The Forgotten Children (3 page)

While I was in the UK researching at the Liverpool University archives, I was contacted by the chairman of the UK Fairbridge Society, Gil Woods, who had been tipped off about my research by the university and wanted to talk to me about the project. He explained that while Fairbridge no longer operated a child migration scheme it was still active in child welfare in the UK.

I told him that I had come across material in the Liverpool University archives that corroborated some of the more disturbing oral histories and asked that Fairbridge allow me to use this material in the book. Woods agreed to consider my request but said he was concerned that any adverse publicity about Fairbridge would make its ongoing public fundraising more difficult. ‘My highest priority is to protect the reputation and name of Fairbridge,’ he warned.

I found the papers of Professor Geoffrey Sherington of Sydney University very helpful. Sherington co-authored an excellent book titled
Fairbridge, Empire and Child Migration
with Chris Jeffery and also helped me access his papers (other than personal files), which are lodged with the State Library of New South Wales.

Finally, there are the records from the Department of Education and the Department of Child Welfare in State Records NSW in western Sydney. There are restrictions that prevent the naming of individuals in Child Welfare Department files. While some child-welfare records confirmed the maltreatment of children, it appears investigations by the department were rare as the children had no way of initiating any inquiry. The Education Department has a simple thirty-year restriction, which made their files more accessible. However, I could not find any records that shed light on the reasons why Fairbridge children failed to receive the same standard of schooling as other Australian children in the state school system.

Most of the information about Fairbridge in these files has never been made public. In many cases it reflects very badly on Fairbridge.

It has always been accepted that the Fairbridge Farm School Scheme, as with all the child-migrant schemes, was well-intentioned and that the Fairbridge organisation could not have been expected to be aware of the dreadful experiences of some children.

However, the hitherto secret files confirm that the Fairbridge hierarchy, and the British and Australian authorities, knew about many of the flaws and failures of the scheme, and the maltreatment of children, for decades. They reveal that Fairbridge consistently rejected criticism and resisted reform, even when changes would have improved the welfare of the children in its care.

Most importantly, the files confirm much that’s contained in the former Fairbridge children’s accounts, which may otherwise have sounded too far-fetched to believe.

One morning early in 1959 two well-dressed and nicely spoken ladies from the Fairbridge Society came to see us in our small council house on the Langney estate outside Eastbourne in Sussex. A few weeks before, we’d had a visit from the local Fairbridge ‘honorary secretary’ and she had now brought down a very important person from the Fairbridge Society in London.

Sitting with Mum, we three boys were wearing our Sunday best. We were very poor: my mother was a single parent with four sons. Our oldest brother, Tony, was twenty and in the RAF. My twin brother, Richard, and I were twelve and Dudley had recently turned fourteen. The three of us were attending the local secondary school but Mum was finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, so there was little prospect of us staying on at school beyond the minimum school-leaving age.

The ladies from Fairbridge told us wonderful stories about Australia, and showed us brochures and photographs. The picture they painted was very attractive: we would be going to a land of milk and honey, where we could ride ponies to school and pluck abundant fruit from the trees growing by the side of the road.

They explained that Fairbridge had recently introduced a new plan called the One Parent Scheme whereby Mum could follow us out to Australia and we would be back together as a family in no time.

They were good salespeople. By the late 1950s Fairbridge had become a slick organisation with almost seventy ‘honorary secretaries’ spread throughout the UK, recruiting more children to its scheme.
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For a poor family like ours, the offer of free transport to Australia, then free accommodation and education once we got there, sounded almost too good to be true.

The ladies told Mum that however much she loved us, she couldn’t provide us with the opportunities we would be given at the Fairbridge Farm School in Australia. They gave us brochures, one of which read:

They told us we qualified for Fairbridge.

We were almost the perfect catch for them: three healthy boys, all above average intelligence, from a deprived background. We were, however, a bit older than the ideal age, as Fairbridge preferred children no older than eight or nine. They felt there was a better chance of turning younger children into good citizens because they’d had less exposure to low-class society.

Ironically, the Fairbridge children who would do better in life tended to be those who entered when they were older, and stayed there for the shortest period of time. The ones who would struggle through life tended to be those who spent their entire childhood in the care of the farm school.

We were like most other Fairbridge children in that we came from a deprived background. Our mother, Kathleen Bow, was born into a modest, working-class family during World War I in Bruxburn, about twenty-four kilometres from Edinburgh, in Scotland. Her father went to war in 1914 and was gassed in the trenches of France before being pensioned out of the army. Her mother worked as a nurse in the Bangor Hospital, to which the wounded were brought, usually from the hospital ships that berthed on Scotland’s Forth River. It was said that many of the men were so terribly wounded that they were brought from the ships to the hospital at night so as not to panic the civilian population.

Mum was illegitimate and when her mother moved to Glasgow to marry a badly wounded soldier she had nursed – her second marriage – Mum was left to be brought up by her grandmother with two children from the first marriage. Mum used to say that she thought her gran was actually her mother, and she only learnt the truth after Granma McNally died when Mum was about fourteen years old.

With nowhere else to go, Mum went to work in one of the big houses in Surrey, in the south of England, living very much ‘below stairs’ as a domestic servant. Within a couple of years she had married local builder Bill Hill and in 1937 she gave birth to Tony, who was to be the first of five sons. In 1940, Billy was born but died of meningitis within months. Dudley was born in 1944.

By the time Mum was pregnant with me and Richard she was separated from her husband and had been abandoned by her partner. At that stage, she was working in a big house in Hertfordshire, but as her pregnancy developed it became clear she would have to leave. She was taken in by a vicar in Eastbourne, Sussex, and lived in the basement of the vicarage till we were born.

So, we were born in 1946, when being a single mother or a divorcee still carried a stigma. Throughout our childhood we were instructed to tell people that Mum was a widow, even though we, along with everyone else in our village, knew it didn’t ring true.

For the first six or seven years of my life we survived on charity, welfare and the small income Mum generated working whenever she had the chance while caring for four children. We lived in three rooms on the second storey of a small terrace house in Dersley Road, Eastbourne. It was a very poor and rough neighbourhood with a sullied reputation. The local council, in an effort to tidy up the street’s image, changed its name from Dennis Road shortly after we moved there.

The three-room flat had a coal-fired stove, which was used for cooking and heating. There was no bath, but in the kitchen there was a large stone sink, which for all our early childhood doubled as a bath for Richard, Dudley and me. We would sit on the draining board with our feet in the water and wash ourselves as best we could. Mum and Tony would bring the tin bath in from out the back of the house, lug it up the stairs, heat water on the stove and take a bath in the tiny living room. We didn’t have a toilet so we paraded down the stairs and through Mrs Symes’s flat on the ground floor below, carrying our potties though her living area and kitchen to the toilet out the back.

In the early postwar years we still had gas street lamps. Every night the gasman came with a long pole to ignite the flame, and he returned early the next morning to douse it. Everyone around us was poor. We were all still issued with ration books full of coupons to go toward paying for food. An old lady across the road used to give us her sweets ration coupons, even though we didn’t have enough money to use them anyway. It was a common occurrence just before payday for a child to go to their neighbour’s house with an empty cup to borrow half a cup of sugar, flour or milk. Seldom did you ask for a whole cupful for fear the neighbour wouldn’t have enough – or that you wouldn’t be able to pay it all back. Shearer’s, the little grocery store on the corner, would run up a slate for each family so they could buy food between paydays, but on more than one occasion they had to halt our credit because Mum was continuing to run up a tab though she was unable to pay anything off.

From a very early age we learnt how to get ourselves to school and care for ourselves in the afternoons, because Mum took any work she could get. From the age of about ten, Tony had to help look after us, and at eleven he got a job at weekends and during the school holidays in the local fishmonger’s. He would come home smelling so strongly of fish that Mum would insist he change his clothes outside our little flat – but we had more fish to eat than any of our neighbours, even if it was the leftovers they couldn’t sell in the fish shop.

Dudley, Richard and I were all doing reasonably well at Bourne Junior School. Tony had already sat for his Eleven Plus exam and won a place at the Eastbourne Grammar School. Dudley and Richard always managed to be in the A classes, but I tended to lag behind in the B classes. Our school, like most in those days, was a dark and oppressive building with equally severe, bleak teachers. School was not much fun, but it wasn’t designed to be.

As all the other kids did, we played in the streets or on one of the many bombsites in the neighbourhood. Eastbourne had not been a major target during the war but it was said that after raids the German bombers would drop off any bombs there that they had left on board, before returning over the English coast.

One of the more popular games played by the kids in the narrow back lanes of the terrace houses was a form of badminton, using an old shuttlecock and hardcover books for racquets. Eastbourne has always been a popular beach resort so we spent a lot of time during the short swimming season up near the Eastbourne Pier. The tourists created job opportunities for Mum, who worked at different times as a domestic in one of the hotels, in beachfront tourist shops, and as a waitress in a coffee shop or in one of the better hotels. Sometimes she came home to tell us she had seen someone famous at work. Once it was the Duke of Edinburgh, whom she had seen at the top table of a banquet at the Grand Hotel up near Beachy Head, while she was working as a waitress on the bottom tables. Another time it was Billy Wright, the then England football captain, whom she served coffee to in the café at Bobby’s department store. We were terribly upset that she didn’t get his autograph, and even more upset when she said she hadn’t known who he was until the other waitresses told her.

When Mum was sick or there was some crisis, we would be put into children’s homes, but would always come back together as a family as soon as things stabilised. As we got older it became increasingly difficult for the five of us to live in three tiny rooms. When we were six years old, Richard and I were put into a giant Barnardo’s children’s home in Barkingside, Essex, while we were found slightly bigger accommodation. It was a tough and traumatic experience. I can remember being teased and bullied by the other children when we tried to write a letter to our mum – it seemed they didn’t have mums to write to.

After some months we were reunited with the rest of our family in a new home. We had a five-room flat in a big, dilapidated old Victorian house in Terminus Place, Eastbourne that had been converted into a number of smaller welfare apartments. I can still remember the day Mum came to get us from Barnardo’s, her excitement on the train trip back to Eastbourne, and our arrival in the early evening to see Tony and Dudley cooking up a pan of bacon and eggs for our tea. There were a number of families living in the grand old house. Years later I would be reminded of it while watching the David Lean film
Dr Zhivago
: when Zhivago came back from the war he found the large house owned by his father-in-law’s family had been broken up into small apartments for fourteen families.

When I was about eight years old we moved into a new house on a council estate outside Eastbourne. The new village had been built on land reclaimed by the government from the estate of an old aristocratic land-owning family, the Austins. At last we had a home with an indoor bathroom and toilet. It had a large living room, kitchen and coal shed downstairs, and three bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. There was one fireplace and chimney in the centre of the living room that heated upstairs and downstairs, and also heated the water.

Our improved circumstances were part of the marvel of Britain’s postwar welfare state, initiated by the British Labour Government. It was much maligned in later times, but this phenomenally successful social experiment meant that for the first time all classes of people were assured of basic food, shelter and clothing, and some level of health care and education. Prior to the welfare state most Britons lived and died poor, in a land of appalling class rigidity and social inequality where there was virtually no prospect of social mobility.

By now Tony had left school and was working and paying Mum a big part of his wages, which helped a great deal. We were still very poor but most of our neighbours in Langney village were only slightly better off. In those days you paid for electricity as you used it, by putting a shilling in the meter under the stairs. Often we went to bed early on a Wednesday night because the last shilling ran out or we had no more coal to put in the fireplace until payday the next day. Despite a lack of money, Mum somehow always managed to put food on the table.

Being on the edge of Eastbourne, Langney village was a pretty good place for kids. We lived in a semi-rural environment and spent lots of time playing in the fields or on the ‘crumbles’, a vast stretch of pebbled beach between Eastbourne and Langney, where the pillboxes and concrete tank blocks built in 1940 in anticipation of Hitler’s invasion of Britain were still standing. A little over a mile from the village was Pevensey Castle. On the site there was an outer Roman wall built in 300
AD
, a Norman keep and a medieval castle with drawbridge and moat. It was a favourite location for playing and camping with the Boy Scouts, and has remained a favourite spot for me throughout my life.

Television had already been in Britain for a few years but no one in Langney could afford to buy one until the late 1950s, so community activity survived. It seems everyone was either in the Boy Scouts, Civil Defence Corps, the drama club or one of myriad other communal activities. Throughout the year the village would turn out for special and festive occasions, including the annual fete. On Guy Fawkes Night we would all march in a torch-lit procession around the village before lighting a huge bonfire in the park at the bottom of Priory Road and letting off fireworks.

Christmas was especially good as people helped one another as best they could. Mr Fry – who lived down on the next corner, had five kids and drove a vegetable truck for a living – would always leave a basket of fruit on our front doorstep. Mrs Austin, one of the landed gentry who still lived in the big family house on nearby Langney Rise, used to leave a sack of potatoes. She didn’t mind when her son Philip came round to play with us lower-class kids when he was home from his exclusive boarding school.