Dear Readers,
When the subject of the British Home Children in Canada was suggested to me as a possible topic for a book, I confess I’d never heard of them. Not in all the time growing up in Ontario—where a large majority of these children were sent—and never in any of the educational studies I’d undertaken. So to find out about these children and the role they played in our country’s history was indeed surprising.
I learned that from the late 1860s up until about 1948, over one hundred thousand children of all ages were sent from the United Kingdom to Canada to be used as indentured laborers, mostly on Canadian farms. There were many organizations involved in the migration of children out of England, but I chose to focus on the homes run by Dr. Thomas Barnardo.
Of the one hundred thousand children sent to Canada, twenty thousand (some reports say thirty thousand) came from the Dr. Barnardo’s Homes. Although Dr. Barnardo’s organization was not the only one involved in this endeavor, he became the most influential figure in child migration of the last half of the nineteenth century.
Though these children were believed to be orphans, only a small percentage actually fell into that category. The majority of children placed in homes such as Dr. Barnardo’s came from families that, through sickness or the death of one of the parents, had fallen on hard times. In many instances, this was thought to be a temporary measure until the family’s circumstances improved. Countless parents did not realize that their sons and daughters would be shipped off to another country.
Once in Canada, the children were sent to various receiving homes across the country to be distributed to the farmers who were looking for help. Though the intentions of the people in charge were good, and they believed they would be providing these children with the opportunity for a better life, the reality did not measure up to the ideal. The majority of children were treated miserably by their employers and made to feel subhuman, as though they didn’t matter.
Not surprisingly, as they grew into adulthood, most of these children never spoke about the topic because they were either too traumatized or too ashamed to relive it. In fact, often their own families had no idea of the difficult circumstances that had initially brought their loved ones to this country or the hardships they had endured.
In Ontario, a lady named Lori Oschefski spearheaded a movement to unearth this chapter in both England and Canada’s past and shed light on these brave souls. Her own mother was one of these children and had kept it a secret until well into her eighties. Ms. Oschefski is the founder of the British Home Children Advocacy and Research Association. This organization has quickly moved to the forefront of the British Home Child awareness movement, not only in Canada but across the world. Ms. Oschefski is very active in communities across Ontario, bringing the story of the British Home Children to the public by giving many presentations on the subject.
I did consult several times with Ms. Oschefski via her Facebook group, and I thank her and the other members who offered me suggestions and stories of their own relatives.
I must confess that while I tried my best to be as factual as possible, I have taken some artistic license with a few of the situations that occur in the book. Although I used the actual name of the superintendent of the Barnardo receiving home at the time, a Mr. Hobday, I made up all interactions with this character, and he is strictly a fictional representation of the real Mr. Hobday. I also made up the cemetery and the rows of white crosses at the Hazelbrae receiving home in Peterborough. I believe the Hazelbrae girls were actually buried in a local cemetery; however, I thought it would be more dramatic to have a private burial ground on the property itself. I did try to find out the name of the person in charge of the home at the time of my story but was unable to come up with the information, so I created Mrs. Whitaker. Again, she is a purely fictional representation, who in no way reflects on any real directress who worked there. The actual Hazelbrae residence, renamed the Margaret Cox Home for Girls in 1912, closed in 1922 or 1923, and was completely torn down by 1939. Today, a black granite heritage plaque stands near the site with the names of the over nine thousand children who came through Hazelbrae and the dates they arrived.
Any mistakes in my portrayal of the Aspinall children’s experience with the Dr. Barnardo organization are purely my own and do not in any way reflect on the research I’ve done in writing this book. I only hope that my story helps shed a little light on such a daunting subject.
Interestingly enough, another wonderful Christian author named Carrie Turansky was writing about this topic at the same time I was. Her novel, entitled No Ocean Too Wide, came out in June 2019. It’s a wonderful book, and I recommend reading it to see how her fictional account handles the same subject matter.
If you care to learn more about these children and their stories, please check out the British Home Children Facebook page for lots of great information: www.facebook.com/groups/Britishhomechildren/. I also recommend https://upsanddownsofhomechildren.wordpress.com/about/ and https://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/.
I hope you enjoyed Quinn’s quest to find his siblings and the romance he finds along the way.
Blessings until the next time,
Susan