s

What was it like to be a child in England and Wales at this time? The census report for 1851 stated that ‘The English population contains an excessive amount of children and young people’. The population was gradually increasing across the nineteenth century: in 1851 the total population for England and Wales was 17.9 million, rising to 36.1 million by 1911.

An interesting distinction is drawn in the 1851 census report between the genealogical definition of family with its emphasis on pedigree, and what the census statisticians regarded as a family unit: ‘The first, most intimate, and perhaps most important community, is the FAMILY, not considered as the children of one parent, but as the persons under one head’. In other words, any group of people living together under one roof and sharing a table were to be regarded as a family, and the head of the household/family or ‘occupier’ was the person responsible for paying the rent for a whole or part of a property. This would also mean that a single person living alone would be regarded as a family or household.

Taking this definition, the number of families in England and Wales in 1851 was 3,712,290, an increase of nearly 2 million since the first census was taken in 1801. The average ‘family’ comprised five persons – usually a male and female partnership, married or otherwise, and their children, plus servants, lodgers or extended family. The average age of marriage was 26 years for women and 28 years for men, but boys of 14 and girls of 12 could consent to marry, with parental consent needed until 21, the age of majority. If this very fluid definition of family was reflected by the population on a practical level, then it would overturn many of our preconceptions of what Victorians thought of as a family unit, and leave the concept of the ‘family’ wide open to the addition of children who were not genetically connected to the key members of the household.

There was nothing sentimental about the way in which the children of labouring families were treated during this period. Children often drank alcohol, so the dosing of babies with opiate-based sedatives seemed perfectly normal in comparison – however, there is evidence that not all parents were aware of the opiate content of the sedatives, but were just happy that it afforded them some peace.

Children were also treated like adults in the eyes of the law, and punished accordingly. Later in the century, the Stockport Town Thieves Book, a ledger kept by local police to identify regular miscreants, featured 12-year-old petty thieves alongside habitual, long-standing and mature adult offenders.

From today’s perspective, it is shocking to think that 160 years ago, children were not always emotionally valuable; they were a commodity, to be moved around, bartered with, sold, and passed on at will. The theft of children – the word theft is chosen advisedly, as abduction would suggest an acknowledgement that children had a freedom that could be curtailed by kidnapping – was undertaken because they could be sold on to beggars (as a useful ‘prop’ to tug at the public’s heart strings), or their clothes taken and sold on into the profitable second-hand clothes market. They could be sold to unscrupulous employers such as chimney sweeps or pushed into prostitution.

Those who stole children could, of course, also exploit the vulnerable childless couple by offering to sell them a child to ‘adopt’. Sometimes, it was the parents who sold the child into any one of these situations. In other cases, the child became a source of profit for the lawless to exploit. Yet, at the same time, children were given responsibilities that would only be undertaken by adults today – care of babies and young children, often in the complete absence of any responsible adults; tasks in industrial and agricultural work that involved dangerous tools and machinery; and heavy work at home.

Children were expected to pull their weight in a family in whatever way they were needed, and because of what they had heard and learned, they feared the possibility of ending up in the workhouse as much as their parents did. The notion of what defined a child was completely different in the nineteenth century, and over-sentimentalised images of cherubic children in pretty clothes from more affluent families sat awkwardly with images of ragged street children in Victorian culture. A child was a small human whom you could own, exploit, love and abuse as you wished, and then discard at will.

It would be all too easy to condemn society and its citizens in the mid nineteenth century because they had such wildly different views about children to the average adult of today. One must guard against this, however. Children were valued, but in a very different way, and the parent who sent a child out to work at a very young age, or insisted she or he stayed at home to learn skills, no doubt truly believed that to provide some security for oneself in those days would be much more important than anything else, including an education.

With security came respectability, a modicum of status, and the hope of marrying better than someone from a pauper background could aspire to. The one day of the week when many children received a form of education would be attending Sunday school, that is, if they could be spared from their chores.

The Victorian Child: Statistics from the 1851 Census for England and Wales and Elsewhere

In 1851 9,985,133 persons were legally classified as ‘infants’, that is, under the age of 21 years.

Included in this figure are:

• 578,743 babies aged 0 to one year

• 2,156,456 children aged one year to five years

• 2,456,066 children between the ages of five and ten years

• 2,256,815 children between the ages of ten and fifteen years.

In England and Wales in 1851, the number of registered live births was 615,865.

• Of these 615,865 births, 42,000 were born outside marriage.

• For every 1,000 babies born in 1851, only 522 reached the age of five years.

• There were 1,509,520 children – ‘orphans’ – living with a sole widowed parent.

• 1,467,185 ‘natural’ families had no children.

• Half of all children in England and Wales aged five to fifteen years – 2,347,291 – were receiving no formal education.

• 705,409 children aged five to fifteen years had employment outside the home; 1,583,732 children in the same age group were ‘employed’ within the home.

Despite legislation in the 1830s and 1840s for factory and mine workers to restrict the roles in which and length of time children would work in those environments, it is startling how many children were still toiling for long hours as employees. The number of boys aged from five to ten years who worked in the textile industry in 1851 was 4,434, with 1,209 children in this age range still working in the coal mining industry. Well over half a million people were classified as domestic servants in 1851, and this would include a substantial number of those whom the twenty-first century citizen would regard as young children, working very long hours and doing arduous manual labour.

As can be seen, many children never went to school at all, and worked from being very small, either at home or in a workplace. For many struggling parents in labouring families, to send a child to school would be to devalue her or him as a personal, family and economic asset. The lives of children displaced from family, work or community could be even worse.

The ‘Displaced Children’ of Victorian England and Wales

How would one define the ‘displaced child’ of Victorian England and Wales? It could be said that such a child is any minor who was not closely connected to, and benefiting from, one family unit as a means of support. The reasons for this detachment varied.

As mentioned above, many children had to work and this left them vulnerable to physical, psychological and developmental damage. Some children in adult environments suffered sexual abuse. Children who became the responsibility of the Poor Law system might find themselves in a workhouse, or later on be boarded out with a family they did not know, or as older children, may be placed in an institution – sooner rather than later, if they had a disability and were not seen as having any economic worth. Other pauper children were placed in apprenticeships and could be moved considerable distances from home as pauper employees, thereby isolating them from extended family. Children, some as young as 12 or even less, who went into domestic service – either in a household or on a farm – were equally isolated and invariably at the bottom of the staff hierarchy too.

However, these children were part of a system in which someone was supposed to have responsibility for them. There were thousands of children who had no one to watch over them at all, who lived on the streets and survived as best they could. There were many reasons why children ended up as ‘Street Arabs’, as they were known. Some babies and young children were simply abandoned, while others had a family who relied on their petty thieving, odd jobs or prostitution to survive and therefore had a vested interest in the child living on the street. Some had run away from abusive or desperately poor backgrounds, while yet others had travelled to an urban area in search of work, but found none.

These children slept where they could, ate when they could, and had even fewer opportunities for health care, nurturing or education than the average poor child with a family. Later in the Victorian era, they were to be the primary target for child welfare groups such as the Waifs and Strays Society, who strove to rebuild the lives of these forgotten children.

Another major group of displaced children were those separated from the nuclear family unit by bereavement. Orphans may have been farmed out to any relative who had the space and resources to take them in, and little consideration would have been given to the process of grieving – such sentiment was reserved for those with the economic leisure to indulge.

However, the group most likely to be displaced in one way or another, was the illegitimate child. Their position in the wider family may well have been precarious, partly because of innate hostility towards the child (the focus of blame for the embarrassment often fell on the child) and could sometimes lead to them being moved from one family group to the other as they grew up. Failing that, such children often grew up with grandparents and did not get to know their mother well, or at all.

This displacement, or isolation from the relatives who under different circumstances may have had the strongest bond with them, made these children much more vulnerable to all manner of negative experiences, and more likely to be in need of the assistance of external sources of help. One piece of legislation that would have provided a framework of stability for children without a stable home or family life was legal adoption. In America, adoption legislation began in 1851, but in England and Wales, a new century would have to dawn before legal adoption was even seriously considered and publicly debated.

In the meantime, the overall picture of child care, especially for children without a family to call their own, remained precarious and often chaotic. However, there were not even many charitable institutions dedicated to the care of children at this point, and certainly not enough to deal with the thousands of vulnerable children; all this was yet to come. For the time being, children remained valuable commodities, useful economic units, and entirely dispensable.

There is one group of displaced children whom it will be almost impossible to trace, at least until they are adults and able to make their own decisions to take their place in society. There is anecdotal evidence that large numbers of illegitimate children, especially those born to women who had moved to urban areas to conceal their pregnancy, were neither registered nor baptised, the attempt to conceal prompted by fear of exposure and of the Poor Law system.

Also, in urban areas anonymity was known to be easier to achieve because the registration of births, marriages and deaths was harder to enforce in poor and overcrowded districts, and in the early days after 1837, there was less compulsion built into the system anyway. This would account for the frustration some family historians feel when they trace a person back only so far, but are completely unable to trace the person further through their early life.

Some of these unrecorded children will have died young, perhaps as a result of their precarious beginnings, or been abandoned to become foundlings. Rather than being displaced children, this group are probably better described as lost. Christoph Bernoulli, another nineteenth century population theorist, wrote, ‘It is beyond doubt that fewer illegitimate children grow up to maturity; that they get through the world with more trouble; that more of them are poor; and that therefore more of them become criminals.’ The pressures on these lost and displaced children were almost insurmountable.

The ‘Fallen Woman’

By the middle of the nineteenth century, disapproval of the unmarried mother and of her children was at a height, but rather than take practical steps to elevate the women and their offspring from the gutters of society, most of the single mothers were left to make their own arrangements. The term ‘fallen woman’ was commonly used for women with illegitimate children, or indeed any woman who was known to have had a sexual relationship outside marriage. But disapproving commentators and social activists split fallen women into two groups: those who were ‘once fallen’ and those who had fallen more than once, in other words likely to have had more than one illegitimate child. For a long time, those who went to any agency or charity for help were more likely to receive assistance if they were once fallen and there was a greater chance of redemption, but all of them faced an unappetising list of choices.

Many of these options were repellent, not only to modern sensibilities but to those of most contemporary citizens, although it is a testament to the desperation of not just the families of the mother, but of the woman herself that they or she felt compelled to try them. All the usual condemnations of the Church and society would weigh down upon all those involved; a woman who found herself in the position of single parent in the mid-nineteenth century was a far cry from the relatively well supported single parents of the late twentieth century, for whom the stigma of having an illegitimate child is so much less.

‘A Fate Worse Than Death’: Solutions to the Unwanted Pregnancy

The safest solution to the plight of any woman who found herself single and pregnant was to marry the father, or just find a husband who would take her and the child on. Bearing in mind that a significant percentage – possibly over a third – of all brides in the mid-nineteenth century were pregnant on their wedding day, clearly this was an option that worked for many, and it is a curiosity of many family histories that women who ‘had to get married’ were later on brutal in their condemnation of daughters who found themselves in the same predicament.

The respectability that marriage instantly brought, whether it was a happy union or not, was regarded as a cure-all and these girls were seen as having manufactured a success out of a disaster. However, women who failed to secure their husband, who had had a union with a married man, or had been the victim of rape or abuse, were regarded as failures both morally and pragmatically. The fact that the marriage was a ‘just in time’ ceremony seemed to be irrelevant; it was securing the father, or indeed any man, that mattered. There are many thousands of examples of ‘just in time’ marriages recorded in family histories, and this is one very typical case.

Sometime around the beginning of 1863, in Birmingham, a young woman named Mary Ann Freeman became pregnant. She lived in Essex Street, one of the poorest streets in the centre of the city, with her mother, two female lodgers and a nine-year-old boy described as the mother’s grandson. No men, as breadwinners, had lived in this household for at least 12 years, although a variety of daughters, grandchildren and female lodgers came and went. Mary Ann was not married, but on this occasion she was lucky. She married Andrew Wilson on 28 June 1863, well into the third trimester of her pregnancy, and presumably was visibly pregnant when she walked into St Luke’s Church for the marriage ceremony.

On 2 September, little Edward Henry was born and was duly registered as the child of a married couple. There is nothing in this story to suggest that Edward was not the son of Andrew Wilson, so as historians we have to take the documentary evidence at face value and accept that Andrew was indeed the baby’s father. Mary was fortunate; she came from a desperately poor household which survived on the meagre pickings that outworking (in this case, linen button covering) could provide women on their own, so there was no guarantee that her all-female family could have supported her and the baby. She would have been a prime candidate for the workhouse, or prostitution. As it was, she lived for many decades with her husband Andrew who seemed always to have work, went on to have more children, and presumably they were as comfortable as any labouring family could be in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The adult Edward went on to marry and unlike his parents, waited till after his wedding to start his own family of nine children – a stereotypically large Victorian family. As to whether Mary Ann and Andrew were ‘happy’ in a romantic sense, one will never know, and it was probably never part of the package anyway – security and survival were more likely to be priorities than emotion, as well as making sure that Mary’s first born was not one of the 6 per cent of registered babies born outside marriage. The Royal Commission, which had examined the state of the bastardy laws prior to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, put such marriages of convenience in starker terms. They commented that such marriages were ‘founded not on affection, not on esteem, not on the prospect of providing for a family, but on fear on one side and vice on both’. One hopes that for Mary and her husband, the marital relationship was not quite that bleak.

Widows left trying to cope without their man were equally pragmatic. Caroline Bardsley had a daughter at the age of 19 in January 1872, and was not married. However, she was living with one Dan Bowker and when she went to register the birth of Mary Ellen, she told the registrar she was married to Dan – so that the birth certificate of her daughter would look ‘respectable’, and her daughter would not have to be stigmatised all her life by an honest admission that her mother had not been married at the time of the birth. Almost exactly nine months later, Caroline and Dan travelled from Haughton Green, then on the outskirts of East Manchester, to the register office in central Manchester and went through a civil marriage ceremony. They could not marry in their own locality, as Caroline had already let it be known that she was married, and all this subterfuge was to save face for her daughter and for herself.

It was to little avail, however, as the following year, Dan died of tuberculosis and she was left the penniless widow of a labourer in a hat factory. What would a woman in her position do now? She was only 21 years old, fit and well, but how could she work and keep her daughter? There was rent to pay and food to buy. The prospect of going into the workhouse, leaving her daughter with a thoughtless childminder who would dope her baby with opiates, or having to give up her daughter, must have loomed large for Caroline. She was far enough away from her own family not to be able to rely on support from them, and in any case she had no sisters who might be able to help by taking on the baby at least for the time being.

For many women – and men – left widowed with young children to look after, a pragmatic solution was the obvious one: find another spouse, and that is what she did. Just eight weeks after Dan Bowker died, Caroline took herself off to Stockport, again out of her immediate locality – and married John Stopford, a farmer who was her neighbour and eleven years her senior. While it may sound rather unseemly to marry again so soon (and Caroline may have felt this too, which is why she went to Stockport for the wedding even though there were places of worship closer than that she could have used), it was very much a matter of practicalities. Caroline and her child needed support, and that support was best found in the long-term solution of a new husband – now, Caroline’s baby was no longer an orphan and her future was relatively secure once again.

Caroline herself was one of nine children, the same number of children as Queen Victoria had, but it is highly unlikely that labouring families would have regarded themselves as in any way akin to the monarch and her brood (pictured in Plate 3). Queen Victoria’s many images of her happy and large family were widely promoted as the ideal family of the day, despite the fact that middle-class couples were starting to practise contraception by the late nineteenth century. When Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert, died, although the Queen was bereft and heartbroken, her life continued on as before in a material sense. For the likes of Caroline, to lose the main breadwinner, usually one’s male partner, was a catastrophe.

Other women tried to terminate their pregnancy by using a variety of ad hoc methods, many of which persisted well into the 1960s. These were almost always of dubious efficacy, the successful reputation of some most likely achieved by a coincidental miscarriage. Jumping off furniture, moving heavy furniture, running up and down stairs, sitting in a bath of very hot water and drinking large amounts of gin, using Slippery Elm bark, or caustic soda solutions, or metal objects soaked in vinegar to create an abortive solution, and various sharp implements were of course highly dangerous and could result in death.

As late as the mid-twentieth century (but generally before the Abortion Act of 1967), nurses on duty in gynaecological wards referred to Friday evenings as ‘Slippery Elm Night’, as they struggled to deal with the influx of emergency cases caused by these home ‘remedies’. Friday night was a popular choice to try to end a pregnancy as it gave the woman the weekend to recover before work again on Monday. Going to the local abortionist did not reduce the risks of shock, infection or haemorrhage; in fact, it probably compounded them.

The later the term of the pregnancy, the higher the risks. In the nineteenth century, a woman was reliant on knowing her own body and cycle well enough to detect the pregnancy early enough to do something about it. Other women would wait until the ‘quickening’, in other words, when they were sure they had felt the baby moving around in the womb, to decide if they were pregnant – astonishingly poor levels of understanding of their own bodies would not have helped matters.

In 1846, a 40-year-old woman named Mary Ledger who lived with her daughter and two grandchildren in Nottingham, died as a result of trying to procure a late abortion. Mary was separated from her husband but had previously been in a relationship with another man. It is not known what she did, or took, but on becoming ill, she sent for a midwife and delivered a baby of 16 weeks’ gestation. This was on a Monday – Mary’s condition continued to deteriorate until she passed away the following Saturday, and it was accepted at the inquest that the miscarriage was self induced and was the cause of her death.

The Nottingham Guardian, which had reported Mary’s death, also named an abortionist from another case from earlier that year. Her name was Mary Goodall and she was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment for working as an abortionist. There was no proof that she had received money for her services, but had there been, she would have been transported to Australia.

There is a popular belief that Victorian morality would not allow for the promotion of any product which aided miscarriage, but early women’s magazines, such as the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine begun in 1852 by Mrs Isabella Beeton (author of the Book of Household Management, published in 1861) and her publisher husband, contained obliquely worded advertisements for discreetly wrapped products that could cure all ‘women’s ailments’ – which any female reader of the magazine knew, would include unwanted pregnancies. One of the main ingredients was usually a quantity of Pennyroyal, a medicinal herb, which even today carries a warning for pregnant women regarding its handling because of its capacity to induce miscarriage.

Such adverts, which included hints that the product was ‘restorative’ (in other words would restore one’s menstrual cycle to regularity) were undoubtedly not the type of genteel scientific education the Beetons were trying to promote to lower-middle-class Englishwomen at the time, but women of any social class could fall prey to an unwanted pregnancy, either in or outside of marriage. After 1861 abortion – whether induced by drugs or surgery – was illegal following the Offences Against the Person Act. Under this act, if the woman died as a result of the ‘treatment’, it was henceforward treated as manslaughter, which was a capital offence.

Unfortunately, this just pushed the abortionists further under cover and it is unlikely that it deterred many of them from carrying out their trade, such was the demand in an era when few adults understood, or had access to, methods of contraception. Over a century had yet to elapse before any woman in England and Wales could obtain a legal abortion in discreet circumstances, yet safe and clinical conditions.

Many women too frightened to try the above remedies, or who had left it too late, may have thrown themselves on the mercy of their family. Many working-class families closed ranks and the illegitimate baby was quietly absorbed into the family circles. He or she may be ‘given’ to a childless relative, a grandparent, or raised as yet another child of the mother of the single mother – so that the child’s mother was, to the outside world, her or his sibling. If the family had refused to have her in the house while she was pregnant, the mother could apply to go into the workhouse and have her baby there, and in some cases the family may well have taken her back in after the birth.

It was also possible for a working single mother to find a baby minder to take the child while she went to work in a factory or workshop, sometimes known as ‘putting out’ the child, as was famously quoted in Friedrich Engels’ book, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844: ‘Dr Hawkins, Commissioner (Factories Inquiry) for Lancashire, expresses his opinion as follows: “The mother is more than twelve hours away from her child daily; the baby is cared for by a young girl or an old woman, to whom it is given to nurse.”’

Consequently, some of the Lancashire mill workers were able to hang on to their babies and still work, and childminders did not seem to discriminate between the legitimate and illegitimate children they provided day ‘care’ for. As a result, many single women could be mothers and keep their jobs in the factories and mills, but it was still a less than satisfactory solution bearing in mind the high percentages of childminded babies who died in infancy.

Most of these mothers accepted that baby minders would dose the babies with laudanum or the infamous Godfrey’s Cordial (originally a teething soother which usually contained large quantities of an opiate) so that they would stay docile during the day, but this had the disadvantage of making the baby too groggy to feed when their mother came for them and could lead to a failure to thrive, addiction to the opiates, and eventually death (a very similar chain of events to those which resulted from the deliberate mistreatment of babies by baby farmers). If the baby survived the ministrations of the childminder, compulsory education, as finally enforced by the 1880 Education Act, could take over and go a long way to solving the mother’s childcare problems. In many industrial areas children sometimes started school at a younger age than in rural areas, because of the pressure working mothers were under.

But what if the mother of the illegitimate baby had no family support, or the support of her family was conditional on the baby not being around any more? The other stumbling block was work; a working-class or poor woman needed to feed herself, and for many women a baby was a passport to the workhouse because she would lose her position if she tried to work and keep, or even conceal, a baby. Not all women worked in industrial settings, in factories and mills – for many women, especially domestic servants and farm labourers, it was a different story, as their jobs often required them to live in and also pull their weight in very physically arduous work, so a pregnancy was almost certain to mean loss of position. If a woman had not been able to induce a miscarriage and she now had a baby that could eventually lead to her starvation and ruin, she could well be tempted to dispose of the child completely.

Selling the child oneself was one option. In 1870, a woman walked into a public house in Market Street, Sheffield, carrying in her arms a beautiful and bonny baby. A local farmer commented on the baby and said he wished he had a fine baby like that for his own, upon which the woman offered to sell the baby to him. After some more conversation, the baby was sold to the farmer for half a sovereign, about 10s. or the equivalent of £216 today. The farmer, delighted with his purchase, called a cab and went home with the baby. The next day, the mother regretted her decision to sell her baby and went looking for the farmer. She searched high and low for the man and her child, even involving the police, but a week later she was no further in her search.

The reasons why this woman sold her baby are not known, but she did so without knowing anything about the farmer, his character or his circumstances. It was either an act of complete desperation, or complete callousness, but she was not alone in choosing this course of action. Many women must have felt that to sell the child to someone who seemed willing to show it affection, or even just give it a home, was preferable to paying someone to ‘adopt’ the child, on the basis that if someone would part with money for the child, they must think she or he was worth investing in. However, if the mother was so desperate that she did not give any thought at all as to the character of the purchaser, she would not think through the implications of an affluent person wanting to take a child from a poor background, and unwittingly sell the child into a life of drudgery or even slavery and abuse.

Another solution was to abandon the baby or young child, either by exposing it, leaving it anonymously outside a workhouse, hospital or orphanage, or simply placing it in a street at a quiet time. The image in Plate 1 from The Pictorial Times of 1846, epitomises the doom-laden public perception of the desperate single mother. Here, the swaddled baby is left alone under a tree, in a remote place, while the mother – the ‘Fallen Woman’, that great preoccupation of moral campaigners of the period – has collapsed to her knees in the background, with her arms raised to the heavens. This was certainly one way of relinquishing all responsibility for the illegitimate child.

Some women simply could not cope with the stigma of being an unmarried mother and sank so low in spirits that they took their own life. In Billington, Lancashire in September 1854, a young woman named Maria Clegg took her own life and that of her illegitimate baby. The local newspaper, the Chronicle, reported the tragedy as follows:

An inquest on view of the bodies … was held at the Petre’s Arms in Billington … the deceased woman was unmarried, and the birth of the illegitimate child seems to have preyed upon her spirits. She was left in the house on Wednesday evening with the child. Her brother returned about seven o’clock, after milking, and missed the deceased. A search was made, and the bodies were found in a large water butt at the back of the house. Life was quite extinct. The infant was locked in the arms of its mother. There is no doubt that it was her own act. She had been low in spirits for some time. A verdict of ‘Temporary Insanity’ was returned.

It is unlikely that anyone bothered to ask poor Maria how she was feeling, and of course the treatment of mental health issues such as postnatal depression were then little understood. Indeed, at this time, psychiatry was an unheard-of profession whose development was still in the future. However, whatever the cause of the mental anguish which led her to take her own and her baby’s life, it is highly probable that the isolation and stigma of being a lone mother at this time would have been a contributing factor in her decision.

For single mothers who had the confidence to do so (or who had family willing to help them), a private claim for maintenance could be made. This might take the form of a private arrangement, drawn up by a local solicitor. One such arrangement took place in June 1907 in North Wales, between John Francis Robinson and Mabel Flora Owens. It was drawn up and overseen by a firm of solicitors in Conwy town and followed a standard format: after stating that the unnamed illegitimate baby that had recently been born was the child of the two parties concerned, in particular stating that John Robinson was the father, it goes on to say that the father was to pay 3s 6d (approximately £18 today) per week for the child’s maintenance until she or he reached the age of fourteen; he was also instructed to pay five guineas (£5 5s – the equivalent of about £550 today) towards the costs of the birth and the legal costs of drawing up the agreement.

Miss Owens was to retain custody of the child and she agreed to provide the child with ‘sufficient food, clothing, lodging and medical attendance’; she must also refrain from any further claims or legal proceedings against the father beyond the current agreement, and ‘shall not in any way molest or disturb the said J.F. Robinson nor in any way communicate to other persons nor make it public the fact that the said child is a child of the said J.F. Robinson’.

This type of private agreement has two advantages: firstly it secures the future of the illegitimate child and allows her or him to stay with the mother, with a very modest income; secondly, it keeps the identity of the father a secret, and ensures that the matter will not be taken through any more public legal proceedings. There must have been many hundreds of these private arrangements made, not all, of course, through a solicitor as this one was; some would not even have had any paperwork to reinforce them. At least, if they were adhered to, the illegitimate children concerned may well have been saved from either being passed around the family as a helpless little nomad, and it certainly kept them from ending up in the workhouse or orphanage.

The option of applying for an affiliation order against the father still remained, although the 1868 Poor Law Amendment Act took a retrograde step and restored the powers of the Poor Law Guardians to institute proceedings against a putative father with a view to obtaining maintenance for the illegitimate child. However, the law still required the mother to give corroborating evidence of paternity in person, which left the burden of proof still with her.

Straightforward infanticide, other than exposure of the baby, was often disguised as an accident; mothers would claim that they had the baby in bed with them, cuddled up, and awoke in the morning to find they had lain on the baby in the night and it had suffocated – an event known as ‘overlaying’. In 1861 alone, over 1,100 inquests were held just in London for young children who had died from unexplained or violent causes, and it was claimed that this figure was increasing year by year. The rise was attributed to two factors – the inability of the mother to maintain her child, and the shame of having illegitimate offspring. Sometimes the finger of blame was pointed at the law, because at this time a single mother could only obtain 2s 6d per week from the father of the child, which was not nearly enough to maintain the child and was not a contribution to the costs of the lying-in or antenatal care. Much debate over ‘hidden’ homicides raged in the mid-nineteenth century, with acrimonious exchanges and discussion between the nation’s doctors and the coroners’ service.

Another method was to hand over the baby to an adoptive or foster parent, or nurse, who would hopefully treat the child as lovingly as their own for as long as necessary, even for life. Such arrangements were without legal basis at this time, and are rarely documented, but were often hoped for. Sometimes a desperate family or individual would advertise for new parents for the child, as in this case from the Western Gazette of 15 February 1901:

Adoption. Would anyone, in really good circumstances, ADOPT, without any reward whatever, a well-born ORPHAN BABY BOY? A most sad case. – Write Box 170, Gazette Office, Yeovil.

It would be impossible now to ascertain whether this baby was truly an orphan or a straightforward case of an illegitimate child whose mother wanted it to be discreetly passed on to a new family, but what is really significant is the desire to have the baby adopted ‘without any reward whatever’. This is a clear attempt to distinguish these circumstances from advertisements which usually conformed to the wording of the three examples below:

Child wanted, to Adopt, with premium. –

G.H., Box 63, Telegraph Office, Sheffield.

(From the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 9 June 1903)

CARE of CHILD or would ADOPT;

lady could have apartments during accouchement. –

A., care of 30 Pretoria-avenue, High-street, Walthamstow.

(From the Chelmsford Chronicle, 5 April 1889)

Wanted a child to adopt; small premium required;

address Mrs Bolton, Post-office, Leeds.

(From Edinburgh Evening News, 24 February 1880)

Baby Farming

Advertisements such as the three above were about as far from a happy adoption solution as it is possible to get, but to a desperate single or expectant mother they were a lifeline, as they were all placed in provincial newspapers by individuals who became widely known as baby farmers.

To ‘farm out’ a baby or child meant that the birth parent/s or family were effectively sub-contracting out the role of parent to another, in this case, a person who for a sum of money, either all paid up front or in instalments over weeks or occasionally monthly, would then take care of the child for the mother ostensibly on a indefinite basis or until such time as the mother was in a position to reclaim the child. Sometimes, the understanding was that the baby farmer would act as a broker, and foster the child until she or he could arrange a permanent adoption for it.

Single women without family support, who wanted to maintain contact with their baby but at the same time needed to work, perhaps in positions such as domestic service where it was impossible to keep a child, would make contact with the advertiser and arrange to hand over the child to their safe keeping. Other women went through this procedure with the financial and practical support of relatives. The handover often took place in a public place, such as a railway station, with a sum of money in full payment or as deposit being made at the same time. The baby farmer would give full assurances to the mother that the baby would be looked after like her own and that regular letters would be sent telling of baby’s progress. In most cases, there would be little or no further contact between birth mother and child, although the mother would continue to send money for the upkeep of the baby.

What happened after this parting could vary. Sometimes, the baby never made it to the baby farmer’s address; it was abandoned on the way home. If it was taken home, it would more than likely be stripped of its own clothes which would be pawned or sold, placed in a rudimentary bed such as an old drawer or wooden fruit box, and placed in a room with several other ‘farmed’ babies. Her/his routine would consist of being fed occasionally with a poor mix of artificial food such as cow’s milk padded out with completely inappropriate substances such as chalk – and almost invariably laced with an opiate-based substance to keep the child quiet.

The most widely used of these potions was the notorious Godfrey’s Cordial, a typical receipt for which is as follows:

Liquid Opium	1 drachm
Carraway oil	4 drops
Spirits of Juniper	4 drops
Tincture of Ginger	2 drachms
Essence of Aniseed	2 drachms
Liquid burnt sugar	2 drachms
Liquid Liquorice extract	4 drachms
Simple syrup	4 drachms to 10 ounces

[One drachm is roughly the equivalent to one-eighth of a fluid ounce.]

An established opiate-based product (it is known to have been on the market as far back as the eighteenth century), Godfrey’s Cordial was widely used in very small amounts for the legitimate purpose of calming babies who were teething, or fractious because of illness and so on, but baby farmers used it round the clock to keep babies quiet and to make sure that neighbours had no inkling of the activities going on in the baby farmer’s house. It also led to the child becoming addicted to this ‘stupefactive’ as they were known, lethargic, failing to thrive and unable to feed even if offered real nourishment.

Hygiene was usually non-existent, and there were rarely regular attempts to clean the baby or change its napkin (if it had one at all). Illness and death almost inevitably followed, but naturally this was not reported to the birth mother, who would continue to pay for a child who no longer lived, sometimes on the basis of continued receipt of fictitious enthusiastic letters from the baby farmer telling of baby’s growth and development. The rudimentary care given to these abused children would deteriorate still further if the baby farmer herself became as addicted to the potion as the babies were – as was the case with Amelia Dyer, the most notorious and prolific of the known baby farmers.

A variation to the services offered by baby farmers is mentioned in the advertisement placed by the baby farmer in Walthamstow – accommodation and midwifery services (‘accouchement’) for the expectant mother, especially useful for those whose families had cast them out of the family home or for those who had lost their employment. This meant that one could pay for a room at the baby farmer’s establishment and the baby farmer would either attend the birth herself, or provide a ‘midwife’. Once the baby was born, she/he would be quickly taken into the baby farming part of the enterprise, and the mother could leave to begin her life anew.

An inquest reported in the Liverpool Mercury in September 1879 is fairly typical of the provincial baby farming activities which came to light as a result of prosecutions. One John Barnes and his wife were arrested for having been found with three emaciated and filthy babies aged 5, 9 and 15 months in their home in Church Road, Higher Tranmere on the Wirral. There was no food in the house beyond a loaf of bread and no bed clothes for the children. After the police had entered the house, the medical officer of Birkenhead Workhouse was summoned, and he decreed that the children should be removed to the workhouse for their own safety and to be treated.

At least two of these infants died as a result of the neglect and abuse they had been subjected to, and on investigating further, the police found more than 72 documents in the Tranmere house relating to these babies and to several others who had been in the care of the Barnes, including several insurance policies for the children with the Prudential and Victoria Societies. There were numerous letters regarding the baby farming activities, one being an agreement drawn up by Mrs Barnes for the sum of £30 to be handed over by the birth mother for the care of her baby.

There is no hint of sensationalism in the reporter’s tone as he recounted what the coroner had to say about the case:

[the authorities] … did not know how the prisoners were paid or renumerated for the maintenance of the children. If they were renumerated by receiving a weekly allowance sufficient to maintain the children and also to compensate them for their trouble, there would be some motive for keeping the children in a healthy and proper manner. It might, however be pointed out that the prisoners received a lump sum, and in that case there was, as a matter of course, a motive to get rid of the children as quickly as possible.

Clearly, the Barnes were using both lump sums and instalment payments as part of their baby farming business. This is a relatively unusual case in that husband and wife were seen as equally culpable, and they were sentenced to life imprisonment for their ‘cruelties and crimes of the most revolting character’, reported the Lloyds Weekly Newspaper of 2 November 1879. The majority of convicted baby farmers were female, although there is evidence that other members of the family often were fully aware of what went on and even helped out and benefited from the financial gain – the husband and daughter of Amelia Dyer being two individuals who witnessed and profited from it. Indeed, Dyer’s daughter went on to become a baby farmer of sorts herself, hardly surprising that after having her own childhood warped by the child abuse she had witnessed (but did not suffer from herself), she would also become an abuser.

While cases such as the Barnes in Tranmere usually proved inconclusive enough to result in a murder charge – at this time it was not easy to prove exactly how and why a baby had failed to thrive and died – numerous baby farmers met the death penalty and were hanged: Amelia Dyer in 1896; Margaret Waters in 1870; Ada Chard Williams in 1900; and Leslie James in 1907 (the only woman in Wales to suffer the death penalty in the twentieth century) are a few examples.

Others, such as Charlotte Winsor of Torquay, received sentences of life imprisonment, and Elizabeth Dearden of Morecambe received a sentence of six months’ imprisonment in May 1901 for baby farming and for, as the newspapers put it, ‘subletting’ two of the babies to a woman in Kendal. Interestingly, the Magistrates in Lancaster also censured one of Dearden’s clients, a mother of twins from Reading, for handing over £65 to have her infant twins farmed out to Dearden – a sign that there was disapproval not only of the baby farmers, but of their clients too, for encouraging this distasteful practice.

Public Outcry

More and more baby farming court cases were appearing in the newspapers and the reaction of the public was typically one of outrage and disgust, and one can imagine appalled middle Englanders reading reports of the maltreated babies, their ‘immoral’ mothers and the criminals who took the children with a sense that certainly for the adults, the various punishments were no more than they deserved; while the national opinion was more like a collective guilt that one of the world’s great nations could allow this to occur in its midst.

Newspapers did their bit in driving the campaign for official action on this matter. The Hull Packet and East Riding Times reported on a baby farming case in London with a commendably sombre tone – the case was that of a two-week-old baby boy handed to a Mrs Cooper, who bears all the credentials for a baby farmer, by his affluent single mother. She told the baby farmer that she and the father of the baby wished him to be adopted out to a permanent and loving family as they were to be married and emigrate to Australia, and she handed over a bundle of extremely good quality clothes (including an outdoor outfit of ‘a scarlet dress and Scotch cap, with a white feather’) and £10 for the ‘adoption fee’. Of course, the baby failed to thrive and died.

There is nothing exceptional about this story as far as baby farming goes, but the comment from the reporter is interesting:

The system of getting rid of the embarrassment of unwanted children by ‘adoption’ appears to be well organised and to be in process of development into an extensive branch of trade. It is said by medical men who have opportunities of becoming acquainted with such matters that children are ‘adopted’ out by scores. When the premium is paid to the adopting parents the child is registered in their name (at least, this is the general practice), and then, if the child dies either from disease … or from accident, such as overlaying &c, resulting in suffocation … disagreeable … suspicions are obviated. There is, of course, as everybody knows, a fine of £50 provided for the offence of making false representations to the registrar. But as all the parties to the transaction are deeply interested in keeping it a close secret, it need hardly be said that the penalty is never enforced in such cases.

The article goes on to call for the registration of all those who take in children to nurse (in a sense, fostering) or adopt, and also calls for the closer regulation of the registration of infants.

Also in the 1860s, Dr Ernest Hart undertook an impassioned campaign against baby farming with a series of articles in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) and even after the Infant Life Protection Act of 1872, he was still making his point, here in the BMJ of 14 December 1878:

One would have thought that, since the exposure of the practice of baby farmers a few years ago, the knowledge then gained would have been sufficient to have influenced a coroner to hold an inquest in a case such as this … a medical practitioner was asked to visit a house … to see if a child were dead. He … found the child dead … it was quite well previously, and had not had any medical attendance. It was a nurse child aged twelve months … the woman having charge of it a cripple, and had one or two other such children under her care. There was … enough primae facie evidence that the woman wished to get rid of her profitless encumbrance.

In this case, Dr Hart reports further that the doctor concerned contacted the coroner as he felt the case worthy of investigation, but the coroner replied that there was ‘no reason to suppose that the death of the child arose from anything but natural causes’ and later added that he thought the child had had ‘bronchitis and it had gone to its head’ – hardly the basis for a scientific conclusion. Dr Hart’s fury was directed partly at the coroners who refused, in his view, to take the deaths of such children seriously, thereby encouraging the boldness of the baby farmers in finishing off their charges, and also at local authorities who failed to use the 1872 Act to apply the new registration of baby minders and paid foster parents, to exclude those who could not or would not carry out suitable childcare in appropriate surroundings or who did not have good characters.

One final case explicitly ties the practice of baby farming in with the concept of adoption, and indeed with numerous other issues around childbirth, illegitimacy and cruelty to children and infants. In London at the beginning of 1893, an inquiry into the death of nine-week-old Albert Victor Weston was held. Albert was passed to one Ellen Barnard as a ‘nurse-child’ but was in fact destined to become a ‘farmed’ baby. For a payment of £2, Albert was handed over at Victoria Station in London by a Mrs Weston and taken back to the Barnard household where, like other farmed babies there, he was fed on milk, oatmeal and barley water. He failed to thrive and died, and a post-morten revealed that he was grossly underweight and had effectively died of starvation.

Mrs Weston’s real name was Sarah Baker, wife of a railway porter. She had numerous other aliases, as did the ladies who went to stay with her for the accouchement or lying-in – Baker stated that the ladies also gave what name they liked. Once the babies were born, advertisements were placed in newspapers for them to be adopted – these adverts were paid for by the mothers. Presumably, those who were not adopted stayed at the baby farm in another part of the house.

The most severe verdict was given against Ellen Barnard, who was convicted of manslaughter, although the jury considered that Baker was more morally at fault and requested that the coroner should severely censure her.

This is a fascinating example of a case involving two baby farmers, and it would seem that the public had a clear perception of what adverts such as these implied (the eventual death of the child) and laid the blame at the feet of the people who chose to exploit this service. Neither woman had any thought for the welfare of the baby.

As the appearance of legislation protecting children, such as the Infant Life Protection Acts of 1872 and 1897, and the Children Act of 1908, made inroads into the reduction of the baby farming industry, and legitimate charity-based accommodation for unwanted children became more readily available, this unpleasant practice faded into the background. The 1872 Act was, first and foremost, concerned to protect the lives of children fostered out or placed in baby farms.

As a result of the Act, baby farmers had to be registered, and licensed with the local authority, deaths of infants had to be reported within 24 hours and a doctor’s certificate obtained, otherwise an inquest would follow automatically – this would also be a useful safeguard against infanticide and overlaying. The law applied to all those receiving for reward, two or more children under the age of one year, for more than 24 hours. The person had to be of good character, have a decent home, and be able to maintain the child or children. Unfortunately, the act did not cover farmed-out single children, for which it was criticised.

However, baby farming did have opportunities to make a comeback in a minor way as a result of the carpe diem attitude of the two World Wars, which led to an upsurge in the birth of unwanted babies. One such baby was the result of an affair that a young woman had while working as a typist in a munitions works during the First World War. Named Kathleen, the baby was placed with Walter and Lydia Elius in Carmarthenshire, where, true to form, she eventually disappeared from sight. Various excuses were given including that her mother had claimed her, that she had died and been thrown into the river, and that she had died and been buried in sand.

It is unlikely that the truth about little Kathleen will ever be known, although the couple were eventually sentenced to five years’ imprisonment each for the manslaughter of another baby who was found wrapped up and weighted in the River Gwendraeth. Clearly, although baby farming had been undermined by improvements or changes in the care of unwanted children over the previous 50 years, when there was dire need, it could still make a profitable income for the unscrupulous, and much more needed to be done to co-ordinate and make available a better system of child protection. One such method, claimed campaigners at the time, was to legalise adoption.

Baby farming was a world shrouded in secrecy – it is extremely difficult to find any records of the baby farming ‘industry’ other than those in the newspapers, court cases and other official records. After all, what birth mother would offer her own story for the public to read, and risk the condemnation of the Victorian moral majority – especially if, as with some of the clients of Amelia Dyer, she had put her antipathy towards her baby in writing in a letter to the baby farmer, and had deliberately put the baby into this care with reasonable knowledge that it would not survive? There can be little doubt that many baby farmers did not need to advertise, but found plenty of ready clients simply by word of mouth, such was the need to find a way to dispose of an unwanted baby.

Historians must be careful not to be all-encompassing in their condemnation of the practice of baby farming. Even though by the end of the nineteenth century, baby farming had firmly linked the word ‘adoption’ with the criminal treatment of children, the London authorities tried to appropriate it to good use by farming out babies and small children to families in outer London in an attempt to get the children out of the workhouse environment, so that they could experience family life as far as was possible. There must have been some childminders and informal foster parents who loved their charges dearly and looked after them well, but they are not the ones who found themselves in the news.

In addition, it would be wrong to assume that all the babies passed to baby farmers were from poor families; indeed if the family could raise and hand over lump sums of at least £10 or more (there are examples of up to £50 changing hands for one baby), they were more likely to be aspirant working class or middle class. While there can be no excuse for the appalling and upsetting levels of child abuse which occurred in baby farming, the bleak financial outlook for poor working-class women, most of whom only had their domestic and mothering skills to sell, must have encouraged them to use these skills to take advantage of other women’s vulnerability as the only way they could earn large amounts of cash relatively easily outside of prostitution.

Of course, some of the baby farmers were habitual law breakers – Leslie James, the Cardiff baby farmer (real name Rhoda Willis) had been a convicted petty thief, sex worker, an alcoholic and neglectful of her own children to the point where they were taken from her by her in-laws. Amelia Dyer showed all the signs of being addicted to opiate-based medicines and alcohol. Profoundly distasteful though these women were, as a group they suffered harsher penalties than some other criminal groups, such as biological mothers who killed their children, and this may have been because they had diverted so strongly from the contemporary ideal of the angel in the house, the devoted mother and assiduous homemaker. They were, in that sense, beyond the control of the society they inhabited.

One of the key positive outcomes of the public outcry regarding baby farming, was that it became crystal clear that some form of governing body or organisation was needed to control or at least oversee the process of handing over a child from one family to another; in that sense it was a deeply saddening, but necessary prompt in the direction of formalised adoption.

For children and babies who were passed on to the new ‘adoptive’ parents with a large sum of money, but who did not remain with one person, becoming part of a ‘trade’ in babies was one unpleasant outcome. A baby acquired with a lump sum of £50, might be sold on for £25 with the other half being kept; adoptive ‘parent’ number two might then sell the baby for £12 and keep the rest, and so on down the line until the baby had no financial worth left. Its fate at that point, as a worthless commodity, was bleak.

Clearly then, the trade in babies touched all strata of society, as the following case of fraud illustrates. In 1878, the extraordinary case of Lady Gooch caused much comment in the press and reads like a classic Victorian melodrama. Annie Louise was the wife of Sir Francis Gooch and desperately wanted a child of her own, if only to secure her husband’s fortune, which, if the couple remained childless, would revert to another relative of her husband’s.

Apparently unable to conceive herself, Lady Gooch proceeded to tell her husband’s tenants and anyone else who would listen, that she was indeed with child and then approached the family surgeon and asked him to help her find a baby to pass off as her own. She told Mr Worthington, the surgeon, that she had believed herself to be pregnant but then found she was not and was afraid to tell her husband. It would seem she was padding her body to make herself look pregnant, and suggested to the doctor that he attend her at her home and pretend to deliver a baby. In the meantime Lady Gooch would make arrangements in London to obtain a baby boy to become her unwitting husband’s son and heir.

The surgeon naturally refused and tried to talk her out of the scheme, and asked why she could not openly adopt a child? The answer was that only the natural child of the couple would secure the property and titles, which shows how important an affluent family’s pedigree was to them. Mr Worthington sent his ‘patient’ away with the threat that if she tried to embroil him any further, he would tell her husband of her plans.

Meanwhile, during the ‘pregnancy’ Lady Gooch visited the ‘Refuge for Deserted Mothers and Their Infants’ in Great Coram Street, London, ironically a street named after the founder of the famous and highly reputable Foundling Hospital, Thomas Coram. It was administered by a matron, Mrs Palmer, and was an establishment known to have babies available for adoption. Lady Gooch was to have a baby brought from Peckham to the home specifically to be adopted, but no record of the handover was made in the home’s books. The matron later stated under oath she did not know Lady Gooch’s name or marital status, adding that it was not her business to know, but on 28 October, Lady Gooch walked out of the Home with a two-week-old baby boy as her own child. Eventually, her plot was uncovered and her story became national news.

What was extraordinary about the story of Lady Gooch and the refuge was that she was able to obtain a baby so easily and anonymously, and for what were seen as fraudulent purposes. The idea of a home where babies were kept and then passed on to new families as adopted children was no surprise at all to the public. Indeed, this particular home was highly respectable, being run by a council of ladies of rank including the Dowager Lady Monteagle, the Hon. Mrs V. Johnson, and Mrs Bonham Carter. It was primarily a refuge for generally reputable young women who had ‘fallen’ for the first time and had an illegitimate baby. The girls went away for their confinement and returned to the home with their baby, some of whom would be adopted out and others kept at the home. In fact, in 1877 the home arranged for 28 of the babies to be adopted.

Following the trial, a debate arose in the letters page of journals and newspapers as to the character of the home, some calling it no more than a ‘baby shop’, others likening it to a baby farm, and yet another correspondent describing it as ‘an Exchange and Mart for babies’. A Mr Chalmers sprang to the defence of the institution in a letter quoted in the Englishwoman’s Review of 14 December, describing how it had been set up by Mrs Main who was a former superintendent of a Bible Mission and that only fallen women ‘of a generally respectable character’ were helped – they were ‘in great privation and distress, out of situation, without employment … unable to earn a living or support their offspring, and in consequence, under strong temptation to infanticide or to a life of profligacy’.

The idea of the home was to provide a safe haven for the babies so that the mothers could return to ‘honest industry, support themselves and their children, and in some measure at least, to regain the position and character they had lost.’ He went on to say that it was the ‘kindest, wisest and most useful’ institution of its kind in London and that part of its income came from the hard-earned wages of the mothers (and by comparison, the fathers only contributed about 10 per cent of the amount that the mothers did).

One note of negativity is raised by the supporter, however, which to the modern reader may strike an uneasy chord. Mr Chalmers also claimed that the home had never had to worry about what to do with the babies once they outgrew the home, as ‘For first, infants born in such unhappy circumstances are difficult to rear. The anxiety and privations undergone by the mothers prior to the birth too often entail on their offspring a sickly existence; and notwithstanding the tenderest care, and the best medical advice, many are removed by death.’ This is a strange point of view for any charitable supporter to take – to accept the infant mortality rate without any comment as to what could be done about it. He goes on to say that of the children who survived, many were returned to their mothers once she had regained some stability in her life. Of the others, many seemed to have been adopted – ‘in the last few years upwards of 200 children have been disposed of in this way’.

After expressing surprise that illegitimate children could be popular with adoptive parents, Mr Chalmers put forward the theory that these babies were popular specifically because they had no father in their lives, which meant that the adoptive parents could really believe the child was their very own without fear of a father appearing years hence to claim it. He goes on to extol the benefits of adoption, stating: ‘It would be difficult to estimate the good which has thus been secured for these little unfortunates that has been introduced into homes by the filling up of what had been felt to be a painful blank.’ Mrs Main, we are told, took great pains to match baby with adoptive parents and that the handing over of the baby was done with ‘ceremony and deliberation.’ As regards the business of Lady Gooch, Chalmers admits that Mrs Main had been duped, but makes it clear that she would be putting safeguards in place to prevent such a thing happening again.

This story has many of the features of the story of adoption as a whole. Secrecy, illegitimacy, the desire for an heir, a strange indifference to infant mortality, a genuine worthiness on the part of those trying to help, and a determination to obtain redemption for these ‘first-fallen’ women, are mirrored in many other institutions and campaigns, but most interesting is the absolute acceptance of adoption as a method of creating a new family, and solving a social ‘problem’ at the same time. Elements of the Victorian passion for ‘self help’ are here too, with the mothers being encouraged to keep their babies, contribute towards their upkeep, and hopefully take on the babies full-time at some point – echoes also of the later determination of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (NCUMC) to support the mother and child, with adoption only as a last resort.

However, not all would-be parents had the money to obtain a baby by offering a large payment. In 1875, a young woman who went by the name of Annie Race was renting rooms in Sandbach, Cheshire, from Mr Roberts, a local grocer. Mr Roberts had several children, including 15-month-old twins. Under pretence of taking one of the children to have a studio photograph taken, Annie went off with the child – and did not come back. She headed for Astbury, then Congleton, and Macclesfield, where she stopped for a rest; she then made her way to Adlington (Cheshire) railway station and bought a ticket for Liverpool, at which point the trail seems to have gone cold. Annie may have stolen the child to order, or so she could sell her or him on, or may just have wanted the child for herself – whatever the reason, child theft (or abduction as it would more likely be called today) was not as rare as it was later to become.

It is tempting to think that this next story is about a woman who desperately wanted a child to love as her own and that had her subterfuge not been found out, the baby would have had a happy life. In 1883, a woman going by the name of May Morley or sometimes Cross (neither being her real surname), persuaded a young woman named Eliza Geary to sell her seven-month-old illegitimate baby, George. Morley told Eliza she was acting on behalf of a well-off lady who had one child but could have no more, and who wanted a son to lavish her estate upon. On behalf of the rich lady (who was never identified or seen), Morley promised Eliza £25 (approximately £9,500 today) with which to pay her rent or buy herself a little business, and regular contact to let her know how George was faring.

Despite the baby’s grandmother trying to prevent the sale, Eliza went ahead and handed over her baby to Morley at Kings Cross station, walking away in tears with £5 in her pocket and the promise of letters, visits to see George and more money later on. She had also had to sign a declaration which said, ‘I, May Morley, receive this child from Eliza Geary to deliver up faithfully to the said lady, and that she shall in future hear from me.’ Of course, she never did receive more news of her baby, or any more money, and when her letter asking for news was returned marked ‘no known address’, she went to the authorities and asked for help.

Eventually, Morley was tracked down to Maidenhead in Berkshire, and Detective Sergeant Summers travelled down there to investigate. He found the baby safe, well and thriving – Morley pointed to him and said, ‘There’s the baby. You can see we have taken great care of it. The agreement was for the mother to see it every two months, which time is not up yet. I have seen my solicitor in the matter, and the mother should have received a letter from him this morning.’ Possibly, the child was going to be sold on to a better-off person, or Morley was genuine in her affection for the child – sadly the outcome is not known, but however it is viewed, it is a highly unsatisfactory way to create an artificial family for oneself.

Some children were fortunate enough in a material sense to be adopted by women who had money and status, but who just happened also to be unmarried. A number of female intellectuals did this, including, in 1888, Constance Maynard, although her adoption experience proved to be complex. For a woman of impeccable middle-class status, successful, affluent and with much to lose, to take on a child of unknown background – essentially a filius populi – was a big statement to make to her status-conscious peers. Constance was the head of Westfield College in London and she chose to adopt a six-year-old girl, Effie.

At the time Constance was 39 years old and of strong Christian faith, and the adoption was purely altruistic and what was more, it crossed class boundaries. In some ways, therefore, it was a bold move by Constance, but sadly it was not a success. On the surface, it appeared that Constance felt she had failed to have an impact on Effie by strengthening her moral and spiritual fibre, and castigated herself for her sometimes ambivalent feelings towards Effie, but apart from blaming herself, she also blamed Effie’s parentage (she was part Italian), her egotism, and various other characteristics for the ‘failure’ of the adoption.

Constance’s religious zeal, her depression, and a tendency to treat Effie as her social inferior (for example, by sending her away one summer holiday to work as a servant and giving her second-hand clothes as presents), cannot have helped. For her part, Effie felt undervalued, confused, and as if she did not belong anywhere at all, and was seemingly given little choice as to what she might do with her life. Constance’s own social adoptive experiment ended when Effie died of tuberculosis in a workhouse infirmary in 1915. Effie’s death as a pauper patient is a sad testament to the low point Constance’s feelings for her daughter had sunk to, although Constance was not alone during the period in her failure to appreciate the special emotional needs an adoptive child may have had.

Adoption and Popular Culture

Adoption as a solution to what was seen as a perplexing social problem was well-known enough to feature regularly in different forms of popular culture. Numerous nineteenth-century authors wrote about adoption, and some even adopted a child themselves – Dinah Craik, (died 1887) a prolific and very popular author, wrote a novel in 1859 entitled A Life For a Life, which centred around a woman who had a child out of wedlock.

Late in life Craik wrote a little-known short piece of fiction called King Arthur (1886) which addresses issues such as child abuse, and also makes the case for legal adoption which at that point in England and Wales, was still 30 years away. She even adopted a baby girl who had been abandoned at the age of nine months on the roadside, and who had been taken to the workhouse to face an uncertain future. Other authors who wrote about adoption included George Eliot (Silas Marner), Charles Dickens (Bleak House; Great Expectations), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Aurora Leigh), Charlotte Yonge (Hope and Fears), and Emily Bronte (Wuthering Heights).

Wilkie Collins did not write about adoption, but he did have a reputation for writing in a way that supported the causes of women, and his works included the play The New Magdalene, in which the heroine is a reformed fallen woman, and the novel Fallen Leaves, in which a man marries a reformed fallen woman and has to suffer the social consequences of his devotion to her. Many other playwrights included characters who were fallen women, but not many of them included a fallen woman with a child.

Adoption was also a popular story to be told in serial form or as a short story in magazines, including those with a religious message. One such story, Her Children by Adoption, by Sarson C.J. Ingham and published in Quiver Magazine in January 1885, tells the tale of a newly ‘released’ (that is, she has just left her employment) governess who has been left a house and money in trust, which allows her to live on her own means and in comfort. However, feeling something was lacking in her life, she was inspired by a talk given to her ladies group by the ‘father’ of a children’s home to consider adopting a child.

First, she lays down conditions. ‘If I had not a gentle, refined character to deal with, the plan might not work happily … I want only good material to work upon.’ The proprietor of the children’s home reassures her, saying ‘I will not knowingly burden you with any likely candidate for a hospital or a lunatic-asylum’, and happily was able to provide two young sisters of well-born but feckless family. Naturally, the story has a happy ending, with the children growing into loving, intelligent and healthy young women, and overall the story is a splendid advertisement for the idea of adoption, especially to the devout readership of the magazine who may wish to ‘save’ a child.

Plays and songs also used the notion of adoption for entertainment – in the journal The Ladies Monthly Museum in 1821, the play The Miller’s Maid is reviewed, and in the review it describes ‘scenes laid in humble life’ and declares, ‘no high born personages are introduced or even hinted at’. It included two characters who were ‘children of adoption’, one being in the care of a miller, and the other being a foundling in the care of a soldier. The review emphasises the fact that the play concentrates solely on the ‘feelings and sensibilities of the poor’, and it is interesting that the ‘melodrama’ links adoption and poverty in this way – presumably because it is something that the audience can readily recognise.

Institutions

The idea of an institution for displaced children – foundlings, illegitimate, orphans, or simply unwanted – was not new by the nineteenth century. Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital had been established in 1741, as a result of the horror Coram felt on observing the many abandoned babies in the streets of London. Taking predominantly infants up to the age of 12 months, the Hospital tried hard to look after the children it took in, and some years later expanded its remit to include children from other areas, although this led to an unfortunate trade in child transportation with unscrupulous vagrants taking money to transport infants to the Hospital with very little care given along the way.

In 1869, the Children’s Home was founded, which always undertook adoptions where it was safe to do so. The founder, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, was another passionate redeemer of children who had been terribly affected by the plight of London’s street children. He aimed to create a family style home for his young charges which was as different to the workhouse as it was possible to achieve – the ambience was to be loving but disciplined, with a master or matron for each home-style ‘family’ unit. From the late 1870s young women – some of them orphans who had been originally taken in by the home – enrolled on groundbreaking childcare courses run by the Home and became ‘Sisters of the Children’, going on to work in the homes full-time. Branches of the society spread quickly and in 1908 the name was changed to the National Children’s Home and Orphanage.

By the end of the nineteenth century there was a bewildering array of institutions, especially in the cities, that could take in a child or a woman in distress. In the Gore’s Directory of Liverpool and Birkenhead for 1900, there is an impressive total of 27 institutions listed to cater for ‘displaced children’ and their mothers, which includes: Waifs and Strays; Canon Lister’s Boys Homes; Barnardos; Home for Waifs and Strays; Home for Destitute Children; Liverpool Wesleyan Mission Girls Home; Ellen Cliff Home for Fallen Women; The Home (for fallen women); the NSPCC.

This long list also includes the Medina Home for Children, the only one in the directory which specifically stated it would take children born out of wedlock: ‘This institution receives illegitimate, destitute and orphan children, and assists young girls who have made the first slip from virtue to obtain situations and thus have an opportunity to retrieve their character and once more to return to the path of virtue and respectability.’ Of course, it was not the only institution to take in illegitimate children and their ‘fallen’ mothers, but it was the only one to proclaim it loud and clear. Otherwise, it was a fairly conservative organisation in that it educated and trained ‘the boys as artisans and the girls as domestic servants’.

These institutions often contained several hundred children and while they may have looked like magnificent pieces of public architecture and a credit to the city fathers who encouraged them, they cannot have been even remotely like a home from home to the children living in them. Yet they were symbolic of the view that these children were a ‘problem’ group who should be dealt with collectively, as if dealing with them on a wholesale scale would eliminate the problem more swiftly.

A perfect example of such an orphanage is the Mount Pleasant District Orphan Asylum in Liverpool. Listed in the 1901 Census the Master of the Asylum (‘asylum’ was a word used for numerous kinds of institution and not just those housing lunatics) was one George Williams from Surrey. His wife was the matron, and there were nine ‘officers’ who included school masters, sub-matrons, and a sewing mistress, and sixteen live-in female servants, who included a nurse, cook, seamstress and laundress.

This live-in team, no doubt supported by day cleaners and other staff who did not live in, supported 242 boys and girls aged from two months to sixteen years, although the majority of the children (205) were aged between nine and sixteen years. Out of all these children, the majority were born in Liverpool, with only seventeen recorded as being born elsewhere, although in institutions of this kind care was not always taken to be accurate in the recording of such data. On the surface, the ratio of staff to children was good – one member of staff to eight children – but this includes all staff including the servants, so individual attention must have been rare for the children.

It is also not easy to ascertain how many of these children would have had the potential to be adopted out, but if the later trend during adoptions in the twentieth century is any indicator, very few of the children older than about six years could have looked forward to having a new family. This would mean that unless someone wanted an older child for a specific reason – and taking an older child to use for work or to tend members of the family was deeply frowned upon – these children would be long-term residents of the asylum. The best they could hope for would be to concentrate on their training as domestic servants or tradesmen, so that they could make their own way in the world and not end up, as adults, in the workhouse.

Another institution which took in ‘fallen women’ and their babies was the House of Providence Home for Desolate Women, also in Liverpool. Opened in 1891 by Monsignor James Nugent, a much loved social campaigner, especially for children, the home was a haven for fallen women who had just had their first – and hopefully only – illegitimate baby. The Monsignor was another activist who thought ‘first timers’ had a better chance of being redeemed than habitual offenders. In December 1900, in an impassioned but rather florid letter to the Liverpool Mercury, Monsignor Nugent said:

Amid the joyous surroundings of the great festival [Christmas] there comes the wail of many heart- broken and destitute fellow creatures … none more utterly desolate than the poor unfortunate females, who, through circumstances of misplaced confidence or otherwise, has become a mother, and finds herself basely deceived and cruelly deserted, with a helpless infant to provide for. So many … seek to end their trouble by resorting to child murder and suicide. Spurned by their partners in guilt, and ostracised by their own kith and kin … Help me to save them from despair and ruin! They can be rescued if we but stretch forth a helping hand.

Monsignor Nugent goes on to describe his home:

The House of Providence, at West Dingle, Liverpool, affords a safe refuge for these neglected and forlorn ones, and at present over 40 unwedded mothers, with their helpless babes, find that shelter and protection … denied them by outraged friends and society … poor ruined girls, left alone in the World, penniless, without home or friends, out on the streets, starving in the midst of plenty.

Finally, this tireless campaigner makes his appeal for donations:

Help me to rescue them from the perils to which they are exposed … the cry of these forsaken and deserted creatures, mingling with the mute entreaty of their hapless babes, must surely reach every Christian and compassionate heart … spare at least a little to help forward this great work for the rescue of the fallen. Any contributions of old clothing, &co, or materials from which garments can be made, would be very acceptable.

The Tablet journal of November 1899 also described the building’s ‘lofty and capacious dormitory’ and ‘well appointed nursery’. Between 1897 and 1905, the home supported over 200 women and their babies, and when the campaigning priest died in 1907, a statue was erected in his honour, which among other accolades, described the Monsignor as a ‘Saviour of Fallen Womanhood’.

Fallen women were not just supported within an institution. Once they had shown suitable contrition and given every indication that this first ‘fall’ would be the only one, as at the Medina Home, they would be helped while living in the community, either with, or preferably without, their baby. While they attempted to rebuild their life with gainful employment, enthusiastic lady social welfare workers would keep an eye on them, as Plate 2 shows.

In this lantern slide from a set used to illustrate the work of an unknown social welfare organisation in London in about 1900, the fallen woman, looking gaunt and desperate, sits with Bible in hand awaiting the arrival of her welfare worker. On this occasion the miscreant is twice fallen – ‘twice she fell, but twice in penitence she was restored’, and as such, this young woman is one of the lucky ones to have been given another chance. One would imagine that this was part of a set to encourage donations for a campaign, as to be able to ‘save’ a twice fallen woman shows an additional level of commitment and higher levels of success.

Of course, the House of Providence only took responsibility for mothers and babies; what of the babies and children who were not with their parents, who had been abandoned, or who had to be given up by their family? In the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, the orphanage was an obvious solution. The Cherry Tree Orphanage in Sheffield occupied seven acres of land on the outskirts of town and could accommodate seventy children, as stated in the Kelly’s Directory of 1881, ‘of all denominations and from all parts of the British Empire’. Boys and girls from the age of five years were admitted. They were educated to a basic standard and the girls were trained to become domestic servants.

Not many orphanages could boast the glamour of the world of theatre, however. The Actors’ Orphanage was first begun in the 1890s as the Actors’ Orphanage Fund, and from the start it had eminent sponsors such as the famous actor Sir Henry Irving, who recruited the Princess Royal and the Princess of Wales as patrons. In 1906, the Fund opened its first orphanage building in Croydon, the primary interest being to ‘board, clothe and educate destitute children of actors and actresses, and fit them for useful positions in after life’. This not only included children who were true orphans, but also those who had parents who were unable to support them due to, for example, physical or mental incapacity.

As well as looking after children within the institution, the orphanage sometimes adopted children out or placed them with a foster parent; on occasion they also left a delicate child with her/his mother and supported them on an outreach basis. The orphanage supporters were adept at fund raising, one of their most popular and successful methods being the annual garden party instigated in 1906. (Plate 5 shows an advert for a garden party which took place in around 1920, a worthwhile fund raiser for many years.)

When it came to the everyday care of the children there were some rocky moments, with the food, education and supervision of the children called into question, but efforts were made to resolve these and the children left the orphanage ready to work as domestic servants, if girls (some even made it to teacher training), or as gardeners or manual workers, if boys. A few even went into the theatre, hardly surprising given the origins of the orphanage.

The original Actors’ Orphanage occupied two large Victorian houses in Croydon and provided accommodation on a smaller, more homely scale. However, not that far away was the Reedham Orphanage in Purley, Surrey (originally known as the Asylum for Fatherless Children), which could take approximately 300 children from the age of three months to eleven years. This building hardly represents accommodation on a homely scale; the image on Plate 3, from the Illustrated London News of July 1894, shows this ‘stately and commodious building’, as it was enthusiastically described in the accompanying article, ‘which stands with its chapel, its sanatorium, the surrounding playgrounds and swimming-bath’, all of which could be enjoyed in the ‘hardy, breezy air’ of Reedham.

Inside, we are told that the resident staff ‘do all that can be done by careful kindness and good management for the welfare, in mind and body, and for the morals and manners, as well as the intellectual culture of their young charges’. This meant, in reality, the usual routine of an orphanage – housewifery lessons for the girls and carpentry or similar for the boys – in other words, training for a life of useful service. Plate 4 shows girls learning the skills of good laundering, although this is clearly an idealised picture of what such a room would really look like.

The orphanage was in the news at this time because of the high-profile visitor to its summer festival – Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Teck, who handed out the school prizes and watched the girls and infants do musical drill and the boys carry out athletic exercises, battalion drill and swimming. This was another orphanage which was non-denominational and it was there strictly to ‘receive and bless the fatherless infant’ and to raise her or him using scriptural principles and precepts but with no adherence to a particular denomination beyond that.

From its foundation, it took in children regardless of ‘sex, place or religious connection’, but like many such institutions it did not provide any further specifications. While most of them took in illegitimate children, it would not be something that they would necessarily advertise – why would they, when some commentators might see that as the harbouring of ‘bad blood’?

There was one institution which was not a place for the ‘displaced’ child to go, however. In 1913 the Mental Deficiency Act gave local authorities the power to certify destitute pregnant women or those judged as ‘immoral’ and detain them indefinitely in mental institutions. Known as ‘The Eugenicist’s Bill’, it was the ultimate legislative link between immorality and imbecility and included a category of ‘moral imbecile’ – a person who displayed mental weakness coupled with strong vicious or criminal tendencies and on whom punishment has little deterrent effect. Women detained under the Act were regarded as incapable of controlling their sexual inclinations, and also vulnerable to exploitation from men. It seems that the original move to include a category of the ‘sexually feeble minded’ for such women was unnecessary; women informally labelled in this way were detained anyway. Their illegitimate children would have been housed in a separate institution, such as an orphanage, or quietly absorbed into their birth family, whilst their mother languished in the asylum a victim of her ‘unacceptable’ conduct.

Charitable and Campaigning Organisations

The end of the nineteenth century also saw the inception of many campaigning and charitable movements. One of the most famous and long lived (indeed, it is still in operation today as The Children’s Society) was the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society. It was founded in 1881 by Edward de Montjoie Rudolf for boys and girls and was funded by contributions from Poor Law Unions, from individuals who sponsored particular children, and from other forms of fundraising – over the decades the society became adept at a gentle form of publicity, based more on fundraising than on blatant requests for foster and adoptive parents to come forward. It also, of course, received considerable support from the Church of England.

The society started its activities in London, pro-actively seeking out destitute and homeless children. By 1896 it had 2,300 children in its care, 700 of whom were in foster care, and it also maintained dozens of homes for the children who were not fostered. The homes were preferably established in out-of-town settings and the ambience was to be, as far as possible, a home not an institution (along the lines of the cottages homes in Plate 4), and a good Christian and loving home at that. From these homes the children would attend a church school for preference, or if that was not available, the local community school. Each home had a matron or master, and training or instruction was based on reward rather than punishment, although there was a sliding scale of punishments which included physical discipline as well as sanctions, such as missed meals.

As was the case with many such organisations, the children were schooled, but also prepared for a life of useful work. The girls were almost always trained to become domestic servants, and stayed on at the home for two years after finishing school in order to learn ‘housewifery’. Some local benefactors even allowed the girls into their homes as ‘pupil servants’ so they could learn to be more than a household drudge, thereby enhancing their employment prospects.

Happily for some of the foster children, they were adopted by their foster parents who voluntarily gave up their boarding out fee (a maximum of 5d a week) from the society to have the child for their own – this was beneficial for the child, who then had a family of their own, but also for the society who had one less fee to pay out. As one of the instructional manuals for the employees of Waifs and Strays says, ‘Not only is a real home provided for the little ones, but also a mother’s love … The cheerless and monotonous life of a childless woman has been brightened, and pent up sympathies have at last found the object which has been long sought for.’

For would-be foster parents there was a application form to complete. This asked questions about their income, enquired if the applicant was a communicant of the Church of England, and requested information about other family members in the house including children, and so on. Those who were related to the child, or in receipt of poor relief, were not accepted, and no foster parent could take in more than four children from the society. The accommodation had to be ‘decent’ and the children were not to sleep in the same room as an adult, and for children over the age of seven, they must not sleep in the same room as a married couple.

Foster parents who did go a step further and adopt their young charge had to complete more forms, and the birth parents also had to do this, in an attempt to make the adoption as irreversible as possible – it had no legal foundation at this time. Sadly, in a few cases, birth relatives did come forward to claim the child back, which although probably not always in the best interests of a settled and much loved adopted child, the birth family had every right to do. As a deterrent, the society included in the agreement a sanction whereby if the birth family took the child back after the adoption, they would have to pay up to £13 towards the expenses of the society – the equivalent of approximately £4,700 today.

For children who stayed in the homes, it was policy to keep in touch with the young people after they left, in order to keep them on the right path, while for foster children, a local clergyman or the ‘ladies of the neighbourhood’ were to supervise the placement and ensure a high standard of care for the boarded out children. The Waifs and Strays Emigration Committee also worked to establish ‘distributing homes’ in Canada, so that children could be sent abroad to start their lives again there.

The Case Committee decided which children the Waifs and Strays should take in, and divided children into various categories, such as orphans, the cruelly treated, deserted children and illegitimate children. With this last group, the idea was to take in the illegitimate child to allow the mother an opportunity to redeem herself by giving her the freedom to resume work. However, the society insisted upon a regular payment of 4d per week for the maintenance of the child, and if the payments ceased, it was expected that the child would be taken back by the mother. The reason for this was, it was said, that the society did not want to be seen as making it easy for a mother to ‘get rid of’ her child, then promptly go off and have another illegitimate baby, in which case Waifs and Strays would be ‘offering a premium to sin’. They also strongly encouraged the mother to pursue the father of the baby for maintenance payments.

All organisations need funds, of course, and apart from their major institutional funding, local workers were strongly encouraged to help with fund raising. This was a mixture of bazaars and sales of work, magazine subscriptions, collections, Lantern Lectures with an entry fee, and ‘Pound Days’ – as a novel way of encouraging donations, well-wishers could give any item such as food or cloth to make outfits for the children, up 16oz or 1lb (slightly under half a kilo) in weight, possibly so that people who could not afford to give money could still support the cause. The society took its work very seriously indeed, seemed well organised and committed, and was acutely aware of the moral work it was doing – and it would seem that many of its workers and foster parents regarded their contribution as a vocation and not just an everyday way of supporting a charity.

The Salvation Army was formed in 1865, and although it was primarily concerned to keep mothers and their babies together rather than separating them so that the child could be adopted, their child welfare work was wide-ranging. In 1885, they were involved in the famous and luridly reported case of the abduction and sale of Eliza Armstrong. Eliza was sold by her alcoholic mother for £5 (the rough equivalent of £2,000 today) to one Rebecca Jarrett, who was secretly working for W.T. Stead, the zealous campaigning proprietor of the tabloid-style journal, The Pall Mall Gazette, and for Bramwell Booth, then the Salvation Army’s Chief of Staff. The whole transaction had been set up to highlight the trafficking and abuse of underage girls and Eliza was later taken to a place of safety relatively unharmed. Partly as a result of the case, the Criminal Law Amendment Act was passed and the age of consent raised to 16 years.

W.T. Stead was to continue with his somewhat maverick endeavours to help disadvantaged children. In 1890, he co-founded the journal, The Review of Reviews, which he used to promote advertisements for his other new venture, ‘The Baby Exchange’. Despite the extraordinary name of his venture, which makes it sound like more of a child ‘library’, it aimed to be a serious and genuine adoption agency.

Some of the advertisements are given below:

Children Offered for Adoption.

Applicants must write to me at the office of the

Review of Reviews.

A boy, one year and nine months old. Fair, with flaxen hair; a

nice healthy little fellow. Illegitimate.

A baby boy. A year old. Of gentle birth. Deserted by its father.

A father, whose profession obliges him to move about

constantly, would like both or one of his motherless girls

adopted. Ages eleven and seven.

A married woman, whose husband has deserted her and her
children, would be thankful to have her baby girl adopted.

A boy, aged six. His mother is dead. Has a bad stepfather.

A boy, his mother died when he was one month old. No

relatives able to help. Father alive, but in very poor

circumstances; wishes to keep out of the workhouse.

Boy. Born November 1894. Ireland.

Girl. Born September, 1895. Southsea. Fine healthy child.

Mother dead. Father gone to Africa. Married second time.

Left the child on the hands of a friend, who would gladly

have her adopted.

Girl. Born May, 1894. Hampshire. Mother will give up all claims.
Father deserted his family.

A baby boy. Illegitimate. About three months old. Fair child.
Its mother is a lady.

A girl, eleven years of age. Half French. Speaks French, Spanish and English. Is neither pretty nor plain. Her mother is alive, but very poor.

A boy of seven years of age, a nice child. Illegitimate.

Stead also published the details of more than 55 couples registered with his Baby Exchange who wished to adopt a child:

A lady and gentleman in good standing in society wish to adopt a baby boy of gentle birth, the child if possible of well educated parents in their own position in life. Age preferred between ten and twelve months. He must be certified by the adopter’s own doctor as healthy, with if possible a good hereditary record. Must be intelligent, with a well shaped head. The boy when adopted will be adopted outright. Nor will any of his relations know where he is or into whose family he has been received. He will be brought up as an English gentleman, well educated and provided for, with good prospects when he grows up.

W.T. Stead added to following postscript to the above notice:

As both the lady and gentleman are personally known to me, and as they have no family of their own, although they are passionately fond of children, I shall be very glad if any readers who may know of a suitable baby boy will communicate with me. It is not indispensable that it should be legitimate, but the circumstances of its illegitimacy will be closely inquired into.

Reading the above notice from a modern cultural perspective makes it seem rather at odds with what we might see now as the reasons for adopting. Parents today adopt for many reasons but high on the list would be to want to love a child as their own and do their best by her or him. Nowhere in this notice does the concept of love appear, rather it concentrates more on a clinical description of what the child should look like and what his background is. It smacks of eugenics to talk about a ‘well shaped head’ and a ‘good hereditary record’.

However, the warning that the birth family will be excluded completely is understandable, bearing in mind that the adoption would be a private arrangement, and as there are no officially sanctioned public bodies at this time to support the couple with their choice of baby, other than the eccentric and impassioned Mr Stead, their caution was probably wise and was intended to prevent the birth family coming forward at a later date (often once the child attained working age) to reclaim their offspring. Nothing could be done about this as the arrangement was not legally enforceable, other than to keep the birth family at as far a distance as was possible.

The Baby Exchange is not unusual for its time either, in that it is one of many organisations started and operated by totally untrained individuals, who acted for the best of motives, which may or may not have been in the best interests of the child. It is not known if there were any follow-up investigations to see if any of the children whose adoption was arranged via the Baby Exchange were doing well in their new families, but this is unlikely. Many such organisations at this time saw the solution to the problem of the child without a family to begin and end with the fact of the adoption; it was as if the child would be remade anew in the image of the new family and any previous problems would be wiped from the slate.

Baby Exchanges were not necessary for many people who wished to adopt a child, but by adopting and, in particular, in trying to conceal the fact of the adoption, respectable couples could find themselves in court for the first time in their lives. At the end of 1891, a young man named Lambert in Holbeck, Leeds, advertised for a baby to adopt, and in response, one Annie Kendall and another woman called on him and his wife, Lily, at their home. Annie told them she had just had a baby and would be willing for them to adopt it.

Subsequently, a prosperous looking man also called on the Lamberts and asked if they would register the child as theirs – presumably an attempt to conceal the disgrace Annie had brought on her family and to cut all ties with the child. The Lamberts, who assumed the man was the father of the baby (who was two weeks old when they ‘adopted’ it), were reassured by the man’s self-assurance and proceeded to have the baby registered as their own, which they must have thought gave them extra security as his parents too. However, in doing so, the delighted new adoptive mother had broken the law in giving false information to the registrar, was found out and ended up being fined £1 to cover costs.

It was said in the Lamberts’ defence that they were eminently respectable people, childless and simply desperate for a child to call their own, even though Mr Lambert was out of work at the time. The magistrate who presided over the case in January 1892 was clearly sympathetic to the Lamberts and their desire to have a family, and expressed regret that the man who had so ill-advised them could not be prosecuted, as he was more at fault than the new parents were. As to whether this was disapproval of the ‘disposing’ of a birth child to adoption, or encouraging a breach of the law, it is difficult now to say.

‘Boarding Out’ and Other Solutions

In the 1880s and the years following, there were a number of significant developments. In 1886 the Guardianship of Infants Act established that on the death of the father of an infant, the mother alone was to be the guardian unless the father had appointed a guardian, in which case a joint arrangement applied between mother and guardian. Overall, a court could override the Common Law rights of the father in relation to the custody of his infant children. This is significant as here is a widow being given rights to have her child despite being a single mother at that point.

The 1889 Poor Law Act empowered Poor Law Guardians to ‘adopt’ children in their care, which meant in practice that they assumed parental rights and responsibilities over a child until he or she reached the age of 18. At first it applied only to deserted children, but this widened later in 1899 with another Poor Law Act, to include orphans and the children of disabled parents or those deemed to have impaired judgement or to be unfit to have control of children. Because of the broad parameters used, only a small proportion of these children were illegitimate. It proved to be a useful tool for the Guardians to have, and by 1908 12,417 children had been ‘adopted’ in this way.

One example of the use of this power occurred in 1913, when the five children of Frederick Battelly and his wife, of Islington in London, were adopted by the local Board of Guardians. Battelly (he claimed) had left his wife and children to go in search of work and that they had to go into the workhouse as they could not manage. At this point, the children were adopted, so when he returned from his wanderings and tried to claim his children back, saying he could now make a home for them, it was too late – he was informed in no uncertain terms that they were no longer his children. He appealed against the adoption, but this was an unwise decision as at the North London Police Court, evidence was put forward by the Guardians that the Battelly family had repeatedly been in receipt of poor relief, and that Mrs Battelly had been convicted three times for drunkenness.

Accordingly, the adoption remained in place due to the unstable home background the children had previously endured and the unfit nature of the parents, and a week later, Battelly’s woes were compounded when the Guardians attempted to extract maintenance payments from him for his children. This failed on a legal technicality, for which he was no doubt very thankful.

Some commentators wanted official intervention to be taken further. In a radical article written for the journal The Fortnightly Review by Emma Samuels, the Government was strongly urged to adopt the nation’s ‘street Arabs’ (children who lived on the streets) and train them for essential trades and for entry into the armed forces. Of these children, the writer says, ‘Their birth a curse to those who have been its cause; their education one of oaths and blows; their future the workhouse and prison; half naked, half starved, subjected to every possible suffering and temptation, dedicated from their cradle to a life of crime.’

The article goes on to praise the recent legislation that had benefited most children, and it enthuses about the work of the relatively new organisation the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). Yet, on noting that many children ended up in the workhouse, separated from their parents, it condemns these institutions, saying they may make the child’s circumstances even worse than they were on the street in their degradation: ‘The influences and surroundings of the poor-house are usually of the worst description, fatal to them in their growing years.’ The answer is, we are told, not to make the children enemies of the state in this way, but to have the state adopt them ‘and be made its future servants instead of its future enemies’. The method of doing this, and redeeming these street children, was to be as follows:

Why should the state not become the father of the fatherless … and properly organise Government refuges, compulsory military and naval training schools, or training ships for boys, and compulsory technical training schools for girls, where the children be made apprentices of the state? … Let any young child that is homeless and whose parents or natural guardians have in the judgement of a court forfeited their right to its custody be adopted by the State … When old enough let the boys be drilled and disciplined as soldier and sailors, and drafted on at a proper age into our army and … navy. Let such as are physically unfit for these services be trained to handicrafts or agricultural employments. Let the girls be trained and disciplined as domestic and farm servants. Numbers (of girls and unfit boys) could be apprenticed out in rural districts among cottagers on the family system … which often leads to the adoption of the child and its final absorption into the family.

The institutions where the children lived while training would be ‘self maintaining child communities’, with the residents doing all maintenance and domestic work, and ‘When the boys and girls have attained a mature age, it would be possible to provide for the emigration of selected groups trained to different trades … which could be planted as communities in different parts of the vast unoccupied tracts of the Empire.’ In the opinion of the author of the article, it was time to lift these children from the streets, make them the ‘property’ of the state, and make them a credit to the nation.

The opinions of Emma Samuels reflect some of the activities that charitable organisations and the Board of Guardians were endeavouring to put into practice already, as she readily acknowledges. But the idea that the state should become a ‘parent’ to the children, which at that time would mean it had absolute control over the fate of them – and full responsibility – was radical.

It is unlikely, however, that the state would want to undertake such a huge task and it was surely no substitute for what these children had apparently always lacked – a family and a home of their own. The very reason why many charities such as Dr Barnardo’s switched eventually to the cottage style or homestead accommodation for small groups of children was that they realised that what the children – many of them traumatised by their early lives – needed was exactly that family ambience, not to become a part of a ‘factory’ producing useful drones for Imperial expansion. On the other hand, late Victorian society was used to the concept of using children’s labour, so it would have seemed a reasonable argument to many.

At the same time, the NSPCC was forging a place for itself as a key player in the campaign against cruelty to children. It had been founded under its most familiar name in 1889 following more localised beginnings in Liverpool and across London from 1883 onwards. Once again, a children’s aid organisation had impressive support, with none other than Queen Victoria as patron. By 1910, it had 250 inspectors (who were known colloquially as ‘The Cruelty Man’) dealing with over 50,000 complaints, armed with power as an ‘authorised person’ (thanks to the 1904 Prevention of Cruelty Act) to remove children from homes where they were being neglected or cruelly treated, once the sanction of a Justice of the Peace had been obtained.

The graphic photographs used by the NSPCC to illustrate the appalling state some children were in at the time of rescue, are painful to view today and would have been equally shocking to people at the time, but they had the desired effect of making the charity high profile and successful in conveying its message – that the neglect and abuse of children must be stopped. It was partly thanks to a display of such photographs that a sequence of events began which led to the arrest and conviction of Amelia Dyer, the notorious baby farmer.

At about the same time, the Salvation Army was involved in the rescue – and sometimes the adoption – of destitute children. It started an Adoption Book to record these events, and one of the earliest entries was for Miss Emma Booth, daughter of the Army’s founder, William Booth – she adopted a son as an example to others. An Adoption Department, with its own board, was set up, and over the years they continued to improve their adoption procedures. The adoptive family had to be Salvationists and the Army tended to concentrate on the adoption of older children at first. This was not the only way in which they helped single mothers – they also did their best to support the mother in keeping her child if she could, on the grounds that keeping mother and child together would help the mother turn her life around and live to a higher moral standard.

Eighteen-eighty-nine was an important year for children in other ways, as were the few years following. In that year, the Prevention of Cruelty to, and Protection of Children Act was passed, which made ill-treatment, neglect of or causing of suffering to children punishable, and it also prohibited begging by boys under the age of 14, and girls under the age of 16. At last, the state was intervening; warrants could be issued for authorities to enter the homes of children thought to be at risk, and arrests could be made of those inflicting harm upon children.

In 1891, the Custody of Children Act enabled courts to prevent the return of children who were staying with friends or relatives to parents who were deemed to be unfit. It also prevented parents from ‘reclaiming’ children when they reached working age, a clear attempt to limit the economic exploitation of children by their families, and an emphasis that to house and feed a child was not enough: how they were treated, and what the children did with their days, was now a matter of wider concern.

Another way to get poor children out of the Poor Law System and into family homes was to use a practice known as ‘boarding out’. This was sanctioned by the English Poor Law Board in 1870 and was essentially a way of fostering out poor children to family homes, albeit those of the labouring classes only. The reasons for doing it were straightforward – it was an attempt to get the children out of the workhouses and the bad influences which might be lurking there. It was also hoped that the children would experience what it was like to have security and the affection of a family, which no matter how caring the workhouse staff tried to be, was extremely difficult to replicate in such a large institution.

It was also an attempt to ensure that pauper girls had an opportunity to escape what were seen as the immoral influences of being in a workhouse, and to give them a chance to learn how to be good housewives, and more importantly, good domestic servants so that they would have gainful and respectable employment when older – a system sometimes referred to as ‘home training’. An editorial in the Montgomeryshire Express and Radnor Times put the case for boarding out in eloquent terms:

Every thoughtful individual is agreed that the orphan, the outcast, or otherwise, unbefriended, helpless child, should have a home outside the pauper citadel, where it is not only branded with the ugly stamp of pauperism, but reared in sight of, if not in actual association with, much that is … vicious and depraved in human nature … The kindest and the best of the workhouse masters and matrons cannot fulfil the part of foster father and mother to individual children, nor create that wholesome atmosphere which they require during those impressive years … A home, which means the love and care of parent or guardian personally bestowed, is essential to the development of the whole nature … We hope to see a day when, instead of being herded into huge depots for human wreckage, these children will be boarded out with respectable people, and thus permitted to enjoy the helpful associations of family life.

The new system of dealing with pauper children had both detractors and supporters. An article in the Merthyr Telegraph and General Advertiser of 16 February 1877 reported:

The National Committee for boarding out pauper children … report that the system of home training, as distinguished from massing children together in large numbers, is gaining favour among guardians of the poor. Statistics are given in the report shewing that children in some of the Metropolitan district schools (institutions) cost £36 a year each, while boarded-out children cost only about 4s a week (£17 per year), and in addition to the visits of the inspectors, the foster parents are seen periodically by committees who undertake to watch over the children.

It would seem that along with the laudable reasons of moral and domestic improvement, the temptation of looking after the children more economically could not be resisted; in addition, some workhouses also used the space freed up by boarding out children to house ‘harmless lunatics’ and ‘imbeciles’ who would then not take up valuable space in the county asylums.

It was even suggested by a speaker at the conference of the Women Guardians and Local Government Association in Manchester in 1905 that boarding out was a way of overcoming the ‘evils of heredity’ in these pauper children – in other words, to sublimate the ‘bad blood’ that children from these unfortunate backgrounds inherited – and of course, many of them would be illegitimate with mothers regarded as morally bankrupt. At the same conference, warnings were given about the choice of foster parents for these already vulnerable children. Solemn advice was given that the children should be dressed in flannelette and their teeth carefully attended to, while any child whose life was found to have been insured by the foster parent should be removed to a place of safety immediately. Unfortunately, these warnings and advice were not always heeded.

In November 1884, in Retford, the death of an 11-year-old boarded out boy named George Hind made the news. Young George and his older sister had been placed by the Board of Guardians about 14 months before with a Henry and Annie Ward, who were paid 3s. a week for having each of the children, plus 10s a quarter for clothing and school fees. George was in delicate health and was lame with poor feet, but it would appear that his clothing allowance was not being used for his benefit, as witnesses came forward to say that he had been seen wearing ill-fitting and inadequate clothes, with no coat on bitterly cold days.

He was often in tears and complained to numerous people of the cold and his great hunger and was compelled to do heavy chores such as vegetable gardening and carrying several buckets of water when his health was not up to the job. Once he had grown the vegetables, he had to go round the local shops trying to sell the produce. George’s foster mother had been seen to beat him with a shovel and his foster father was physically abusive too. George eventually died from tubercular meningitis, but at his inquest the jury ‘found as a fact that the deceased had been systematically ill-treated, and that such ill-treatment accelerated death, and that therefore the foster parents were deserving of the severest censure’. It was not reported what happened to George’s sister, although one hopes she was swiftly removed from this cruel and abusive household.

Despite the best efforts of the Poor Relief System and an enthusiastic network of lady inspectors (it was proclaimed that inspections of children must be the work of women with their motherly attributes), boarding out poor children was not proving to be any better a solution to the problem of children without homes, than any other on offer. It is perhaps due to the uncertainties of boarding out that even by the beginning of the twentieth century, less than 4 per cent of all English and Welsh children in receipt of some form of public relief had been placed with foster parents.

It stands to reason that if the Poor Law Guardians had taken over the role of parent in some cases, they then had the right to allow or refuse to have the child adopted out to another person or family, and some private adoptions did occur in this period, long before the legalised adoptions after 1926. One such adoption occurred in 1915, just one year into the First World War. On 12 June in that year, William and Elizabeth Williams of Harlech in North Wales signed an adoption agreement to undertake the upbringing of a child named Cassie Davies, the orphan child of Hugh and Ann Davies.

Cassie had been born in 1901 in Glamorganshire and was 13 years old at the time of the adoption. After Cassie was orphaned, she became the responsibility of the Guardians of the Poor of the Bridgend and Cowbridge Union, Glamorganshire, and therefore it was they who agreed to ‘deliver’, as the adoption agreement says, the young Cassie to Mr and Mrs Williams. In return, Cassie’s new parents had to accept certain conditions. Firstly and obviously, they had to agree to ‘adopt the said child, and to maintain, support and educate her in a proper and suitable manner’. Mr and Mrs Williams rather curiously had to hand over 1s. to the trustees and in return ‘the said trustees (Guardians) hereby grant and assign to the parties of the second part, all their rights to the possession, custody and control of the said child, and all right, profit and advantage to be derived from the custody and possession of the said child’.

So far, so good, except that to the average modern parent, the idea of having rights to profit, advantage or have ‘possession’ of a child seems rather archaic and uncomfortably reminiscent of earlier Victorian notions of the child as a commodity.

Mr and Mrs Williams also had to agree to:

board, lodge, clothe and educate the child in a manner suitable to the station of the (new parents) … in the same manner as if the said Cassie Davies was their own lawful child … They will … provide the said child with all the necessaries and discharge all debts and liabilities which the said child may incur for necessaries and will indemnify the said trustees against all actions, claims and demands in respect thereof: and that they will bring up the said child and cause her to be instructed in the principles of the Baptist Denomination.

The final part of the agreement is an assurance from the trustees (Guardians) that they will not in any way ‘interfere with or in any way disturb’ the newly bestowed parental rights of Cassie’s new mother and father, so long as they ‘faithfully perform their part to this agreement’. A copy of the agreement was sent to the Board of Guardians of the Conway Union, presumably so that their North Wales colleagues were kept fully informed of the event.

There is a twist to this story in connection with Cassie’s earlier life. In the 1911 census, little nine-year-old Cassie is listed as living with her three sisters, Maggie, Annie and Gwennie, but the head of the household is their aunt, one Mary Williams. Mary was born in Dyffryn in Merionethshire which is the county that Cassie eventually moved to after her adoption – and not far from where Mr and Mrs Williams lived. Were William and Elizabeth Williams related to Cassie and Mary?

It was not uncommon for family members to take in children from other relatives who could no longer cope or where the child had been orphaned, and absorb them into their own family group. Possibly in the close-knit culture of rural and sparsely populated Mid Wales, the Williamses were friends of the family and wanted to help out. Whatever the reason, given their address was that of a farm, even if Cassie was much loved and nurtured she would be an extra pair of hands, like any other farmer’s daughter. However, the fact that the Guardians were involved meant that Cassie’s adoption had to be done formally.

Another example of inter-family ‘adoption’ occurred in Haslingden, in Lancashire. On the 1911 census, a young couple, Ernest and Betsy Jane Haworth, 21 and 22 years old respectively, are recorded as having been married for two years and with no children. Yet also in the four-roomed house with them is George Collinge Warburton, aged 16, who is listed as an ‘adopted boy’. Whose adopted boy is George? It is highly unlikely that such a young couple could have made any formal arrangement for an adoption and of a youth too, not even a child, although George was legally still a minor.

Looking into their background, it transpires that Betsy’s unmarried name was Warburton and that as a little girl on the 1891 census, she was living with her father Thomas, her mother Sarah, her maternal grandparents and her sister Amelia. By 1901 Betsy’s family circumstances had clearly changed. Now she was living with a 60-year-old man called Fletcher Rawlinson and is described as ‘Adopted Daughter’. Listed on the same census, George Warburton is five years old and is in the Haslingden Workhouse as an inmate. It is likely that George is a close relative of Betsy’s and she did for George what someone had done for her – gave him a home. More than likely, Betsy had been boarded out by the Board of Guardians and as George was a minor, she was able to apply for the same with George.

At the other end of the scale, in 1914, a bizarre example of child theft occurred in Walthamstow, apparently for the purposes of adoption. At the end of November, a 10-year-old girl called Lucy Carter was playing in the street with her little brother. They were approached by a young woman (later revealed in court to be 22-year-old Florence Powell), who chatted to Lucy and then gave her a penny to buy sweets. Unable to resist the idea of such a treat, Lucy hurried into the shop, the woman having said she would mind the baby while she did. When Lucy came out of the shop, both baby and woman had gone.

Shortly before this abduction, Powell had visited an acquaintance named Annie Snow, and declared ‘I have come to adopt your baby … I am married, and my hubby wants a baby.’ Annie refused to sell her baby, but did suggest to Powell that she took her four-year-old son instead! He was rejected for being too old. Powell and one William Elston (charged with receiving the stolen child) ended up in court and the baby was found safe and well, but the case took a bizarre twist when Powell was revealed as having told people she was an aristocrat’s daughter – she was nothing of the sort, so it would seem that her fantasies of motherhood were not her only form of make-believe.

Not all thefts and trading in babies was for some form of personal gain. In the spring of 1903, a young married woman named Caroline Carthy in Liswery, near Newport, answered an advertisement appealing for someone to take on a three-week-old baby boy for love only; no money was to be exchanged. She went to meet a Mrs Brown, the midwife who had delivered the baby, and a Miss Davies who was the birth mother. Miss Davies personally put the baby in Caroline’s arms and was happy for the adoption to go ahead.

Caroline’s husband and the birth mother, a respectable looking young woman of about 30 years of age, signed a document – apparently drawn up by a lawyer – in which the birth mother gave up all rights and claims to the child, and the delighted adoptive parents took their new baby son home. They must have been thrilled to be chosen, as four other people had already come forward to take on the baby but had been rejected.

Tragically, despite what seemed to be relatively respectable beginnings with all care given, the baby did not thrive and died soon after this, despite a doctor being in attendance. The death of the baby prompted an inquest and the coroner raised serious questions about the activities of Mrs Brown, pointing out to her that if she had offered a premium with the baby, he could have ended up in terrible circumstances and in great peril. As it was, the jury noted that Caroline was clearly ‘a fond and considerate foster (adoptive) mother’ and no harm had been meant to the baby at any point.

It is a shame that this little boy did not live to know the love his adoptive parents clearly had for him, but there would have been hundreds of such arrangements around the country that went unnoticed and unrecorded, of babies and young children who changed hands and went on to live happy lives, doted on by their new families. There is always a mix of circumstance in history, and it is never all bad.

In 1897, the Infant Life Protection Act added to the body of legislation designed to protect privately farmed or fostered children. Henceforward, any foster carer who had in their home children aged under a year old, for more than 24 hours, had to apply for registration. The law was rigorously imposed and the penalties were harsh, even 20 years after the Act came into force. The Children Act of 1908 extended this legislation to include the single fostered child, and gave access for parents to a physician for their child under the Poor Laws if they could not afford a doctor themselves.

Taking out life insurance for children was now prohibited, and farmed or fostered children up to the age of seven were now protected by the law, part of which protection was the compulsory inspection visits of an Infant Life Protection Visitor (ILP). It was now becoming more and more difficult to use baby farming as a route to easy money, and although the new system was not perfect and there were concerns about the insufficient number of ILPs, it was a big step forward in dealing with the problem and it allowed campaigners the space to look at how they were going to approach other child-centred issues, such as child health in general and the mothering skills of the nation’s women.

As the twentieth century dawned, the status of children in England and Wales was subtly shifting. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, children were part of a patriarch’s domain; they were his and his alone to treat, punish and dispose of as he wished. The state was extremely reluctant to undermine the influence of parents over children and this was considered by some to be positively subversive; where would such intervention end? Would it attack the very foundations of society?

However, taken as a whole, this very society had changed immeasurably in the nineteenth century and the state had to change with it. Over this century, the state had taken over the registration of life events (from July 1837); established a state-run probate system, taking over from the church courts (from 1858); passed legislation to limit the adverse working conditions of women and children, such as the 1833 Factory Act and the Mines and Collieries Act of 1842; and local government in a relatively familiar pattern was established by the Local Governments Act of 1888. The nineteenth century also saw an increasing secularisation of poor relief, and indeed, in most areas, the secular state was becoming ever more important, and ever more visible and intrusive.

In 1880, the Elementary Education Act made education for all children compulsory up to the age of 10 years, which, by 1899, had been raised to 13. At the beginning of the campaign for education for all children, including those of the labouring poor, opposition was based around the argument that such education inhibited a parent’s right to bring up a child as they saw fit, and would also encourage a dependence on the state instead of instilling virtues of personal initiative and self-sufficiency.

There was an element of truth to this, as full-time education created a generation of children who were now removed from the world of work and who had become a financial burden on their family – they may be able to do chores at home and part-time work around school hours, but they were not a vital economic unit any more until school days were over at the age of 10.

At the same time, the public dismay and lurid publicity around baby farming had highlighted the plight of illegitimate children or children who did not have a stable family life, and by 1900 many organisations and institutions had sprung up to aid and support children and, in some cases, their lone mothers too. It would be tempting to suggest that children were regarded less as a commodity and were loved and valued more highly, but that might be overstating the progress that had been made.

Alongside these major changes to the way children were perceived and treated in law, were growing calls for a better way of transferring parental responsibilities from a child’s birth parents to others, in other words, a more formal way of adopting children. But a precedent was now also set for a close overseeing of the lives of all children, not just with regard to who was their parent, but also over issues of neglect and abuse, malnutrition, education (both moral and academic), housing and family income. The world of the child and their family were be scrutinised and tweaked in an effort to bring the family into modern times in line with the new passion for ‘welfare’, and the attention was to become ever more intensive.

The First World War

In times of war, inhibitions can waver. With the threat of danger and death looming over most families in Britain between 1914 and 1918, more men and women had affairs, took risks by having sexual relationships before marriage and married in a hurry without going through the usual prolonged courtship. Popular culture reflected this new emotional urgency with songs such as ‘I’ll Make a Man of You’ written and composed by Arthur Wimperis and Herman Finck in 1914 (and famously revived in the movie Oh What a Lovely War in 1969).

The lyrics take the point of view of a young woman who is telling the listener exactly how she is going to support the war effort – by encouraging all the nation’s girls to only date boys who have joined up: ‘On Saturday I’m willing if you’ll only take the shilling to make a man of any one of you’ (the ‘shilling’ being the King’s shilling given as a token to new recruits to the army). The message is straightforward – use your feminine charms to get a man to join up, and it ‘makes you almost proud to be a woman,’ and as the chorus suggests, any representative of the forces will do – included in the list is a bosun, rifleman, marine and midshipman!

The message was probably only intended to be a light hearted and mildly risqué encouragement to women to make sure their menfolk joined up, but there must have been thousands of women who bitterly regretted heeding this message when their husbands, boyfriends, fathers and brothers did not come home, especially if using those feminine charms had gone a little further than intended and led to an illegitimate baby. Alongside the more suggestive songs like this, images of chaste mothers, sweethearts and sisters were invoked with songs like ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’ (composed by Ivor Novello and Lena Gilbert Ford in 1914), but the notion of keeping the troops happy was no less powerful.

Even Emmeline Pankhurst, who along with her comrades in the Women’s Social and Political Union was previously vilified in the media for their militant campaign to obtain the vote for women, largely abandoned her militant suffrage campaign in order to support the war and strongly encouraged women to join in the war effort by taking up key roles and by urging men to join the armed forces.

The impact on children in general was immense. With their fathers away at the Front and their mothers employed in war work, older children would have had to take on extra responsibility and, at the very least, help out more at home. From a child’s point of view they would have missed their fathers, brothers and uncles, been frightened by dire threats of the enemy (some children were threatened with a visit from ‘Kaiser Bill’ instead of the bogeyman!), and suffered the bereavement of losing family members. Some children in coastal areas and in the South East of England lived with the threat of coastal bombardment or bombing, and food rationing was introduced in February 1918.

With the emphasis so strongly on families pulling together and facing the ‘German Peril’, as Mrs Pankhurst called it, as one, and putting the soldiers first in all things, it is little wonder that many people embarked on relationships without much prior thought as to the consequences. The result was that newly wed wives also became newly widowed women with young babies to support. The birth rate for babies born outside marriage rose from 4.29 per cent in 1913, to 6.26 per cent in 1918, which looks a small increase, but in statistical and cultural terms it was significant.

Unfortunately, the war could also lead to fraudulent activities in which children were caught up. In September 1915, Elizabeth White of Brixton had a baby, whose father was Robert Abel, a soldier on active service in France. Her baby was stillborn, and if the authorities had known about this, Elizabeth’s war separation allowance (a payment made to the dependants of soldiers) would have been stopped.

In order to keep her allowance, Elizabeth advertised for, and obtained a baby – in other words, an informal adoption – and went to register the child as her own. She made the mistake of telling the registrar what she had done and the registrar refused to issue a birth certificate. Subsequently, Elizabeth’s mother completed the registration in another area, the adopted baby being given the surname Abel. Elizabeth continued to receive the allowance for another ten weeks – a total of £2 10s, at which point the police intervened.

Elizabeth White lost her own baby, but many other illegitimate ‘war babies’ survived, and it was not long before their plight came to the attention of seasoned campaigners like Mrs Pankhurst, who took her support for the war effort still further by taking an interest in this growing social and moral crisis. Undeterred by the disapproval of her colleagues in the suffrage campaign, she acquired four such babies and in 1916, established them in a home at 50 Clarendon Road, Kensington, London with a nurse to care for them.

The following year, the remaining funds of the Women’s Social and Political Union, her suffrage organisation, were used to purchase a four-storey residence called Tower Cressy in Kensington, which was intended to be a home for female orphans. In 1919, the project was transferred to the care of trustees and was named the War Memorial Adoption Home, the now famous flagship building of the National Children’s Adoption Association (NCAA) which had been set up in 1917 primarily to deal with the adoption of war babies.

Meanwhile, in Duxhurst Village, Reigate, the Babies’ Haven was receiving illegitimate babies to be cared for so that their mothers could go out and rebuild their lives. It was the project of Lady Henry Somerset, a famous temperance campaigner and social activist, who now turned her considerable energies to the plight of the nation’s young. In an appeal for support for the haven, she wrote of the high infant mortality in the country:

The reasons for this high death rate are many, among them the general disorganisation of home life, the employment of women in munitions and war work, and the entire absence of foster mothers, who are engaged in remunerative labour of all kinds. The unmarried mother has now nowhere to place her baby in safety. The baby is either hopelessly neglected and dies, or she must, in order to support it, give up her work, and perhaps drift into a life of wrong-doing to get the money to maintain herself and the child – thus bringing about still greater disaster … Babies are a national asset; in the years before the war eight and a half million more babies were born in Germany than in England, and the mortality among children was much lower … every child in the land must be saved.

Of the Haven, Lady Somerset says, ‘The unmarried mothers have their share of responsibility, and not only pay 5s a week, but have to furnish the name of a guarantor, who in the case of no payment, is responsible for the money.’ Hopefully, these babies were the lucky ones who never fell into the hands of a wartime baby farmer.

Another imaginative if rather utopian solution was put forward by a columnist in the British Journal of Nursing in March 1916. In an article entitled ‘Babies’ Camps’, the author attempts to address not only the evils of baby farming or inadequate foster care for single mothers, but also the shortage of labour on the nation’s farms which was affecting the nation’s wartime food supply. The author sets the scene:

They [illegitimate babies] are born for the most part in maternity homes, lying-in hospitals or in workhouse infirmaries. It is only in the last institution that the mother can, if she so wishes, remain in touch with her infant … this course, if beneficial to the child, is disastrous to the young mother, as her surroundings tend to her demoralisation. At the end of a month the girl usually returns to [domestic] service, or other work, and places her infant with strangers at a payment of 5s a week with milk at 5d a quart.

The author then goes on to describe the all too familiar tale of neglect that caused minded-out babies to fail to thrive, due to ignorance and by penny pinching – some babies were given one part milk to five parts of barley water, to make the foster fees go further, and this despite the fact that the Infant Life Protection Act had ensured the registration of minders.

The other option, we are told, is Babies’ Homes but where large numbers of babies are kept together, the mortality rate was very high, understandably so with little protection against childhood diseases such as measles and whooping cough. Furthermore, ‘Boy babies are the more difficult to rear, and … the coming generation will have to make good the waste of manhood in this deplorable war.’

Turning her attention to the countryside, the author goes on to explain the serious lack of labour in the farming industry:

it is impossible to get the milking done … crops are spoiled with weeds, and the sowing cannot be accomplished. Then there are the bee industries, and market and nursery gardening … when so much is said about the economy of making every foot of land produce, acres are lying idle, and hundreds of strong young girls are … in dull occupations, and their infants are pining and dying amongst strangers.

The author exhorts the public to put aside any prejudices they may have about unmarried mothers and give them a chance to redeem themselves by their going to live in ‘Baby Camps’ for baby’s first year. In these places, ‘the eternal laundry that seems to be at present the one and only suitable occupation for the institutional unmarried mother, could well be carried on in the vicinity of the camp’, but the mothers could also work on the land as much needed agricultural labour. Now the author gets positively poetic:

The picture arises up before us of little brown [suntanned, i.e., healthy] infants lying about on sweet-smelling heather or daisy-dappled meadows. We can see … the sheds, each with its little cot besides the mother’s bed … we can figure out amongst them our very best babies’ nurse, who must have a laughing face and rosy cheeks, and who must love the babies. It is the dinner hour and back come the mothers with flying feet to snatch up her … little possession and kiss and cuddle it.

All that was needed now that this vision had been put forward, enthuses the author, is a rich benefactor to make the project happen – needless to say, in a time of war, none came forward – but it is another example of the body of opinion that mothers and their babies should be kept together, to the benefit of both parties.

The NSPCC had continued its activities during the war, utilising female inspectors for the first time as many of their male counterparts had joined the armed forces. They also joined the widespread campaign to promote the well-being of mothers and babies (legitimate or otherwise) – in 1917, Robert Parr, the Director of the NSPCC, stated in a speech that after the question of how to win the war, the issue of child welfare was of utmost importance to the nation. He put forward two strong propositions: first, that a child has a right to be properly born (that is, safely and in hygienic conditions); and secondly, that the child has a right to proper treatment after it is born.

These ideas may sound obvious to the modern reader, but to some at this time, the idea that any child could have ‘rights’ must have been a challenge. Although Mr Parr urged all parties – voluntary, local authorities and private individuals – to work together for the sake of the nation’s children to overcome adverse conditions and the ill-effects of ‘habit’, he also said that the ideal method was to properly prepare the parent for the fulfilment of parental duties rather than take over from them; however, if the child’s rights to proper care were not being fulfilled by the parents, then the state should secure their enforcement.

Many of the voluntary bodies referred to by Mr Parr were enthusiastically taking the initiative at this time and promoting good parenting and especially (as it was popularly known) mothercraft. At the National Baby Week Exhibition in July 1917, the National Clean Milk Society had a display showing the correct and incorrect ways to keep milk in the home, and the Jewish Maternity and Sick Room Helps Society had a display of items – cot, basket, and clothes for baby – made in a pre-natal class. The British Journal of Nursing, who reported on the event, added, ‘The importance of pre natal work is slowly receiving recognition.’

Nineteen-seventeen was also the year that National Baby Week began, heralding the era of orderly and ‘scientific’ child rearing where routine, cleanliness and discipline is the norm. As the interwar period continued, the pressure on parents to be ‘perfect’ intensified, and for adoptive parents, they had to be even better than the rest. The following year, the Maternity and Child Health Act was passed, which gave local authorities the powers to set up day nurseries and child welfare clinics, and to employ health visitors.

This Act was a consolidation of the 1907 Notification of Births Act, which decreed that the local Medical Officer of Health must be informed as soon as possible after a baby was born, and a trained health visitor would then call on the mother and advise her on how best to look after her baby. The establishment’s dismay over the poor condition of the working-class men who joined the army had galvanised them into doing something about the nation’s human resources, and in future, the health of babies and children was inextricably tied up with preoccupations over the health of the nation as a whole. As another writer in the British Journal of Nursing put it in 1917:

If … National Baby Week is to make any permanent difference to the health of the nation its effect must be very far reaching … Those into whose hands the task of teaching and uplifting the parents of the race is given must be men and women of education … it is not enough to have a committee of gentlewomen with heaps of sympathy and little knowledge of the practical side … The war found us unprepared to meet our enemy abroad; do let us bend all our energies towards preparation for the fight before us at home … [the mothercraft instructors] have to set a high standard of refinement both morally and physically and help their sisters live up to it.

The Salvation Army was still involved in adoption at this time, striving to find new homes for very young children who had been left orphans by the war. As always, these were recorded in the Army’s adoption books, sometimes with tantalising extra snippets of information such as who had the baby’s ration book and what the occupation of the adoptive father was.

There was a small rise in the instances of baby farming during the war – due to the rising number of illegitimate babies being born – and correspondingly, there was also a decline in the number of respectable foster parents, many former foster mothers now being occupied in jobs for the war effort.

It may also be that the greater supervision and regulation of foster homes following the 1908 Children Act deterred those who could not meet the required standards – but sadly, not all. In November 1918, Martha Malster, a widow in Manor Park, London, received a sentence of two months’ imprisonment with hard labour (the law allowed for up to six months) for undertaking the maintenance of a baby for reward and failing to notify the West Ham Guardians of this. Malster had previously had a foster child removed from her house because it was deemed unfit for the purpose of childcare, and she was told that she must not take on another child without the permission of the guardians. However, she did just that, taking a payment of £15 to foster a child for a couple, which was regarded as trafficking in the adoption of children.

As the war came to an end, Prime Minister David Lloyd George made a speech declaring that the demobbed servicemen should come home to a land fit for heroes, marking the beginning of a campaign to replace inferior housing for labouring people with quality rented accommodation. Added to the growing demand for legalised adoption and greater regulation of the welfare of children, it seemed that the post war era promised greater material comfort and more stable families. The reality was to be a rather more mixed picture.