Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
The Forgotten Children (6 page)
The chairman of the Fairbridge Society for most of the 1920s was Sir Arthur Lawley, later Baron Wenlock.
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Lawley had earlier served as governor of Western Australia, lieutenant governor of Transvaal and governor of Madras. Following the retirement of Lawley, Sir William Edward Goodenough, former aide-de-camp to King George V, became chairman. He was replaced in 1932 by MP Lawrence Roger Lumley, the Earl of Scarborough. Lumley, who had fought with the 11th Hussars and the Yorkshire Dragoons in World War I, remained chairman of Fairbridge for five years before resigning to become the governor of Bombay and Bengal in 1937.
With the departure of Lumley, Sir Charles Hambro became chairman of the London Fairbridge Society and remained in the position for the next twenty-six years, until 1963, the year he died. Hambro was born in 1897 into a Jewish family, and his father was the founder of the Hambro Bank. After being schooled at Eton he attended Sandhurst Military College. He served in France in World War I and was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. Hambro would later serve as a governor of the Bank of England and chairman of the Great Western Railway. As a friend of Winston Churchill’s, he was appointed head of Britain’s secret service agency, the Special Operations Executive, during World War II.
In the early 1930s the Fairbridge Society began to seriously plan for the expansion of the farm schools to other British colonies and dominions.
In June 1934, the Prince of Wales, who would later become King Edward VIII before abdicating the British throne, started the ball rolling. At the launch of an appeal to raise £100,000 at Grocers Hall in London, he committed £1000 and echoed the words of Kingsley Fairbridge when he said: ‘This is not a charity. It is an Imperial investment.’
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The Times
reported that His Royal Highness described Fairbridge as ‘the only completely successful form of migration at this time’ that would give orphans and poorer British children the chance of happiness and successful careers, contribute to solving the problem of unemployment and provide a steady flow of good citizens to the dominions and colonies.
The launch was supported by a four-page lift-out in
The Times
on 21 June 1934 carrying the headline ‘FARM SCHOOLS FOR THE EMPIRE’ and the subheading ‘These pages are paid for by a reader of
The Times
as a gift to the £100,000 appeal.’ On the front page of the supplement was a large photograph of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, and a picture of a Coutts Bank cheque written out to the Child Emigration Society for £1000 and simply signed ‘Edward’. The remainder of the front page contained the text of the prince’s speech.
The inside pages contained photographs of children at Pinjarra at work, school and play. The caption under a photograph of a group of children standing around a cottage mother read ‘Homely scene at Haig Cottage’. Another photo of two boys working in a field read ‘Where labour is a delight’, while another, of a boy with bare feet chopping up a felled tree, read ‘In Training for the clearing of his own block of land’.
On the back page, for contrast, there was a photo of a large group of children crowded onto the back stairs of an old house in Britain, with the caption ‘Slum warrens’. Below was a list of the patrons of the appeal, including a selection of marquises, earls, countesses, ladies and lords, knights of the realm, and the famous actress Dame Sybil Thorndike.
The next Fairbridge farm school was opened in 1936 on Vancouver Island, Canada. The village was designed to eventually accommodate 250 children.
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A child-migrant centre that was to be closely connected to Fairbridge opened in 1937 at Bacchus Marsh outside Melbourne, Victoria. The scheme was launched by the Northcote Trust with the help of a donation of land from a wealthy pastoralist, William Angliss. The late Lady Northcote was the wife of Lord Northcote, the governor-general of Australia from 1904 to 1908. Two years before her death she had established a trust to:
… enable and assist poor children of British birth of either sex and in particular orphans to emigrate from any part of Great Britain to any part of the Commonwealth of Australia and there to establish and equip themselves for life.
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The Northcote centre secured a commitment of funding from both the British Government and the Australian Government. While independent, it had a very close relationship with the Fairbridge Society in London, which effectively acted as Northcote’s agent by recruiting British children to the scheme.
The Fairbridge Farm School that was to be opened in Rhodesia was to be different from the others. In 1936, Rev. A. G. B. West of the London Fairbridge Society travelled extensively throughout Rhodesia, meeting with the prime minister and others before recommending the building of a farm school capable of housing 250 children.
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However, the Fairbridge Society in London was concerned that British children from poor backgrounds would not be suitable for farming in Rhodesia, where unskilled farm work was usually undertaken by poorly paid blacks. At the same time, it was felt that working-class British children would prove incapable of filling leadership roles expected of white Rhodesians.
Consequently, the Fairbridge Farm School in Rhodesia was designed along different lines to the others. The children were to be recruited from a better class of family, and were to be trained for white-collar and leadership roles, and their parents were to contribute financially to their upbringing. The children were also going to be older – between ten and fifteen years of age.
The Rhodesian scheme was officially launched at the Rhodesian High Commission in London in August 1939 but then war broke out. In May 1945 the scheme was relaunched, with a commitment of funding from the British Government, and of funding and land near Bulawayo from the Rhodesian Government. The first party of children arrived in 1946. The London Fairbridge Society did have some misgivings: perhaps the different design of the Rhodesian farm school would create confusion in the public’s mind at a time when the society was trying to recruit children in Britain for its other farms.
In Australia a group of former Rhodes scholars, some of whom had known Kingsley Fairbridge at Oxford, had become enthusiastic about opening new farm schools. Fairbridge’s widow, Ruby, spoke at the biennial conference of Rhodes scholars in Melbourne in January 1935. She was keen to have the memory of her husband promoted in new schools, and the former Rhodes scholars resolved to establish Fairbridge farm schools in each of their states.
About six months later, the New South Wales Rhodes Fellowship met in Sydney and began raising money to build a Fairbridge farm school in New South Wales. They had the support of Scottish-born Andrew Reid, who committed substantial funds to the scheme.
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The first meeting of the provisional committee of the Fairbridge Council was held in the University Club, Phillip Street, Sydney, on 30 July 1936. The meeting voted that a cable be sent to the Fairbridge Society in London, ‘intimating the launching of the scheme in New South Wales’ and that the executive were ‘empowered to carry on enquiries for the land for the Farm’.
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Initially there was a decided lack of enthusiasm in London about the prospect of a Fairbridge school being opened in New South Wales. The London Fairbridge Society had been happy to leave New South Wales to Barnardo’s, who had been operating a farm school at Picton, outside of Sydney, since the early 1920s. London had been looking at other spots in the British Empire that might be suitable, including Queensland, where there was considerable support in the upper echelons of the state government. New Zealand was also considered but the plan fizzled out.
In advice to the Dominions Office, the London Fairbridge Society said: ‘Mrs. Kingsley Fairbridge’s efforts to start a new farm school in New South Wales were entirely uninspired by this Society and made without our knowledge.’
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The Dominions Office replied that ‘The Society runs the risk of being overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of its supporters.’
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There was to be ongoing tension between the local Fairbridge Society in Sydney and the Fairbridge Society in London regarding their respective powers and responsibilities. (This was also the case with the Fairbridge farm schools at Pinjarra and Rhodesia.) The local Fairbridge Society in Sydney was to organise much of the funding to start up the farm but would need ongoing financial support from London to cover its operating costs. London would be responsible for ensuring the continuing support of the British Government and the ongoing recruitment of British children. London would also retain the power to hire and fire the school’s principals.
The building and opening of the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong happened very quickly: there was only a year between the acquisition of the land and the arrival of the first party of children.
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On 8 February 1937 the society bought Naragoon, a 650-hectare farm six kilometres east of the town of Molong in New South Wales. At the time there was only one timber house on the site, which was to become the farm supervisor’s house.
On 24 February 1937 a public subscription campaign was launched in
The Sydney Morning Herald
. The target – £50,000 – was quickly reached and passed.
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By the end of 1937 a windmill, water pipes and water tanks had been installed on the farm and by January 1938 the first of the children’s cottages was completed. The cottage was used by Commander R. R. Beauchamp, the school’s first principal, and his family until the big two-storey principal’s house was completed a couple of months later.
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By March 1938, when the first party of twenty-eight boys arrived, three children’s cottages – named Brown, Green and Molong – and the principal’s house were completed. The boys were split between Brown Cottage and Green Cottage. Molong Cottage was used for cooking, dining and schooling until the dining hall, kitchens and school were built over the next two years.
Len Cowne recalls the Fairbridge Farm School he saw when he arrived in March 1938 in the first party of boys. The design of the cottages was to stay essentially the same for the life of Fairbridge:
When we, the first party, arrived, the school consisted of the beginnings of a settlement which – probably because we were English – became known as ‘the village’, and was to become the main domestic and communal area of the farm school.
Three very large wooden bungalows, the principal’s two-storey house and a small guesthouse had already been completed; and about half a mile away stood the original farm and dairy buildings. The cottages were to be the homes of the child migrants, and were solidly built of timber standing on brick piers for both ventilation and to discourage termites; these were roofed with heavy-duty red corrugated asbestos sheets. Apart from the bathroom, which was open to the roof, all rooms had ceilings and upper walls made from a sugar cane waste product called ‘Canex’, that looked like compressed straw but was a good insulating material. Some of the later cottages had the upper walls and ceilings lined with asbestos sheets.
Each cottage consisted of a large dormitory at one end separated from the matron’s quarters at the other end by a locker room, a dining/common room, a bathroom, and a kitchen complete with wood-fired black iron range.
There was no main drainage or main sewer, so domestic waste water went into soakaways via a grease trap, and sewage went into large septic tanks.
Our beds were made of metal tubing, somewhat like the frame of a farm gate, with unsprung diamond wire mesh stretched between; there were no pillows, one end of the frame being angled slightly upwards instead. This took some getting used to, as did having to depend on oil lighting for several months until the electricity was connected. Using oil lamps for lighting and having our meals cooked on a Victorian-style wood-fired range seemed, at least to me, like being transported back into the days of my grandmother’s youth.
But these were our living conditions and we had to get used to stepping back a century or so – at least for the time being.
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The official opening of Fairbridge took place in November 1938 and was an opportunity for the Sydney Fairbridge Council to demonstrate the strength and breadth of its support.
The Sydney Morning Herald
reported that over 700 guests arrived to witness the official opening by the governor-general of Australia, Lord Gowrie. During the ceremony his wife officially opened Green Cottage, which was renamed Lady Gowrie Cottage in her honour.
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By the outbreak of World War II most of the village’s buildings and roads had been built. There were ten children’s cottages (an eleventh was finished during the war), the village hospital, village school, schoolmaster’s house, staff quarters, farm supervisor’s houses and the deputy principal’s house.
The last party of children to arrive at Fairbridge before child migration was halted due to World War II had to sail from England to Canada and then across the Pacific, via Honolulu and New Zealand, in order to avoid the conflict. They arrived in Sydney in May 1940. No more child migrants would come to Australia until shipping became available again in 1947. In the meantime, the Fairbridge Farms at Molong and Pinjarra, and the Northcote Home in Victoria, shrank in size as children progressively left the schools to take up jobs outside. In 1944 the smaller Northcote home closed for the duration of the war and its forty-two children were transported by train and truck to live at the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong.
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