The Forgotten Children (18 page)

Christina Murray was seven when she arrived in Australia in 1939; she remembers working as a trainee in Nuffield Hall when she was older:

At lunch the cottage mothers ate up on the stage with the other staff so the trainee girls set extra places on the top table for them. After lunch, it was time for the girls to wash the napkins and tablecloths, and hang them on the washing line at the back of the principal’s house. After a rest for an hour or two, the girls were back at Nuffield Hall by 5 p.m. to prepare the evening meal. As all the children had their evening meal in their cottages, only the odd staff member and visitor to the farm came down in the evening to eat in the hall. By the time the meal was over and the washing up and cleaning finished, the girls knocked off around seven-thirty.

The trainee girls worked and lived at the principal’s house for the last few months of their time at Fairbridge, often two at a time. The principal’s house, a grand timber building, was the only two-storey structure at Fairbridge. Downstairs there was a kitchen, bathroom, lounge room, dining room with a dining table large enough to seat twelve, and a sitting room where the principal’s family gathered in the evening to listen to the wireless, and where Ruth Woods had her desk. Toward the back of the house was Woods’s untidy office, where he would spend some time during the day and many hours at night clacking away with his two huge index fingers on an old Olivetti manual typewriter that sat in the middle of his vast desk. Most of us Fairbridge children never went beyond the office, which was just inside the back door – and when we went that far it was often only to be caned for some misdemeanour.

Upstairs there were seven bedrooms – enough for Mr and Mrs Woods and their four children when they were home from boarding school, and for special guests, including the chairman of the Fairbridge Council who came fairly regularly to the farm. One of the upstairs bedrooms was shared by the two trainee girls, but the girls were not allowed to use the upstairs bathroom.

One of the girls would have to bring the boss a cup of tea in bed early in the morning. Some remember it as an uncomfortable experience as Woods customarily slept in the nude and was completely unabashed about his state when any trainee girl came into his room. Gwen Miller remembers being shocked: ‘I had never seen a man before.’

Marina McMahon had been forewarned and wouldn’t go into the boss’s bedroom with the tea. ‘I would leave it outside the door,’ she says. ‘He would call out for me to bring it in but I would just say I’d left it outside and would hurry away.’

The former trainee girls who were rostered to work at the deputy principal’s house during the years that Harry Harrop and his wife were there say they enjoyed it. Marina worked at the Harrop house and says that when she and other former trainee girls found out about his crime: ‘We didn’t feel bad about Harry stealing because he was the one who treated us all well.’

Despite doing the work of adults, the trainees were not paid adult wages but got pocket money. For most of the farm school’s history the trainees were paid one shilling a week at fifteen years of age and two shillings a week at sixteen. By comparison, the full adult wage of a farm labourer working on a sheep station in the district was around £12 a week plus board and lodging. By defining the children’s work as ‘training’, Fairbridge was able to circumvent the labour laws, which guaranteed a minimum wage. Smiley Bayliff was one of many Fairbridge trainees who were unimpressed by the arrangement:

While Fairbridge children felt they were underpaid, by the early 1960s some members of the Fairbridge Council in Sydney thought the children were being overpaid and treated too softly. They felt they were being paid too much pocket money, and that this pampering and indulgence had contributed to irresponsible and criminal behaviour in Fairbridge children once they left the farm.

In response to queries by the Fairbridge Council, Woods advised that in addition to their base pocket money, children could be paid more for personal achievement or for undertaking extra duties. He reported that a child received an extra sixpence or shilling for such things as working as a barber in the evening cutting the other children’s hair; being a Boy Scout patrol leader, hockey team captain, office bearer for the Junior Farmers Club or school prefect; or passing the Intermediate Certificate. (At the time, sixpence was enough to buy a small bar of chocolate at the Fairbridge tuckshop.) He reported that of the 265 children who had received pocket money in 1961 and 1962 eighty-one were paid sixpence a week, sixty-four were paid eight pence, fifty-five were paid a shilling, twenty-four were paid two shillings and forty-one were paid four shillings.
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Dr R. L. Raymond O.B.E., B.A., M.B., F.R.A.C.S. and member of the Fairbridge Council was appalled that Fairbridge children were allowed to eat sweets once a week: ‘I think sweets should only be an occasional treat. Teaching self restraint is better than indulgence and having a whim satisfied.’ He described an ‘atmosphere of indulgence’ at Fairbridge and said, ‘Our duty is to educate and take care of the children, not to pamper them and bring them up as irresponsible spoilt children with a sense of easy come easy go about money.’ He went on to say:

‘Indulgence’, ‘pampered’, ‘not tough enough’? Hard physical labour is the only thing most of the children at Fairbridge Farm School ever experienced. The typical child would leave with little or no education, no money and no skills – other than those acquired labouring on the farm – and was destined to spend his or her working life as an unskilled farm hand or a domestic.

Fairbridge was a harsh environment where children had no one to turn to and no way to seek redress. The youngest children were the most vulnerable, the least protected, and the most regularly beaten and abused. Much of the ill treatment of the children was inflicted by some of the cottage mothers.

Kingsley Fairbridge had recognised the importance of well suited and qualified staff, and the need to pay high enough salaries to attract them. However, the organisation in Australia never paid the high salaries originally promised by Kingsley Fairbridge and as a result, the standard of cottage mothers was low and turnover of staff was high. The cottage mothers were the lowest-paid staff at Fairbridge; they were paid less than the going rate for an unskilled farm labourer. In the 1950s, when a farm labourer was being paid more than £12 a week, a Fairbridge cottage mother was paid less than £10. Once tax, board and lodging were deducted she was left with £8, two shillings and sixpence a week. The situation did not improve over the years. By 1970 (and after the introduction of decimal currency) a farm labourer was being paid about $40 a week but a Fairbridge cottage mother only $25 a week.

The obstacles to attracting good cottage mothers to Fairbridge were the same faced by most other children’s institutions in the postwar years: poor pay, unsociable hours of work, low job status, geographic isolation and very modest accommodation. A cottage mother’s quarters – two small rooms and a bathroom attached to the end of the children’s cottage – were hardly salubrious. The little apartment had a bedroom that was just big enough for a double bed and a lounge room that could fit a lounge suite and a few other small pieces of furniture.

It was a lonely existence for a single woman. While Fairbridge had for many years recognised that ‘the desirability of employing married staff as far as possible is self evident’,
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it was quite rare for a married woman to take on the job of cottage mother because Fairbridge could not normally offer her husband employment.

Among the cottage mothers who stayed at Fairbridge the longest were the ‘widows of Empire’. Typical of them was Kathleen Johnstone, who was at Fairbridge from the early 1950s till the mid-1960s. We knew her as ‘The Witch’ because of her fearsome treatment of some of the smaller children in her care. She was also known as ‘Fag’ Johnstone: not only was she a chain-smoker but she would leave the cigarette hanging out of her mouth until it burnt down almost to her lips. The boys in Lady Gowrie Cottage, where she ruled for many years, lived with cigarette ash everywhere; it fell from the side of her mouth as she wandered from room to room. Johnstone also had a perennially runny nose and the children used to watch to see if the snot would reach her mouth before she wiped it away. She was very short, standing only a little over five feet tall, had a slightly hunched back, always dressed in black or dark clothes and carried a huge bunch of keys on her belt.

For the first couple of years of Derek Moriarty’s time at Fairbridge his cottage mother was Miss Jenny Barr, whom he remembers with great affection:

When Barr left and was replaced by Johnstone, Moriarty said his ‘world tumbled upside down’.

No one knew a great deal about Johnstone’s past or her family, but she was believed to be a widow, having been married to a British Indian Army officer. The boys in Gowrie Cottage remember that she kept a sheathed Nepalese Gurkha knife hanging on the wall of her quarters. We all knew of Johnstone’s cruel treatment of children. I simply kept out of her way; if I saw her in the village I would quickly turn and head in another direction.

Vivian Bingham was unlucky enough to have Kathleen Johnstone as her cottage mother. Vivian arrived at Fairbridge in 1959 at four years of age. She was first sexually abused when she was five. By the age of six she was regularly beaten. At eight she was sexually abused by her older half-brother.

She had been a happy little four-year-old girl when she arrived at John Howard Mitchell House at Knockholt in Kent, prior to sailing to Australia. The matron’s reports at the time describe her as ‘a dear little girl’, ‘attractive and amusing’, ‘a loveable little girl – never lost for conversation’. According to the matron, Vivian asked ‘many questions’, was ‘very popular with other children’, and had a ‘carefree’ attitude. In one of the reports the matron also recorded that she regularly wet her bed, ‘but this will quickly clear with care and training I feel sure’.
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When she arrived at Fairbridge in 1959 she was less than one metre tall and weighed 24 kg. Within months her reports began to include comments such as ‘intellectually dull’, ‘quiet and rather nervous at times’, ‘lacks ability to concentrate’ and ‘Vivian does not seem to show any progress at all.’ When she was only six years old the local school headmaster reported, ‘Vivian is a real problem child.’

She remembers the early days:

For the first few months she was too young to attend the local primary school and, like other children who arrived as four-year-olds, was sent out after breakfast to spend her day wandering around the village and the wood piles picking up twigs for lighting the cottage fires.

After terrorising the boys at Gowrie Cottage for many years, Kathleen Johnstone had moved to the girls’ Rose Cottage. ‘I was about four and a half or five when she started flogging me because I wet the bed. You know, I couldn’t help it, I was only a child,’ says Vivian. She explains how she was further punished when she wet the bed at the age of six: ‘I had to wash the sheets. And then she put me under a cold shower and at one time she put my head down the toilet and flushed the chain.’

She remembers the bigger girls in Rose Cottage trying to take care of her but they were powerless to stop Johnstone.

Vivian’s claims of maltreatment were corroborated in a report that followed an investigation by the New South Wales Child Welfare Department. The report has remained secret and restricted for more than forty years.

The investigation followed complaints made in 1964 to the child-welfare authorities by Mrs Jeanette Bradfield, whose children – thirteen-year-old Clair and ten-year-old William – had gone to Fairbridge under the One Parent Scheme. When she came to Australia she was alarmed at what she witnessed when visiting the farm school. While Mrs Bradfield’s complaints were not substantiated by the inquiry, many other children’s allegations of cruelty were.

The results of the inquiry were communicated in a letter from A. C. Thomas, Under Secretary, Child Welfare, to the Fairbridge Council in Sydney and a copy of the letter was sent to the Fairbridge Society in the UK; they remain in the Fairbridge files.
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In the letter Thomas wrote:

The investigation also found that Johnstone regularly whipped the smaller children with a riding crop, which we at Fairbridge had all known about for years.

Despite the fact that the report of the investigation was sent to both the Fairbridge Council in Sydney and Fairbridge Society in London, no action was taken against Johnstone by the Child Welfare Department or Fairbridge, other than to tell her to stop whipping the children. There is no record of Johnstone having been told to stop stuffing children’s heads down the toilet. She continued working at Fairbridge for several more years.

Many former Fairbridge children recall savage punishments dealt out by various cottage mothers to little children who wet their beds. As a ten-year-old, Gwen Miller witnessed the treatment of a nine-year-old girl in Lilac Cottage who wet her bed.

Jimmy ‘Tubby’ Walker, who arrived as a five-year-old and was to spend twelve years at Fairbridge, recalls a boy being punished by his cottage mother in Brown Cottage for wetting his bed.

Another of the ‘widows of Empire’ was Margaret Hodgkinson. Like her friend Johnstone, with whom she played bridge, Hodgkinson had been in India. She was the widow of a knighted judge named Routledge and, though her husband had died, thought she was entitled to be called ‘Lady’, which would have been hopelessly out of place at Fairbridge. She then married a colonel in the British Indian Army and was widowed a second time.

Michael Walker remembers Hodgkinson:

Lennie Magee recalls meeting Mrs Hodgkinson, his cottage mother, the day he arrived at Fairbridge as a seven-year-old. He was to be the subject of her abuse for the next six years: