British immigrant children from Dr. Barnardo’s Homes at landing stage, Saint John, New Brunswick. (Isaac Erb / Library and Archives Canada / PA-041785)
I first learned about the British Home Children a few years ago, when I stumbled upon an article about them online. The article said that starting in 1869, more than 120,000 destitute British children between the ages of three and eighteen were taken from England’s streets, orphanages, and homes, and then shipped across the ocean to work in other countries, where it was thought they’d have a chance to lead better lives. This went on for nearly eighty years, until 1948. The more I read, the more intrigued I became. The idea of improving their young lives sounded plausible, but then I read on and discovered the alarming truth. Once the children arrived in their new country, there were few to no checks and balances in place. What could go wrong? Some of the children did benefit from the scheme. Those were informally adopted and their lives improved unquestionably. Most of the children, however, did not. The majority became indentured servants, working as farm labourers and domestic servants.
Here’s what got to me: Where were all the children shipped? Here, to Canada. I was filled with questions. How could something so significant have happened here without it becoming general knowledge? Why had I never learned about this in school?
How could I not write their story?
British immigrant children from Dr. Barnardo’s Homes at landing stage, Saint John, New Brunswick. (Isaac Erb / Library and Archives Canada / PA-041785)
My initial challenge was finding information. There were a few books and articles, but in general, no one seemed to be talking about it. When I asked around, I was met with a lot of blank stares. Then I found the website for the Canadian British Home Children, and from there, multiple Facebook pages for British Home Children descendants. Most of the members on those pages have at least one British Home Child in their family tree, and everyone shares a common goal. They are there to learn more about their family history, but most of all they want to raise public awareness about some of Canada’s earliest and youngest pioneers, the children who helped make our country what it is today.
As you’ll remember from the novel, Winny’s granddaughter Chrissie connects with other descendants in a Facebook group just like the real ones. If you believe you have a British Home Child in your family tree and are looking for information, I highly recommend you join one of these groups. Every member is an eager volunteer waiting for people to post questions, and I have seen descendants matched up with their ancestors within hours. It’s incredible to watch. They’re also passionate about adding the history of the British Home Children to the Canadian school curriculum—something that Winny’s great-grandson, Jamie, alludes to in the book.
When I mentioned to the groups that I was writing a novel based on the British Home Children, I was welcomed with open arms and immediately invited to the Nova Scotia British Home Children Descendants’ reunion to speak about my book. Here in Nova Scotia, most of the children had been brought over by Middlemore Homes, an organization based in Birmingham, England. In fact, more than fifty organizations were involved in the child migrant scheme. I focused on Dr. Barnardo’s in this book because they brought in the largest number of children by far.
When I went to the reunion, I already had a sense of the larger history and a basic plotline in mind, but that wasn’t enough. I needed to understand the children’s experiences more deeply. I handed out surveys, mixing generalized questions about their ancestors with more personal ones, and within a week, I had more than two hundred responses. Many of them broke my heart. When I asked the descendants what kind of people their ancestors were (based on what they either remembered or had been told), the answers were mixed, but the adjective that kept showing up was bitter. Almost every one of them said their relative’s greatest pain came from never knowing what had become of their families. Their responses shaped the core characters of Winny, Mary, Jack, Edward, Cecil, Quinn, and Charlotte.
The carpentry shop at Dr. Barnardo’s Boys’ Home Stepney Causeway, in 1905. (Mary Evans / Peter Higginbottom Collection)
List of trunk contents for girls at Homes for Waifs and Strays from Our Waifs and Strays, March 1885.
Everything you read about in The Forgotten Home Child happened to the actual Home Children. The trunk Winny built and carried with her was real, as was the list of contents. Ill-fitting shoes like the ones she wore were not uncommon. Some children were forced to work in the snow in bare feet. The children’s exhaustion and hunger were all well-documented. One descendant wrote to me about her grandmother falling asleep in a haystack in the barn and being whipped for it. The granddaughter said, “When I grew up, she lived with us and she would take my school books to learn. When I would go to retrieve them, she would jump up and state, ‘I am not sleeping!’ ” The poignancy of that story, and the fact that decades later it still impacted that woman so deeply, wouldn’t let me go, so I wove it into Winny’s tale.
There were many other, even more difficult stories to accept. A large percentage of the girls, like Mary, suffered sexual abuse and rape. Many boys were beaten to death, like Quinn, and other children committed suicide. In 1905, fourteen-year-old Arnold Walsh arrived in Canada and was sent to work for a wealthy farmer in Quebec, where he lived in the barn. After seven months, he froze to death. Authorities discovered his undersized coffin buried in a pile of manure. A later autopsy showed he was undernourished, poorly clad, had severely frostbitten hands and feet, a fractured skull, and his body was full of pitchfork holes.
Those children who did survive their indenture were deeply affected by the experience, and many chose to keep their stories to themselves as Winny and Jack did. Many carried with them a lifetime of trauma, and that anguish reverberated as they married and started families of their own. One descendant described their father as loving, but said that he had a lifelong feeling of inferiority. Another said their grandfather was an angry man with no love to give. As I wrote about Winny and Jack in their later years, these were the emotions I kept in mind.
Despite being rejected by both England and Canada, more than thirty thousand British Home Boys fought in the World Wars. The incident with Jack, Edward, and Cecil in the Italian countryside in 1943 is lifted from the pages of history. The 1st Canadian Infantry Division and the 1st Canadian Armoured Brigade were both involved in Operation Husky, the seaborne invasion of the island of Sicily. Though the role of Canadians has been marginalized—some might even suggest forgotten—The Canadian Encyclopedia includes a sweet tribute to our boys:
On 18 July, the Canadians met their heaviest resistance to date at Valguarnera. Fighting before the town and on adjacent ridges resulted in 145 casualties, including 40 killed. But the Germans lost 250 men captured and an estimated 180 to 240 killed or wounded. Field marshal Albert Kesselring reported that his men were fighting highly-trained mountain troops. “They are called ‘Mountain Boys,’ ” he said, “and probably belong to the 1st Canadian Division.” German respect for the Canadian soldier was beginning.
But that respect was nonexistent on the farms where they’d been as children. Throughout the writing of the book, I couldn’t stop wondering how anyone could possibly treat children that way. Master Warren, of course, was the epitome of the baseness of human nature, but what about the Renfrews and the Adamses? Perhaps the hardest part of writing this story was trying to put myself in their place and understand where their callousness and cruelty came from. To do that, I looked more deeply at the harsh and unforgiving life in rural Canada in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While there is no excuse for what they did, I came to understand how it could have happened. Canadian farms were rural, isolated, and failing. The growing season was short, soil and water were unreliable, and the Great Depression was grinding the country into the dirt. Families already struggling with extreme poverty tried to have large families in order to work the farms, but in such terrible, remote conditions and without proper medical care, the child mortality rate was alarmingly high. So when these struggling farmers saw advertisements for British Home Children and realized they could pay so little to get help on their farms, they quickly sent in applications. They weren’t thinking about children, they were thinking of workers. That’s all they wanted, and they wanted them desperately. The sending agencies couldn’t keep up with all the requests—at one point Dr. Barnardo said there were seven applications for each child.
An unidentified British Home Boy ploughing a field at Barnardo’s Training Farm in Russell, Manitoba, 1900. The 8,960 acre (or fourteen square miles) industrial farm started in 1887 with accommodations for one hundred boys and closed twenty years later. (Library and Archives Canada / PA-117285)
The children, meanwhile, were told that going to Canada was the chance of a lifetime. As Winny’s story illustrates, many of them came from poverty-stricken families that could no longer support their children. In the mid-1800s, the child mortality rate in the UK was 26 percent (compared to the 0.5 percent of today). Children started working very young, toiling in terribly dangerous jobs underground, in chimneys, in factories, as matchmakers, as beggars, and worse. The streets were crowded with small, filthy urchins, their faces drawn with hunger. The workhouses were filled to bursting. Imagine Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Annie—but without the singing and dancing, as Jamie says. There was no future for them in England. Canada was supposed to be something completely different: a land of opportunity, offering adventure, income, and hope, not to mention clean air to breathe. The reality was quite the opposite for most. About 75 percent of the children who came here experienced abuse and neglect.
Which means that 25 percent did not, and that was also apparent in the survey responses I received. Plenty of descendants acknowledged that while many did suffer, their relatives viewed the emigration plan as an escape from a life that was not unlike those described in Dickens’s novels. Because their ancestors came to Canada, their children, and their children, were given a better future. I chose to tell these happier stories through sweet Charlotte. However, despite the economic opportunities she enjoyed and the love she received from the Carpenters, her character highlights one of the great myths about this chapter of history: That these children were mostly orphans. In fact, only about 2 percent did not have parents. The majority were surrendered to shelters like Dr. Barnardo’s Barkingside Home for Girls—often temporarily, while their parent(s) got back on their feet—or they were forcibly removed from families deemed unable to properly care for them. Just like with Charlotte, the children were deceived into believing they were unwanted or that their parents had died. Many of them never knew that their mothers and fathers were still very much alive and continued to search for their children for the rest of their lives.
While rare, reunions did happen, as they did in Charlotte’s case. And while these children, now adults, at last had some of their most urgent questions answered, it was far too late. I’ve read heartbreaking newspaper stories of siblings reuniting after forty, fifty, even sixty years, all across Canada. Sisters Mary and Marjory Johnson were finally reunited after sixty years, but by then, Marjory had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember Mary. Brothers Joe and Dennis Waterer met again after more than half a century of separation, only to discover they had lived ten minutes from each other for years. In Montreal, Daisy Bance and her younger brother Albert were reunited after eighty years when they were eighty-five and eighty-four, respectively.
Because of stories like these and the unflagging determination of the children’s descendants, awareness is growing. The monument Chrissie shows to Winny and Jamie in Park Lawn Cemetery in Etobicoke was erected in 2017, and it is one of quite a few British Home Children monuments across the country. Lori Oschefski, CEO of the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association (BHCARA), discovered the two mass graves of seventy-five British Home Children. After raising $16,000, Lori and other BHCARA volunteers identified the remains of every one of those children using archival records, death certificates, and cemetery plot cards. These children have been traced back to their families and connected to their family trees on Ancestry.ca. The following year, in 2018, September 28 was decreed National British Home Children Day in Canada. In 2019, more than two hundred major landmarks across Canada were voluntarily lit up for one special night to mark the 150th anniversary of the first shipload of children to arrive in Canada.
Lori Oschefski, CEO of the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association, unveiling the monument for two mass graves of British Home Children discovered in Park Lawn Cemetery, in Etobicoke, just outside of Toronto. (Judy Preston)
Thanks to the growing accessibility and popularity of genealogy, we now know that approximately 12 percent of Canada’s population—more than four million Canadians—are descended from British Home Children. Whether they chose to come to Canada or not, those children were integral in building our nation, which has now become what it was supposed to be then: a vast, welcoming land of opportunity. Because children like Winny chose to keep what they considered to be their shameful past lives to themselves, their contributions and sacrifices have been forgotten. It is their ancestors who are shining light on those dark times and by doing so, showing their respect and love. Now it is up to the people of Canada to remember these children and make sure they are never forgotten again.