Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
The Forgotten Children (31 page)
Keeping the addenda secret was one thing, but the government had to make a decision about further migration of children to Fairbridge and other institutions that had attracted critical comment from the fact-finding mission. Costley-White continued:
The question arises whether in the light of the fact-finding mission report, we should continue to allow further children to go to Australia. It will evidently be difficult for the United Kingdom Government to approve children going to institutions which have been criticised by the fact-finding mission; but rather than make a complete closure on all child migration it may be considered wiser to adopt a middle course of allowing children to go to institutions provided they have not been adversely criticised by the Fact-finding Mission.
The addenda to the report became the basis of a black list drawn up by the home office.
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The secret addendum on Fairbridge Farm at Molong included a number of critical observations:
Furnishing and equipment: The cottages have the minimum of furniture and little comfort. The beds consist of wire mesh, which tends to sag, on a steel frame, with very poor mattresses. There is no other furniture in the dormitories and the floors are bare wood. A typical playroom contains one large table, with plain wooden chairs, and lockers forming seats around the walls. Bathrooms and kitchens are shabby and poorly though adequately equipped. In the dining hall, the children use plain metal plates and beakers.
Children’s Activities: A considerable amount of domestic and other work is done by the older school children, who spend about two hours before morning School and another hour in the evening on their duties in the cottages, kitchen, bakery, etc., or at farm or garden work.
General comments: The children at Molong have to work hard and have no luxuries … From conversation with a number of children it was clear that at first many of them find life strange and are homesick.
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The report pointed out that Fairbridge at Molong was harder for girls than boys: ‘Those who leave school at fifteen have little preparation for anything but domestic work and even less opportunity than boys of seeing much of Australian life.’
The addendum on Pinjarra was also unflattering: the fact-finding mission found that it ‘was complacent, and reluctant to accept new ideas’ and ‘showed a lack of appreciation of current thought on child care’.
The mission was relatively more impressed with a number of other institutions. Of the Clarendon Church of England Home at Kingston Park, Tasmania, the mission reported:
In this home there are good material conditions, and the children appear to receive individual affection and understanding. The home is run on sound principles, and the children seen seemed to have plenty of interests and to be happy and spontaneous.
And of the Methodist Home at Burwood in Victoria it said:
These homes provide good material care and a high standard of comfort, in an attractive setting. The Superintendent is keen, active and enlightened, and has considerable personal knowledge of individual children. These appear to be really good homes of the grouped cottage type.
Having received the damaging addenda on the child-migrant institutions from the CRO, on 22 June 1956, R. J. Whittick of the Home Office wrote to his boss, G. E. B. Shannon to advise him on compilation of a black list:
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We have, in consultation with our experts on child care, gone through the notes on the various establishments and, based on those notes alone, we have drawn up the enclosure to this letter. Establishments in category ‘A’ are those which we think are not fit to receive more migrants, for the present at least, Category ‘C’ are establishments that pass muster. Category ‘B’ contains those about which we do not know enough to say whether they ought to be placed in ‘A’ or ‘C’. Some of the establishments in category ‘A’ are so wrong in the principles on which they run that they would need a complete metamorphosis to bring them into category ‘C’.
Organisations on the ‘black list’ would be told that their establishments had been criticised by the Mission, would be shown the reports or parts of them or given the gist of the criticism and would be asked to put matters right before you approved any more children being sent to these establishments.
It is clear from Whittick’s memo that the home office was well aware of Fairbridge’s influence in high places in Britain and of the political difficulties that would flow from putting Fairbridge schools on the black list.
The reputation in which the Fairbridge organisation has been held in this country – and no doubt in Australia as well – may, we recognise, remove from the sphere of practical politics the possibility of putting the Farm Schools at Pinjarra and Molong on your black list, although well informed opinion would condemn them from the point of view of the accepted principles of child care.
Of the twenty-six institutions inspected by the fact-finding mission, ten were placed in category A and included on the black list, eight ‘passed muster’ and were placed in category C. The remaining eight were placed in category B.
The institutions on the black list were: the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong; the Fairbridge Farm School at Pinjarra; St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Orphanage, Lane Cove, Sydney; Dhurringile Presbyterian Rural Training Farm, Victoria; St Joseph’s Roman Catholic School, near Rockhampton in Queensland; the Salvation Army Training Farm, Riverview, Queensland; the Methodist Home at Magill, Adelaide; St Vincent’s Roman Catholic Orphanage, Castledare, Western Australia; St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Farm School at Bindoon in Western Australia; and St John Bosco Roman Catholic Boys’ Town at Glenorchy in Hobart, Tasmania.
The institutions in Category C, which ‘passed muster’ were: Dr Barnardo’s Homes, Burwood, Sydney; Dr Barnardo’s Homes, Normanhurst, Sydney; Northcote School, Bacchus Marsh, Victoria; St John’s Church of England Home, Canterbury, Melbourne; Burton Hall Farm School, Tatura, Victoria; Methodist Homes, Burwood, Victoria; Clarendon Church of England Home, Kingston Park, Tasmania; and Hagley Area Farm School, Tasmania.
Category B was made up of: Maelrose United Protestant School, Pendle Hill, Sydney; Murray Dwyer Roman Catholic Orphanage, Mayfield, New South Wales; Goodwood Roman Catholic Orphanage, Goodwood, Adelaide; Clontarf Roman Catholic Boys’ Town, Clontarf, Perth; St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Home, Leederville, Perth; Methodist Home, Victoria Park, Perth; Swan Church of England Homes, Midland Junction, Western Australia; and Nazareth House, East Camberwell, Melbourne.
By the end of June T. H. E. Heyes, secretary to the British high commissioner in Canberra, gave the Australian Government the general report of the fact-finding mission but not the addenda.
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Following consultation with Mr J. Ross, the chairman of the fact-finding mission, the home office decided that it would not authorise further child migration to institutions on the black list. The Fairbridge Society in London, which was by now aware of the developments, had sixteen children at John Howard Mitchell House in Kent waiting to sail to Australia. On Monday, 2 July, Mr W. B. Vaughan, the secretary as well as the director, of the London Fairbridge Society, called on Mr Armstrong, the chief migration officer at Australia House, ‘greatly concerned’ that formal approval had not been given for the children to go to Australia. Six of the party were destined for Molong and the other ten were going to Pinjarra. The party’s escorts had been recruited and bookings had been made to sail a little more than three weeks later, on 26 July, from Tilbury.
Vaughan, according to Armstrong, said that the board of the Fairbridge Society was meeting at 2.15 p.m. that Thursday – only three days away – and he wanted the situation resolved before then. There would be ‘a first class row’ if he had to report to the board that approval had been denied for the children to go to Australia. Vaughan threatened that Fairbridge would apply political pressure. Armstrong wrote: ‘He had no doubt that a sudden suspension of child migration would lead to pressure on the secretary of state and possibly questions in the Commons or the Lords.’
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As His Royal Highness the Duke of Gloucester was the president of the Fairbridge Society the civil servants were all too aware of the political implications of denying authorisation for children to be sent to Fairbridge. In a memo to his boss, G. E. B. Shannon, Costley-White of the CRO noted that there would almost certainly be:
immediate Parliamentary repercussions since Fairbridge has the means of making itself heard in both Houses of Parliament and to the public at large. The President of the Fairbridge Society [HRH the Duke of Gloucester] is known to take an active interest in its affairs, and it is on the cards that his intervention would be sought if a ‘stand still’ were suddenly to be imposed, and imposed in the first instance against the Fairbridge Society.
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Costley-White felt that it ‘was almost impossible’ to resolve the matter before the Fairbridge board meeting at 2.15 p.m. that Thursday. He was starting to look at ways to back down on the issue. Having deliberately withheld the addenda from the Australian Government he now used the need for consultation as a possible way out of the impasse: ‘To take what would appear to be a somewhat high handed decision to hold up child migration without consulting the Australian Government would appear to be dangerous.’
Shannon hastily took the lifeline and in the first of a series of backdowns sent a memo to Costley-White on Thursday morning.
I have discussed the foregoing with Sir Saville Garner and Commander Noble. They agree that the sixteen children for Fairbridge and three others for the Northcote Fund should be allowed to go, on the understanding that we cannot guarantee approval of future applications pending consideration of the Fact-finding Mission’s report and consultation with the Australian authorities about it.
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Later that morning Costley-White met with Mr Vaughan of the Fairbridge Society, telling him that the children already booked could go to Australia. He informed Vaughan that it was ‘the general wish of the UK Government’ that there be no other child migration in the ‘immediate future weeks’, while the British Government discussed the report with the Australian Government.
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So, as a result of political machinations, sixteen more children, and countless others after them, were dispatched to Australia to spend the remainder of their childhood in an institution black listed by the British Government and condemned as unfit for children.
At the meeting of the Fairbridge Society that Thursday, Vaughan described how the CRO had held up the approval for the party of children at Knockholt to sail on 26 July; he had gone to their offices and protested strongly at not having been told; and then went to Australia House, where the chief immigration officer had been very kind and added his protest to Vaughan’s. The minutes finish:
I am glad to say that this combined action had the desired effect, and that I was called to the CRO again yesterday to be told by Costley-White one of the Under Secretaries that without prejudice to further arrangements the party would be allowed to sail on the 26th.
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Meanwhile, the Fairbridge Society considered the published report of the fact-finding mission. It was in no mood to reform and disagreed with most of the report’s important recommendations. In a letter to the CRO, Vaughan made it clear that Fairbridge disagreed with the principal thrust of the fact-finding mission and of child welfare generally: that the days of institutions were over.
The proposal that the aim should be to provide for migrant children by boarding them out is one of the major problems as, apart from other important aspects, lack of housing and the difficulty of adequate supervision must inevitably influence such a policy.
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The London Fairbridge Society was supported by the Sydney Fairbridge Council, which also criticised the fact-finding mission’s proposal to foster out migrant children in Australia. The chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, W. Hudson, wrote to the chairman of Fairbridge in London, Sir Charles Hambro, dismissing the idea as impractical. He wrote that he was sure 99 per cent of the people in Australia who would want to take in children ‘would not and could not give them as good a start in life nor be able to give them the same opportunities we can’. He went on to express his conviction that 90 per cent of the homes where children were likely to be boarded ‘would be a poor substitute for the upbringing we give them at Fairbridge’.
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The Fairbridge Society in London had been successful in getting the British Government to back down; however, the number of children being committed to Fairbridge began to fall dramatically as enlightened childcare authorities in effect boycotted the scheme. At the time of the release of the initial report of the fact-finding mission, Vaughan had warned the London Fairbridge Society that childcare professionals were turning away from the scheme. He explained that local authorities did not see any advantage in emigration for children in their care, and he didn’t think it was likely that applications from them would increase.
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