The Forgotten Children (13 page)

Six months after London appointed Woods, Sir Claude Reading KCMG, the chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, wrote to Sir Charles Hambro, the chairman of the London Fairbridge Society:

He went on to explain that a report recently received from the Child Welfare Department completely exonerated Woods and that ‘The allegations made by the girl can only be put down to the sexual stirrings of an hysterical adolescent mind.’
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In December 1945 Ruth Woods, in defence of her husband, wrote to a Miss Hart who worked in the London Fairbridge office:

She said that a few days before, they had been confronted by private detectives enquiring about accusations of indecent behaviour Joy had made against her husband.

Two months later, Ruth Woods wrote again, saying that Joy Watt had been upset with Woods, whom she blamed for the suicide of a fifteen-year Fairbridge boy, Peter Johnson. The death of Johnson upset a number of Fairbridge children and remained an unhappy memory in their lives for decades to come. She wrote of Joy:

Mrs Woods believed that Joy’s father, who had seen his daughter recently, ‘is an unpleasant man, [and] may have aroused her more unpleasant side’.

Less than three years later, in 1948, Woods was again under investigation. A number of serious allegations had been made by the newly appointed bursar to Fairbridge, a Commander Owen. Again, the allegations and the investigation were never made public.

In March 1948, the new chairman of the Fairbridge Council, W. B. Hudson, wrote to Sir Charles Hambro:

The investigation was quickly completed by a Mr V. A. Heffernan of the Child Welfare Department, who concluded that: ‘It was not considered that any of the charges made against Mr Woods have been substantiated.’
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The report of the investigation listed six allegations made by Commander Owen: that the children were not sufficiently and properly fed; that Woods had employed a cook in the tertiary stages of syphilis; that Woods was a ‘sexual pervert’ that Woods knocked down and kicked a boy till his eyes bled; that Woods beat and injured boys with a hockey stick; and ‘other matters too dreadful to mention’.

Heffernan did not accept that the children were improperly fed, and reported that Owen could not provide specific details of the matters ‘too dreadful to mention’. He discovered that Woods had allowed the cook with syphilis to stay on upon receiving medical advice that she posed no threat of infection to the children. He also dismissed the allegation that Woods was a sexual pervert, because he was satisfied with Woods’s explanation for his possession of sex books.

The inquiry did find that Woods had knocked over a boy in the kitchen and kneed him, and that the boy’s eyes were ‘bloodshot’ after the incident. While Woods was ‘unwise’ to use such a method of punishment it was ‘not considered that this action amounted to excessive punishment or serious assault’. The inquiry revealed that Woods had used the hockey stick to beat the boys, but noted ‘he has not used it since he was instructed by the chairman [of Fairbridge]’.

Woods survived the crisis and remained principal.

In December 1964, Ruth Woods went with her husband to Sydney to do some Christmas shopping. They drove back to Fairbridge and arrived at around three o’clock in the morning on Tuesday, 8 December. At about two o’clock that afternoon she left Fairbridge and drove thirty kilometres to the town of Milthorpe to keep an appointment as guest speaker at a Mothers’ Union meeting. After rising to speak she was seen to falter and then appeared to faint. She was carried to the nearby church rectory, and was pronounced dead at 6 p.m. from what was later confirmed to be a blood clot in her brain.

Her funeral service was held the following Friday afternoon at the little chapel at Fairbridge Farm, which was to be renamed the Ruth Woods Memorial Chapel. The service was followed by a cremation later that afternoon in Orange. Hundreds of mourners attended the funeral, along with Woods, three of his four children – Robert, Raymond and Memory – and a large number of Old Fairbridgians. Woods’s daughter Nyassa, who was working as a nurse in England, was unable to be there, but returned to the farm school soon after. More than a hundred mourners were unable to fit into the little church and had to stand outside.
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Woods, who had been a towering influence over Fairbridge for nearly three decades, was sacked only six months after the death of his wife. The fact that Woods was sacked, and the reasons for his dismissal, were never made public. Woods may have been under some pressure from the Fairbridge Council in Sydney to retire, but it was the Fairbridge Society in London that dismissed him, without any prior consultation with Sydney.

Within months of the death of his wife, Woods was in a new relationship with a cottage mother, Mrs Wunch, who had recently divorced her husband. Woods quickly proposed. This did not sit well with the Sydney Fairbridge Council, and after discussions with the new chairman of the council, Dr W. L. Calov, Woods agreed to postpone the marriage.

Woods had suggested that remarrying might help solve the housekeeping problem he’d had since his wife’s death. In a letter to the secretary of Fairbridge in Sydney, Woods wrote that his daughter Memory had acted as housekeeper at the principal’s house for three months after Ruth’s death, then had to go back to university. After her departure the housework had been done by trainee girls, but now they hadn’t enough trainees to spare for such duties. He asked Fairbridge to consider paying his other daughter, Nyassa, to take up housekeeping duties in the principals’ house. ‘My original intention to get married again about this time would have obviated this little problem in the most practical way,’ he said, ‘but after a discussion with the chairman a longer lapse in time is considered wise and proper.’
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Unbeknown to Woods, Dr Calov communicated his concerns about the love affair to Lord Slim, who had become the chairman of the London Fairbridge Society in 1963 after the death of the long-serving chairman Sir Charles Hambro. Slim was a war hero. He had been commissioned as a second lieutenant in the British Army in World War I and was badly wounded at Gallipoli before serving later in France and Mesopotamia. After the war he was promoted to captain and spent fifteen years with Gurkha regiments in the British Indian Army before fighting in the Sudan, Ethiopia and finally Burma during World War II. After the war he was appointed commander of Allied Land Forces in South East Asia; and in 1953, with the title of Field Marshal Sir William Slim, he became governor-general of Australia. He served as governor-general till 1959 and became familiar with Fairbridge, visiting the Molong farm school in 1953 and 1955.

At a meeting of the London Fairbridge Society on 2 July 1965 chaired by Lord Slim the decision was made to sack Woods. The minutes of the fateful meeting record that the chairman read a letter dated 21 May 1965 from Dr Calov in which he informed them that Mr Woods had decided to marry the recently divorced cottage mother. Dr Calov went on to say the marriage plans had caused adverse comment in the local community and a hostile attitude in Woods’s family.

The society in London had apparently agreed with its chairman, Lord Slim, that Mr Woods had ‘created a scandal and had besmirched the good name of Fairbridge’. The minutes also said that:

Appendix A, titled ‘Complaints and Anxieties about Molong over the Last Fifteen Years’, contained documents that reflected poorly on Woods. One was a copy of a letter from a Fairbridge girl, Margaret Bannerman, to her mother complaining about being physically threatened as a trainee girl by the Fairbridge cook and his wife, and pleading with her mother to be taken out of Fairbridge:

Another document in the appendix was a copy of an investigation by the New South Wales Child Welfare Department that confirmed allegations of child brutality by cottage mothers at Fairbridge. The allegations were made in 1964 by Mrs Jeanette Bradfield, who had followed her son and daughter out to Australia under the One Parent Scheme.

The London Fairbridge Society wanted Woods gone immediately and, while deciding to ask Sydney about a number of financial issues, it was agreed unanimously that the time had come to terminate Woods’ appointment. The council resolved that he should be off the property by the end of the month.

On being advised of London’s decision, Dr Calov wrote back to register the surprise of the local board at the dramatic sacking of Woods. He professed his ‘great shock’ at their decision, saying he didn’t believe that the complaints were sufficient to warrant ‘dismissal of a principal who has had twenty-six years of service in Fairbridge’. He continued:

However, Sydney did not attempt to persuade London to reverse the decision: most of their communication was aimed at securing a decent severance package for Woods. Calov pointed out that Woods had no superannuation, had not been trained in a profession and would find it difficult at his age – he was fifty-nine years old – to find a comparable job. Sydney also asked for some financial assistance for Woods’s children so they could continue their university education after he had left Fairbridge, which is interesting because the Sydney Fairbridge Council did not provide financial assistance to Fairbridge children for their tertiary education.

London wanted the cottage mother involved in the scandal off the scene straightaway and the local Fairbridge Council in Sydney wasted no time following London’s instruction. A meeting of the executive committee decided that: ‘the principal of the Fairbridge Farm School Molong be informed that Mrs Wunch must leave the employment of the Society immediately’.
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Ian Dean was a fifteen-year-old and remembers the gossip about Woods and Wunch at the time. ‘It was obvious to all of us,’ he recalls.

Notwithstanding the misgivings of the Sydney Fairbridge Society about their principal’s conduct, their intervention on his behalf paid off and Woods was financially looked after. In November 1965, General Hawthorn, the director of Fairbridge London, came to Australia to discuss Woods’s departure with the Sydney council. The visit coincided with the news that the last party of British children would be arriving at Fairbridge the following January.

It was all very nicely done. The minutes of the meeting between the Fairbridge Council of Sydney and General Hawthorn record that Mr Woods ‘was then asked to retire, which he did’. Hawthorn said that the London council would be terminating his appointment from that 31 December 1966. Woods’s appointment was not pensionable, but in view of his length of service London proposed to give him a year’s salary when he retired. The minutes detail that the meeting discussed this for a few minutes, agreed with London’s decision and ‘thought that Mr Woods was being fairly treated’.
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