Britain's Sea Evacuees: "The child, the best immigrant" More than ten years ago I was flicking through a copy of the Economist when I saw an article that took me quite by surprise. It was about thousands of children who had been routinely sent to the British colonies as child migrants. Because children were young and malleable they were seen as the best category of immigrant - easy to assimilate, more adaptable and with a long working life ahead of them. The British Dominions loved them. This practice only came to light in 1986 when a British social worker called Margaret Humphreys met a former child migrant who asked her for assistance in locating her relatives Margaret Humphreys The woman had been sent to Australia as a young child and now she wanted to trace her family. Margaret was staggered at this revelation and since that happenstance meeting, has formed the Child Migrant Trust to help many people find their families— children now mature adults who had been sent as child migrants to countries such as Australia and Canada from Britain and never knew their own parents. She managed to reunite many of these former child migrants with their families,…
