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Film "Oranges and Sunshine", about children who were forcibly relocated from Britain to Australia
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Message 1.Â
Posted by Thomas_II (U14690627) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
I´ve read that article yesterday about this film dealing with an topic from the past-war-times in Britain. It´s terrible to take note of that, but what isn´t mentioned in the article is "why" were these children taken from their parents and "relocated" to Australia.
Maybe someone on these boards know something about it? -
Message 2
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
Thomas, it was an ill fated decision to send orphans, and children of single mothers who were in children's homes, to Australia. I don't think it was done initially for bad reasons but from what I read no one appeared to check too closely about who would look after them at the other end. At a time when having a child out of wedlock, or being that child, was frowned upon by society, those charged with finding places for the chldren in care must have thought they had found a good solution.
I could have been one of them but I was adopted in England, though I am Welsh by birth. Even though I was adopted and happy in my new life, I was at times mocked and called things like 'spawn of the devil'. So what the children in Australia went through beggars belief.
The subsequent cover ups were unforgiveable. -
Message 3
Posted by Thomas_II (U14690627) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
Thanks for your interesting reply, Silver Jenny.
I´ve got the impression from that article, that these children were "captured and deported" to Australia. It´s remarkable that this practise continued up to the 1960s and I´m asking myself, that in a time, some 15 to 20 years after WWII, how could this been handled legally, aside from the mothers decision to give the child away for adoption by her own will?
These children were told that they "are orphans", even despite the fact that they weren´t because their parents, or at least their mother, was still alive. A cruel lie to them and a big unjustice.
I think that if I can see that film in a cinema in my town, I´ll go to watch it.
I´m sorry for your experiences during your childhood, fortunately you´ve got good adoptive parents, as you said. -
Message 4
Posted by raundsgirl (U2992430) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
They weren't all orphans, some had both parents living and had gone into a children's home 'temporarily' for some reason. The children were told their parents were dead (and vice versa). It's something that quite often crops up on the Family History board.
You may find this website interesting. It was a shameful episode in our history.
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Message 5
Posted by islanddawn (U7379884) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
were "captured and deported" to Australia. It´s remarkable that this practise continued up to the 1960sÂ
Surprising for Europe possibly Thomas but not surprising for Australia. Australia was an extremely conservative country, and because of it's isolation was, until recent times, somewhat behind Europe in social attitudes and in other respects also.
You may have heard of the Stolen Generations? It was Australian government practice to remove indigenous and Torres Straight Island children from their homes so they could be raised with white families in an effort of "Anglicisation". This barbaric government policy was carried out from approx. 1869 until 1969 and, in some places, well into the 1970s and left untold damage to those children (now adults) who were torn from their parents and communities. The government has, recently, officially apologised for past actions, but imo, it is posssibly too little and far too late for reparations.
So no, not at all surprising that Australia, at that time, was complicit in the relocation of British children from orphanages and homes. After all, it is not the first time that Britain had shipped it's unwanted down south, the real shame of it the second time, was that there were two democratically elected governments involved, unlike the first. -
Message 6
Posted by raundsgirl (U2992430) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
There was the 'White Australia' policy that underpinned the '£10 Poms' (Ten-pound-Poms) scheme. -
Message 7
Posted by wollemi (U2318584) on Wednesday, 25th May 2011
Hello Thomas
Poor children had long been shipped out of Britain
The scheme began in the 1860s and was originally to Canada, the children were called "British Â鶹ԼÅÄ Children"
It was begun under the auspices of British charities with the intent of relocating poor children from British slums to a healthier life in Canada, best espoused by the later writings of Kingsley Fairbridge.. The boys worked as farm labourers, the girls as domestic servants. They were supposed to attend school, although it seems many didn't and there were problems with maltreatment and runaways and a few suicides. A British Governmenrt inquiry in the 1920s then restricted the age sent to teenagers and the scheme continued until the 1940s. About 100,000 were sent to Canada
So there was a precedent, postwar, when the scheme began again as a response to postwar deprivation in Britain. This time it was to Australia, NZ South Africa and Rhodesia, and in smaller numbers, probably about 10,000. The age limit was scrapped and very young children were sent out to these countries
It has been more of an issue in Australia than Canada as the 'children' are still alive.
I think the other issue is that Bowlby's theory of attachment only became published in the 1960s/1970s which is when the scheme was terminated. -
Message 8
Posted by Caro (U1691443) on Thursday, 26th May 2011
Yes, it was by no means only to Australia. This caused a stir about fifteen or twenty years ago when Margaret Humphreys brought it to public notice. The scandal isn't that children were adopted into another country but that both they and their parents were lied to about it. They did tend to be children who were already in homes for one reason or another, but some parents at least had expected to take them back at some time.
But of course, not all the children had unhappy lives afterwards. When this was in the news here, some children had had a very bad time of it, and others had as happy a life as they could have wished. There's an interesting timeline here: The practice began as early as 1617 to the American colonies. During wartime, of course, children were often sent away with their parents' blessing, in the hopes it would save their lives. (I wonder what the numbers of children killed in bombs over Britain were compared with those torpedoed on their way to new countries.) -
Message 9
Posted by Thomas_II (U14690627) on Thursday, 26th May 2011
Thanks to all of you and your posts which gave me some enlightment on the subject.
I´ve had a look on that website of BHC and I´ve some understanding for the person who initiated it. I can´t understand the rudeness of some other people complaining about her, as it is stated there.
These stories show for what the British used their Empire among other things. It´s one thing to send a child abroad for adoption so that it can have a better future, but it is another to take it away from their parents without their and the childs agreement. In all, a difficult matter.
This seems to fit into some of like Charles Dickens stories from the Victorian era. Unbelievable that it was practised up to the late 1960s. -
Message 10
Posted by clematised (U3233879) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
The earlier film The Leaving of Liverpool told of the hardships that these children faced and was a real tear jerking movie in the 90s and the Book written by the same auther Margaret Humphries a Nottingham Social Worker.
This is a wonderful website for those looking for their lost relatives that may have been sent abroad and has a name search.
Edna -
Message 11
Posted by Silver Jenny (U12795676) on Saturday, 28th May 2011
Thomas, I doubt very much is children would have been asked what they wanted back then. Grownups made decisions, children complied.
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Message 12
Posted by Hyopocon (U7605718) on Monday, 29th August 2011
I´ve read that article yesterday about this film dealing with an topic from the past-war-times in Britain. It´s terrible to take note of that, but what isn´t mentioned in the article is "why" were these children taken from their parents and "relocated" to Australia.
Maybe someone on these boards know something about it?Â
While I have not seen the film, I have no doubt that many of these children were victims of Government evacuation policies to safe-guard civilians - which effectively broke up families, so it was easy to home in on the adults and involve them in the war effort. The fact that those adults, some of them, gravitated away from their own children and found it easy to take up with fresh partners - GIs ? - while not anticipated in government circles, tells us something more about those adults, who it appears are less than reputable, with hind-sight, than the glossy war-heroic tales that are projected down the years about that era and those people. While there were - undoubtedly, sad stories of war casualties and orphaned children, it is not the complete story, as Margaret Humphries reveals. -
Message 13
Posted by wollemi (U2318584) on Monday, 29th August 2011
As I understand, most of the children were already in care institutions postwar. to do with postwar poverty and parent(s)' inability to care for their children. Many seemed to be single parent families and there was a high degree of illegitimacy amongst the group - that's probably more the result of wartime disruption to families
I think the charities concerned saw it as an opportunity for the children to make something of their lives . There's also an element though of getting rid of a potential social problem. Britain had long exported its difficult youngsters from its underclass to the Empire
What was extraordinary is what I mentioned in a post upthread - that a previous British parliamentary investigation into the Canadian system had found that young children fared so poorly that a ban was placed on shipping out anyone younger than school leaving age (14). This was ignored in the postwar programme
Some indeed did make successful lives. One is a recently retired Australian Senator (ie Upper House) who had originally been shipped out to Rhodesia at age 2, later migrated to Australia, had a succesful business career before entering parliament -
Message 14
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 30th August 2011
Thomas
Of course there was a long tradition in England- and probably elsewhere- that for children to get on in this world, especially boys, it was best to get them away from their mothers and fathers at an appropriate age and place them with people who could widen their experience and train them for life.. This was so for most classes of society who could afford it. The children of nobles etc being placed in "good houses" where they could work as liveried pages, get to understand the high society that they were destined to live in (including the life of those who served them in domestic service) and make useful contacts for their future life.. though in the case of Thomas Becket his time spent in the household of the then Archbishop of Canterbury left him with such a high view of that role that his quarrel with his friend Henry II led to his murder.
Under the Poor Law started up under Elizabeth I it became a parish responsibility to help the children of paupers to break out of the cycle of poverty and deprivation that they were born into, and to place such children as apprentices at the parish expense because the parents could not afford such fees. I read recently that the use of Parish apprentices in this way was one of the crucial cost advantages enjoyed by the port of Liverpool as it challenged Bristol's place in the Atlantic slave trade. Many of the Liverpool slave ships were manned by parish apprentices, much cheaper than ordinary seamen.
During the great industrial boom of the French Wars 1793-1815 the ongoing Labour problems of booming Lancashire were seen as a solution to London's population problem, as outlined by T.R. Malthus in his great essay on the Principle of Population c1799. The UK population was booming and the poor had too many children encouraged- it was argued- by the change in the running of the Poor Law which resulted in handing parents cash in proportion to the size of their families. But London Poor Law overseers found that Lancashire industrialists were only to happy to take the Pauper children of the London region and train them as "factory apprentices". No fee. And no money to be paid to the parents.
After the Napoleonic Wars the factory apprenticeship scheme was improved by act of Parliament. But by then Lancashire had massive unemployment and the bosses were able to replace the apprentices with "free children" often taken to the mill to work alongside their parents, but in other cases sent out to work by parents who just stayed at home.. By the time of Engel's study of the life of the working people of Lancashire- the way ahead for the world- it was possible to believe - as Marx and Engels argued in the Communist Manifesto- that family life as such no longer existed. Marriage was prostitution- a woman getting her keep in return for sex. And children were subject to vicious exploitation by their parents.
This view of working class life in the poorest districts was later embellished upon by the great British Socialist Beatrice Webb who did very important seminal work on the great prevalence of incest in working class families. But long before that Victorian philanthropy had become obsessed with a "save the children" approach which meant taking them out of the control and influence of their parents and placing them under those who would improve their prospects.. This was especially the case with education which even many parents embraced as a way that their children might escape from the problems that blighted their own lives, and certainly this was the approach taken by inner city missions and organisations like Dr. Barnadoes.
The principle of aided migration was formalised by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 that initially offered unemployed or underemployed paupers the chance of being moved to Lancashire- booming once again and short of Labour. But there was also a change in emphasis to going to the colonies- still very much associated by penal transportation. As the USA began to prosper and offer good future prospects the whole idea of assisted emigration, for example by trade unions came to be seen in a much more positive light, for Britain was still facing the Malthusian nightmare that seemed to be born out when the "Natural Checks" that Malthus had predicted arrived. There had been a great war, but now what was more important was a new "plague" cholera (c1831) and then the potato blight that causes widespread famine, especially the great Irish Famines which have resonated down through Irish history ever since.
All of a sudden the colonies were seen as virgin lands ripe with opportunity.
Cass -
Message 15
Posted by CASSEROLEON (U11049737) on Tuesday, 30th August 2011
At this very moment Jamelia is visiting a Victorian Workhouse in her TV programme about single mothers.. The Board Workhouse was another part of the New Poor Law after 1834.. No money was to be paif to any pauper.. Instead they could enter the workhouse.. As part of the principle of "less eligibility" and in pursuit of Malthusian principles of population limitation, even families that went into the workhouse got split up into the women's ward, the men's ward and the children's ward.. Those who could not afford to support their families could not expect the public to support a family life that was superior to whatever the poorest person could achieve by their own efforts, and they certainly could not be allowed to breed more children.
But as I write she is interviewing people who had to live with the stigma of being someone who people would call by the b- word.. If I hear right a man who as a boy had to go to the workhouse with his mother when her family threw her out for getting pregnant a second time out of wedlock.
Even in the Fifties and early Sixties it was very common for even young married people from working class backgrounds- often only 19 or 20- to have to live in one room of one of their parent's houses, and parents often felt very bitter about daughters who got pregnant and produced another burden on the household.. What one also has to remember is that women in their forties - and therefore quite capable of being grandparents- were more or less late Middle-Aged compared to today.
And what one has to remember is that, while there are now many single-mothers, there many of those children who would have ended up getting sent abroad in the past would now be amongst the large number of foetuses that get aborted every year.
Is some chance of life better than no life at all?
The great art historian wrote that life everywhere and at all times is the same with no progress, and that at all moments of his life he would have been prepared to exchange his life for a never having ever existed..
It came as a shock to me to see the idea put in print.. Times were hard and it was not uncommon for people to wish that they never had been born.
Cass -
Message 16
Posted by clematised (U3233879) on Saturday, 3rd September 2011
I have just watched this very moving and emotional story of Margaret Humphreys research in Australia to these children and it touched her deeply and emotionally during her time in Australia trying to re unite these children with their parents, and their stories of the sufferinng as young children being treated as slave labour and abuse
I have been waiting to see it and really glad I did
Edna
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