Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
The Forgotten Children (11 page)
Not all the Fairbridge children remember the food being bad. John Harris, who arrived at Fairbridge as a nine-year-old in 1948, feels the choice of food was too limited, but he says he wouldn’t complain about the quality. Joyce Drury also thought the food at Fairbridge was okay, particularly compared with her experiences in the late 1930s in England when she was a small girl and food was scarce:
I found the food all right, especially when Mr Oates was the gardener and there’d be times when there would be lots of fruit growing on trees, and the strawberries, and we’d go out mushrooming … Or someone would say a farmer had rung up to say, ‘We’ve got all these apples that are blown off the tree.’ So we had fruit … [In] England fruit was a thing I got for Christmas in my little Christmas sock, where we got a few nuts, a comic and a piece of fruit and that was the Christmas stocking.
By and large, Fairbridge children were quite healthy. There were the usual illnesses and injuries that could be expected in a school of 150 children, but kids quickly toughened up when they arrived and it was unusual for us to be off sick.
Most of the children’s ailments were treated in the village by a not-always-qualified nursing sister, who lived in tiny quarters attached to the back of the little hospital near the front gate of the school. The surgery opened immediately after breakfast and again every afternoon at 5 p.m., after the work was done, because it was assumed any health problems would not interfere with work. In more serious cases, children would be taken to the doctor in Molong or admitted to the Molong Hospital. Children were not permitted to stay in their bed in the cottage dormitory if they were ill – they had to go to this little Fairbridge hospital, where there was a four-bed ward for those who needed it. On occasions there were more serious health problems in the village, including an outbreak of hepatitis in 1959, which forced Fairbridge to quarantine much of the farm school and prevent children from going to school for several weeks.
There was no regular dental care and we would be taken into Molong if a tooth had to be taken out. But Fairbridge kids generally had good teeth because we ate very little sugar and few sweets.
The basic health care at Fairbridge was adequate for most children, but not for those with complicated medical conditions. Christina Murray, who arrived in Australia in 1939 as a seven-year-old, had serious medical problems that went unrecognised and untreated:
I was the fruitcake! I was the biggest idiot … I had difficulty with everything. If we had sweets, because I didn’t know at the time that I had sugar diabetes, I just went off my rocker … I was living in no man’s land … If I went to the cottage mother and said I had a headache, she’d say, ‘You haven’t got a headache; it’s only in your mind.’ So in the end you just suffered.
When I was twenty-three the doctor came back and said, ‘You’ve got sugar diabetes; you’ve had it all your life.’ … He asked, ‘Do you have headaches?’
And I said, ‘Yes, I’ve had terrible headaches. I’ve had them all my life – or the last ten years.’
And … he said, ‘We’ve checked that out and there’s a tumour.’ Nobody [at Fairbridge] knew that I had a medical problem, which I think is atrocious.
In England, my brothers and I had regularly attended the local church and Sunday school, and had weekly religious instruction at school, so we were not surprised by the religious observance at Fairbridge – but it did play a bigger role in our daily lives than in the past.
Before eating breakfast in Nuffield Hall Woods would read a prayer and then each cottage would be rostered in turn to provide a boy and a girl to read the same two prayers every day.
We were also expected to say grace before every meal. At breakfast we would all chant: ‘For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful, through Jesus Christ’s sake. Amen.’ Before lunch, to a single note struck by one of the girls on the piano, we’d sing, ‘For health and strength and daily food we praise thy name, O Lord.’
Margaret McLaughlan recalls the ritual:
The girl read a verse out of the prayer book, then the boy read a verse out of the prayer book, then Mr Woods … I think he had about two different prayers he would read. Then we would all have to say grace. Then, if I was doing prayers – because they would change the children about from time to time – I’d have to walk over to the piano and press the middle C on the piano as a key note for everyone to sing grace … Then I would go back to my table and the boy would go back to his table.
When he designed the child-migrant scheme Kingsley Fairbridge said it would be ‘non-denominational Christian’ and that worship would be optional for the children. In his 1909 speech to the Oxford Colonial Club, he said: ‘Priests of any Christian denomination passing through the school area may be permitted to hold meetings’, but ‘the children will be under no compulsion to attend them.’
In practice, Fairbridge was almost exclusively Anglican and attendance at church was compulsory. There were only a couple of Catholic children at Fairbridge because the Catholic church ran its own child-migrant schemes. We were all ordered to attend the church service in Nuffield Hall conducted by the Anglican vicar from St John’s in Molong. After breakfast on Sunday we cleared up, moved the big tables to one side of the hall and put out the benches in rows, as pews for the service. An altar that was kept at the back of the hall was drawn out and covered, and two candles were lit for the service.
Then, on the first Sunday of each month, we went to the Church of England service at St John’s, which was up toward the top of Molong. While Fairbridge kids welcomed any chance to get out of the farm school, most of us found these services excruciatingly dull. As Daphne Brown remembers:
And then Sunday was the same as Saturday but we used to have to go to church and I hated it because they talked about was the resurrection and all that. They never made it interesting for the children.
The old Fairbridge bus, which took us to church, was famous in the central west of New South Wales for several decades after World War II. Built in 1942, it had a normal steel chassis but because of wartime shortages, its frame and bodywork above the level of the windows were made of timber. Only five of these ‘austerity’ buses were ever made and Fairbridge bought this one when the government bus service sold them off cheaply in 1948. Although only licensed to carry twenty-nine passengers, practically all the children from the village – often over 100 – would be packed aboard, with most standing or hanging out the open doorways for the six-kilometre trip to town.
The bus had its own song, which most of us at Fairbridge learnt before we knew the words to the Fairbridge Farm School song. There were a number of variations but the most popular version, sung to the tune of ‘The Road to Gundagai’, was:
There’s an old-fashioned bus,
And it’s meant to carry us,
Along the road to Fairbridge Farm.
It’s got water in its petrol tank and sawdust in its gears
And it hasn’t seen a garage,
For over fifty years,
Oh my Lord, Oh my Lord,
Here comes Woodsy and his horde
Along the road to
Fairbridge Farm
David Wilson, who spent more than ten years at Fairbridge after arriving as a six-year-old in 1951, recalls the tedium of going into Molong for the monthly church service:
Of course, every first Sunday of the month we’d go into Molong to the C. of E. church there. And Ruth Woods would play the piano. And if she ever caught us talking, she’d tell her husband and the boss used to cane us. And yet he was twice as noisy, snoring away.
When the collection purse was passed around some of the more dutiful children put in a few coins, while others, pretending to be putting money in, were actually stealing.
In the original plans for the Fairbridge settlement at Molong it was always envisaged that the village would have its own chapel, but it was not until 1961 that enough money was raised to build one. After many years of fundraising, driven largely by Ruth Woods, an old army hut was bought from the nearby town of Parkes, brought to the village and converted into a chapel. I remember being off school with a skin infection and spending a week giving the little church its first coat of glossy white paint. (After the Fairbridge Farm School was closed down in 1974 the building was sold again and moved to the local town of Yeoval, to be converted into a private home.)
From time to time children from other Protestant religions came to Fairbridge, and they were allowed to attend their own church. Joyce Drury remembers:
Sunday was funny … because I was Wesleyan and those of us that had a different religion to Anglican had to go to the Anglican service in the morning. Then Sunday afternoon might have been free time for everyone else but we had to go into Molong to the Methodist church … So I became confirmed in the Anglican Church and the Methodist Church. And I hated it because we had to stay quiet for church. And we had to get dressed up and walk all the way into Molong for church, I can remember that.
The Miller family – Reg, Doug, Gwen and Kathy – came out to Fairbridge in 1951 from Grimsby in Lincolnshire, and their brother Huey followed a year later. They were part of a Roman Catholic family of ten children. When their mother died, their father, who ‘hated the nuns’, arranged for them to go to Fairbridge. Gwen recalls how they would all attend the Catholic church in Molong:
We were the first Catholics at Fairbridge and the nuns in England were in touch with the nuns in Molong. They paid for a taxi to take us to the church in Molong and bring us back again. And if we had Holy Communion once a month, the nuns fed us breakfast and it was the best meal we ever had while we were at Fairbridge.
No doubt inspired by the Miller children, the enterprising Paddy O’Brien, the eldest boy in our group that had come to Fairbridge together in 1959, approached Woods to say that he and his sisters, Mary and Myrtle, were Methodists and he wanted the three of them to attend the Methodist service in Molong each week. Like many Australian country towns, Molong, despite having a population of barely 2000, boasted a fine range of stone churches: Church of England, Catholic, Presbyterian, Methodist and Baptist. Not to be outdone by Paddy, my older brother Dudley approached Woods and told him we were Presbyterians and wished to worship in our own church. This was not entirely true. We had never been baptised and as children had attended any number of different Sunday schools, usually the one closest to where we were living at the time. But it worked and it gave us an excuse to get off the farm every Sunday, when the other kids were obliged to go to the Anglican service in Nuffield Hall.
It wasn’t easy to get to the Presbyterian church every week, due to a lack of reliable transport provided by Fairbridge. Eventually Paddy was old enough to get a driver’s licence and drive one of the Fairbridge trucks, but this was only any good to us when the timing of the Methodist and Presbyterian services coincided. Mostly we were happy to walk or just hitch a ride.
For all the religion at Fairbridge, only a few carried it into their adult lives, such as Roland Bigrigg, who became an Anglican vicar, and Malcolm ‘Flossy’ Field, who became a server and deacon of the altar in the Anglo-Catholic tradition.
Lennie Magee left Fairbridge with no religious conviction whatsoever but became ‘born again’ later in life. While at Fairbridge, Lennie didn’t take religion any more seriously than the rest of us:
On the night I was confirmed into the Anglican church I was with two other kids stealing chocolates from the shop next door … On Sundays the vicar … inflicted some of the dullest and [most] tedious sermons ever concocted upon us hapless kids. Unwittingly, these men in white dresses robbed God of any life and personality.
4
For most Fairbridge children, religious observance was something you had to do at the farm school, and you left it behind when you finally left Fairbridge.
Within a few weeks of arriving at Fairbridge we began to develop friendships with the kids who were already at the farm school. In addition to the other boys in Canonbar Cottage I started to make friends with a few of the boys my age who went with me each day on the bus to school. Apart from the fact that most of them expected never to see their parents again, I wasn’t aware of any great differences in our circumstances and within a few weeks I was feeling more settled, and very much a Fairbridge kid.
F
AMILIES
Contrary to popular belief, hardly any of the children who went to Fairbridge were orphans. Most came from very poor families whose parents – often single or abandoned – had been persuaded that Fairbridge could provide a better life for their children. Further contact with their children was discouraged from the moment kids were put in the care of Fairbridge, even to the extent that parents were asked not to go to wave goodbye when the ship set sail for Australia. This was not, however, made clear to parents when they agreed to hand over care of their offspring to the farm school.
Some children had already been placed in homes in the UK by their parents before they were sent to Australia under the Fairbridge scheme. These children may have been placed in institutions because of economic hardship or some other circumstance that made it too hard for them to be brought up by their mother or father. But some, such as David Wilson, feel they were simply unwanted and are still bitter about that:
I always remember we got on the train at Newcastle and the lady with the child welfare took us to London and our mother stood on the Newcastle railway station and that was the last time I’ve ever seen my mother.
I would never send my children, like my mother did, you know, a five-year-old. Getting rid of kids because you don’t want them. Because my parents – not my father so much – but my mother, she didn’t want us. Couldn’t wait to get rid of us.
Gwen Miller also thought she and her sister and brothers were unwanted by their father, and that being part of a big extended Catholic family, they could have stayed in Grimsby.
My mother died when I was five years old. She left ten children aged seven months to fifteen years old. I didn’t ever forgive my father for giving us away … We had wonderful family support and we were a close family … We felt abandoned. We
were
abandoned. He sent the youngest four children 12,000 miles away to a place somewhere where not one family member could visit. There was no need to send us away. We had a family, we weren’t poor yet he still gave us away … I hated him till the day he died.Well, I wish it had never happened. I never forgave my father. He did that to us, didn’t he? And it wasn’t necessary.
About being sent to Fairbridge, Derek Moriarty says: ‘I’m bitter about why I went there. I’m also bitter about the fact that my mother knew where we were the whole time.’
When Derek was three and his brother Paul was one they were placed in different children’s homes after his parents separated.
Now, when he was five and I was seven, one day they said, ‘Your brother’s coming,’ and I didn’t even know I had a brother. Then, just before my eighth birthday or just after – it might have been just after, I think – somebody came along and said, ‘You guys are going out to Australia.’ And, even though we were attending school, Australia was just a name. I didn’t know anything about it, didn’t know where it was. ‘Would you like to go?’ they asked, and I said, ‘No, I’m quite happy here where I am.’ Which I was. It was only a small orphanage and it was quite good, although it was very, very strict, and there were things we had to do that we didn’t like. But Paul saw it as an adventure and so I said, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’
After nearly seventy years, Margaret McLaughlan is still saddened about becoming a child migrant in 1939 as a five-year-old because nobody wanted her or her six-year-old brother. She says her mother was in Scotland while they lived with their father in England, and both children were neglected.
I’ve got reports – they’re in my cupboard there – from when I left England to come to Australia from … these orphanages, that we were just little urchins, my brother and I. No one wanted the McLaughlan kids. No one wanted to own, nobody wanted to adopt them. So they might as well go to Australia. And I cry every time I look at them. That’s very, very sad. Nobody wanted my brother and I. After reading these reports many years later, it really distresses me to think that we are all God’s children, and it can happen to absolutely anyone. And it happened to hundreds – many a thousand children went through what I went through.
Other Fairbridge children have no idea how they ended up in children’s homes in England. David Eva has no recollection of ever being in a family and only remembers being in homes:
I never knew my parents and I was put in this home when I suppose I was three or four … I can’t remember too much at all. I didn’t like it there. It was sort of like a prison camp.
One day somebody came into the home and said to me, ‘Do you want to go to Australia?’ I think the other place was South Africa, I could be wrong.
The only time David remembers seeing his mother was shortly before he left England:
We were having all these vaccinations and somebody came into the place and said to me, ‘David, we’d like you to go and see your mother, she’s in hospital,’ and I can remember so plainly going in the car and going to this hospital and seeing this woman in bed. And she said to me, ‘I’m your mother.’
Then she asked, ‘Do you want to go to Australia?’ And I said, ‘Oh, yes,’ you know, the boat trip, six weeks on the big boat.
And she said to me, ‘I’ll give you something to remember me by.’ And it was a watch. I haven’t got it now but … I can remember that watch. She also gave me a letter case with envelopes and where I could write. I never saw her again and she never wrote to me, and that was it … There was no hugging or anything like that. She was sitting in bed. I don’t know what was wrong with her. That was all. Then I went back to Knockholt and then, of course, it was full steam ahead.
While there were many children who came to Fairbridge from children’s homes, most were from poor families who had been convinced that Fairbridge would provide their children with a way out of the poverty cycle. For these parents, signing over their children was an enormous sacrifice, made in the hope their children would have a better future than if they stayed in the UK. Daphne Brown’s mother turned to Fairbridge in desperation:
My father left my mother when I was about three, and she had a very hard time because of the war. There was no money and my sister and I were at school and when Mum got work … we had to sit and wait or play in the streets … So, one day she came and asked us if we’d like to live in Australia, and of course we thought it was great.
Joyce Drury, who was a child of the Depression, says her parents sent her and her siblings to Fairbridge because they loved them:
I came basically because we were poor, but we had a happy family. I didn’t ever hear Mum and Dad have an argument. We always knew that we were loved, and we didn’t have that sense of them sending us away, but they were doing this out of caring for us.
Dad … was a pianist, and with the Depression they weren’t wanting him to play the piano, and he was fixing pianos and never had any money and he ended up selling shoelaces door to door and my mother, who hadn’t worked at all … found night work, nursing old people. So they really wanted the best for us.
My brothers had to go and find bottles, and they would go and get, like, sixpence for half a dozen bottles, and then they would go to the biscuit factory and get this bag of broken biscuits … And that bag of broken biscuits would be our meal. There was no money for food but I can’t remember going hungry.
Joyce’s mother was one of the few parents to say goodbye to her children at the wharf when they sailed from England:
My mother told me how she felt when she left and when the ship pulled out … She was very sad, but she walked past … the church and thought, ‘What have I done? What have I done?’ and went into the church and she said she just sat in the back, right at the back, crying and crying. And then a real peace came over her and she knew she had done the right thing.
Malcolm Field, or ‘Flossy’ as all the Fairbridge kids knew him because of his mop of very blond hair, was one of the few children to come to Fairbridge who was not from a deprived background. Flossy says that his father was a university science graduate and a structural engineer who worked secretly during the war on the development of jet aircraft. After the war the family went to live in a seventeenth-century rectory in Dorset.
In 1946 … my parents rented an old rectory. My mother had help in the house … there were eighteen rooms; there were stone floors in the kitchen and the scullery … We each had our own bedroom. There was a main staircase and then there was a servant’s staircase … They were our best years.
In 1949 his father developed a brain tumour and died, leaving a wife and four children. Laurie was ten; Malcolm was seven; Keith was five; and Jane was three.
So things suddenly changed. We were scattered among relatives for six months while mother sort of coped … So, after she got herself sorted out we came home and she bought a house in Yeovil, took in a lodger, and after some time, the lodger became a boyfriend and he was married so she couldn’t marry him, but she changed her name by deed poll to his name, and his name was Wriggler. Not a nice person.
Within a couple of years the family had moved to Southampton and Flossy’s mum was driving around in an MG sports car. One afternoon after school Flossy asked why Keith and Jane were not at home, and he was told, ‘They’ve gone to Australia.’
She’d heard about Fairbridge. She wanted to spend more time with the boyfriend … She wanted more room for the lodgers … this is what she told the social services, the children’s officer, ‘because I don’t have much income’.
Six months later she decided, ‘Oh, I’ll get rid of the other two.’ So, Laurie and I end up in Knockholt, but within two days she came up in her sports car and took us back home.
After the summer holidays, Flossy recalls, his mother decided that they would all migrate to Australia.
Not on the £10 [assisted passage scheme]. She paid her way, first class on the
Strathaird
. Anyway, Eric Wriggler, the boyfriend, and her were to have one cabin and Laurie and I had the other cabin. And when we got to the ship – no sign of Eric Wriggler. He’d dumped her.
Flossy says that within a week of sailing, his mother had forgotten Wriggler and had struck up a relationship with the waiter at their table, who was a good ten years her junior:
So we arrive in Australia. My mum sends a telegram to Fairbridge to say that she was coming up and Mr Woods had told Keith and Jane, ‘Your mother’s coming to visit you.’ So Jane told all the girls in Rose Cottage, ‘My mother’s coming to visit me,’ because not many children had parents coming out to visit.
Meanwhile, Flossy’s mother and Mark the waiter were enjoying themselves in Sydney before he was due to sail back to England.
After a week, she didn’t bother going up to Fairbridge, only 180 miles. Forgot about them. Next thing, we’re on the ship, going back to England, because Mark was a steward and had to go back to England, so why shouldn’t we go back, first class all the way.
Within a week of arriving back in England, Flossy and Laurie were returned to the Fairbridge house at Knockholt in Kent by their mother. They sailed with a party of children for the Fairbridge Farm School on the S.S.
Chitral
on 19 December 1952, qualifying as probably the only people to have migrated to Australia from Britain twice in the same year.
Before a child was allowed to go out to the Fairbridge Farm School his or her parent or guardian was required to sign over legal guardianship. The form they were required to sign read:
I, being the father, mother, guardian, person having the actual custody of the child named _________ hereby declare that I consent to his/her emigration to Canada/Australia through the Fairbridge Society and I further authorize the said Society and the Officers to exercise in Canada/Australia all the functions as guardians, including power to have carried out such medical and/or surgical treatment as may be considered necessary for the child’s welfare.
Few were aware that in signing away guardianship they relinquished all rights to their children and would find it practically impossible ever to get them back, even when the children were dreadfully unhappy at Fairbridge and their parents made every effort to get them home.
As a British Government report into child migration in 1953 noted:
There have been a few cases in which the parents have followed their children to Australia, but this is not encouraged as the child scheme is primarily for those children who have been deprived of a normal home life. The Child Immigration Officer in London and the voluntary organisations have therefore been asked to do their utmost to select children whose parents are not likely to follow them.
1
For most of its existence, Fairbridge adopted the attitude that it had rescued children from deprived environments and was taking over where parents had failed or were irresponsible. Fairbridge took a dim view of parents who tried to later reunite with their children. At one stage, in a letter to the British Government seeking further support, the director of Fairbridge argued that because the farm school offered fresh opportunities to children, it was undesirable for the children to ever return home.
We feel that such opportunities should be given to more children who need a fresh start in life away from an unhappy environment in Britain – apart from the risk of many such children drifting back to their former surroundings by undesirable parents claiming them when old enough to work.
2
