The Forgotten Children (32 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
The following year Sir Charles Hambro publicly criticised those who did not recognise the benefits of the Fairbridge scheme.
The Times
, under the headline ‘Negative Outlook of Local Authorities’, reported that in an address to Fairbridge’s annual general meeting:
Sir Charles Hambro said he was driven to the conclusion that for the present local authorities responsible for child welfare in Britain felt that, in spite of the unhappy background and bad environment from which these children might come, they had a better chance under the care of local authorities in the crowded towns and cities of this country than they would have in Australia. This view prevailed in spite of many proofs of the great success achieved by those distressed children who had benefited under the Fairbridge scheme.
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Finding itself unable to attract sufficient numbers of children for unaccompanied migration, Fairbridge was forced to devise a new recruitment strategy, the One Parent Scheme. Under the scheme Fairbridge would be able to increasingly recruit directly from single-parent families, rather than from child-welfare agencies. Single parents were less likely to be aware of debate about modern childcare practices, and less likely to be critical of or hostile to the child-migrant institutions that were increasingly out of favour with child-welfare authorities. They were also unlikely to be aware of the debate raging within government and welfare circles as a result of the fact-finding mission’s report.
But Fairbridge had trouble getting the British Government’s approval for its new scheme. On 14 March 1957, Sir Charles Hambro wrote an informal note to Lord Home, who was then the secretary of state for Commonwealth relations. (In 1963 he would move from the House of Lords to become Sir Alexander Douglas-Home and prime minister of Britain.) In the letter, Sir Charles dismissed as ‘extreme’ the views of the fact-finding mission, and refuted the suggestion that Fairbridge had something to answer for. He acknowledged the help that Lord Home had given Fairbridge as secretary of state, and asked if he realised that Fairbridge’s work had been frustrated during the last two years:
… by the comings and goings of semi-official fact-finding missions to Australia. These people have adopted what seems to us to be a very extreme view on child immigration, which we have proved to be so successful over many years.
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Hambro explained that the new One Parent Scheme was being held up by the British Government, although it had been ‘enthusiastically supported by the federal and state Governments of Australia and by all our subscribers over here’. He finished with a request: ‘If you can do anything to expedite action and give us the all-clear to go ahead, we shall be everlastingly grateful and many hundreds of human beings will benefit.’
The lobbying worked and Fairbridge was able to launch the One Parent Scheme later the same year, without making any changes to the way the Fairbridge farm schools operated. The London Fairbridge Society became resigned to the fact that childcare professionals were in effect boycotting its scheme. At a special meeting in 1958 the Fairbridge Society in the UK was told by Sir Charles that no amount of political lobbying would change the situation.
Hambro expressed in a letter to Hudson in January 1959 his belief that the council and executive of Fairbridge in Sydney were under the impression that Fairbridge London could pressure local authorities into sending children to the farm schools in Australia. He explained that even members of parliament had achieved no tangible result from approaching the local authorities in their constituencies. He wrote: ‘I put these facts before you, as I feel that there is no hope of a change of attitude, and this should now be realised by everybody connected with Fairbridge.’ He demonstrated how out of step Fairbridge was with contemporary childcare thinking, saying he believed that ‘in nine cases out of ten a good children’s home is better than boarding out’. He lamented that in Britain:
The authorities and the new hierarchy of children’s officers have convinced themselves to the opposite policy of what you and I advocate and we are compelled for the present to bow before them.
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In the last year of the old recruitment scheme, 1958, the number of children migrating to Fairbridge in Molong fell to only eight, down from an annual average of thirty in the previous few years.
While Fairbridge was taking a battering in Britain, it was facing – and resisting – official criticism in Australia, too. In the 1950s the New South Wales Department of Child Welfare made repeated requests that Fairbridge investigate a number of allegations of maltreatment of children
After sending numerous letters to Fairbridge, in February 1958 the director of Child Welfare in New South Wales, R. H. Hicks, wrote to the Australian Department of Immigration, which was technically the legal guardian of Fairbridge children, to complain about the unwillingness of Fairbridge to respond to complaints. He said ‘generally good work is being done at Molong by Fairbridge’, but also said:
Fairbridge does not welcome any suggestions for improvement and apparently resents any inference that there may be matters which require attention. Dr Barnardo’s Homes on the other hand act very promptly when any matter is brought under notice. The executive is objective in its inquiries and very frank with the Department. No doubt with such a wide and lengthy experience executive officers realise that with even well managed institutions occasionally situations arise which require investigation. It is a pity Fairbridge does not adopt the same approach.
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The One Parent Scheme provided Fairbridge with some temporary respite. In 1959, the first year of the new scheme, fifty children went to the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong; eighty-three went in 1960; and ninety-seven went in 1961. By the end of the 1950s Fairbridge had developed an elaborate network of representatives spread throughout Britain promoting and marketing the scheme directly to single parents from poor families.
In 1960 Fairbridge announced a new Family Scheme, under which both parents could come to Australia at the same time as their children. The children would be left at Fairbridge while the parents found a job and accommodation, and eventually they would all be back together as a family.
Fairbridge faced a problem with the One Parent Scheme, though. On leaving school at fifteen years, children were extremely unlikely to work on the Fairbridge farm for two years for only a bit of pocket money when they could join their parent, immediately start work and earn a wage, as I did. As early as 1961, when I was still at Fairbridge, Woods expressed his concern in a ‘Special Memorandum’ attached to his regular principal’s report to the Sydney Fairbridge Council:
Firstly, by the end of the year we will have too few trainees to run all the various sections of our Farm Training in the manner we have done for several years – that is the Dairy, Piggery, Slaughter yards, Vegetable Garden and Orchard, General farm work, Laundry, Bakery, Main Kitchen, Stores, Gloucester House, Village maintenance, and all the other general domestic chores of the community.
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Woods noted that it would be necessary to reduce the range of ‘general training’ Fairbridge provided, to eliminate a number of aspects, ‘such as baking, gardening and main kitchen, and employ staff to deal with some of the work’. Alternatively, they could employ additional staff and the work could be shared by staff and trainees.
Secondly, there seems now to be a probable cessation or at least a lessening in the flow of children to Fairbridge even under the ‘Family’ scheme. It is very necessary for future planning to know how many children we may expect here, say in the next twelve months, since if we do not get many more, or our numbers continue to fall at all appreciably, we should reduce our milking herd, thereby reducing the amount of work to be done by the reduced number of trainees, we should cut down much of our garden area, and we could reduce the number of cottages we have open.
The loss of trainees was critical to Fairbridge since child labour had enabled the farm to function. The Family Scheme caused even more problems for Fairbridge. Many parents who were supposed to leave their children at Fairbridge while they were setting up their new lives in Australia were dissatisfied when they saw the farm school and would not leave their children there for one day longer than was absolutely necessary. During 1962, for example, a total of 144 children arrived at the farm school under the Family Scheme but ninety-three had left by the end of the year to be with their parents.
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For the next two years the number of children coming out to Australia under the Family Scheme was maintained, but the children tended to be older and stayed for a shorter period of time. The number of children at the farm school continued to rapidly fall. By the middle of the 1960s the situation had become critical and the director of the London Fairbridge Society, General Hawthorn, travelled to Sydney to tell the local Fairbridge Council that the last party of children would be arriving from Britain early in 1966.
To help shore up numbers the Sydney Fairbridge Council began taking Australian children. In the late 1960s Fairbridge placed ads in newspapers promoting the Molong farm school as a good boarding school: children could attend one of the local schools while paying to board in the Fairbridge village. By 1970, almost all the British children had reached seventeen years of age and left Fairbridge, and there were only sixty-seven children still there, including thirty-five paid boarders.
Ian Dean was one of only a handful of British children when he left Fairbridge at the end of 1967.
You could see the decline going on around you. It was falling to pieces. There were only half a dozen original British children still there. Most of the children at Fairbridge at that time were the Australian kids. There were only about four children’s cottages still open. The rest were closed. There were no village musters, little cottage gardening and hardly any sport. No one seemed to be in control. It was very different from the feeling at the place when it was full of people.
The rot set in after Woods left. Indeed the rot seemed to set in before he left. After his wife died. He didn’t seem to have the same sense of purpose after that.
Toward the end Fairbridge supplemented its numbers by accepting children who had been ‘committed to care’ by the children’s courts.
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The offences committed by the children sent to Fairbridge included stealing, break and enter and ‘uncontrollability’. The farm school had, in effect, become a children’s prison.
Even in the early 1970s the authorities were still trying to persuade Fairbridge to make the cottages more ‘comfortable and homelike’. In 1971 the New South Wales Director of Child Welfare, Bill Langshore, called on Fairbridge to have the ‘cheerless’ cottage dining rooms (which he called ‘common rooms’) furnished with some comfortable chairs, bright curtains and floor coverings, and for each child to be given a bedside locker in which to keep personal effects. He also wanted bedside floor rugs in all the cottages, plastic shower curtains in the girls’ bathrooms to give them some privacy, and for the laundries and bathrooms to be separated by partitions. He called for smaller tables to ‘improve the atmosphere of the dining room’.
In 1972, Langshore’s appeals produced results. Fairbridge announced that partitions had been erected in the big cottage dormitories, shower curtains had been installed to give a little privacy, lino tiles had been laid on the cement floors of the kitchens, and the long dining-room tables had been cut down into smaller tables that each accommodated six children. The school had managed to successfully resist all of the attempts to make it reform until now – two years before it closed.
Fairbridge made its last, desperate – and ultimately unsuccessful – attempt to save Molong as a farm school by trying to arrange a financial bail-out from the Isolated Children’s Parents Association.
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In 1973, all efforts to financially salvage the farm having failed, Fairbridge threw in the towel and announced it was going to sell the farm school. Its annual report said:
This decision had been made after the most exhaustive investigation by Council and with extreme regret because of the support received over the years particularly from local services. However, the increasing rate of erosion of capital accompanying operations at Molong forced the decision and the sale of the property was negotiated in November 1973 to T.A. Barrett Pty Ltd.
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The last British child at Fairbridge was Vivian Bingham, who had arrived as a four-year-old in 1959. She remembers being sad as the other children gradually left the farm and she became the last British child migrant there.
I felt terrible … I felt like, everyone’s leaving me … as they started to go … it was like part of my family was disappearing. I felt very lonely and sad and scared because I was on my own again.
She finally left the farm in March 1973.
Fairbridge closed in 1974 and became a chicken farm. Some of the cottages were sold and moved from the village to become country homes around the west of New South Wales. The remainder of the village fell in to disrepair. In 1988 the property changed hands and continued to be used for a variety of farm activities. A number of the children’s cottages that remained at Fairbridge were rented out to locals; the rest of the village increasingly resembled a ghost town. The Fairbridge Council became the Fairbridge Foundation and invested the money it earned from the sale of the property. It distributes the dividends and profits from these investments to other children’s charities.
