“The Child, the best immigrant”

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, although in many cases it
was too late and their parents had already died.
I was so moved by this surprising piece of British history that I wanted to tell people
about it, and so I wrote the novel The Only Blue Door. The characters in the story are
fictitious but everything that happens to them is based on the accounts of many of those
evacuees.
It seemed that it was not something unusual. Throughout the late 19th century thousands
of children were routinely sent out to the overseas British Dominions to start new lives, and
this continued during the 20th century until as late as the 1960s. They were taken from
orphanages run by religious and charitable institutions and despatched to Canada, South
Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Some were as young as four and five; others were
teenagers. Most of the children came from deprived backgrounds and it was considered to
be for their own good that they were plucked from poverty and sent to a country where there
was good food and new opportunities for them. The receiving countries welcomed them—
they needed people, and children were so much easier to mould into their way of life than
adults.
So when World War II broke out in 1939 there was already a precedent for sending
children abroad to start new lives. June 1940 saw the start of heavy bombing raids across
London, and with the threat of an enemy invasion becoming more and more real, it was then
that the British government decided to set up the Children’s Overseas Reception Board to
send the children of parents who could not afford to send them to safety, to the Dominions.
They enlisted help from charities with experience of child migration, such as the Barnado’s
Homes, Fairbridge Farm Schools, the Salvation Army and the Catholic Church. However
the plan was not warmly received by everyone—Winston Churchill thought it was a
defeatist move and others warned of the disruption it would cause to families. Nevertheless
within two weeks CORB had received over 200,000 applications from parents who wanted
to send their children to safety. Parents often volunteered the names of relatives or friends
who would look after the children in their new country and homes were found for the others
by CORB representatives or the charities.
Unlike previous child migrants, most of the sea evacuees returned to Britain once the war
was over. But child migration continued until 1967 when the last nine children were sent to
Australia by the Barnado’s Homes charity.
In my novel ‘The Only Blue Door,’ three children are sent to Australia under the CORB
scheme in one of the last ships to take sea evacuees to the Dominions, but unlike the other
CORB children they are sent from an orphanage which had taken them in, erroneously
believing them to be orphans. It is the story of their lives in a strange country and their
mother’s struggle to find them and bring them home.
If you want to read more books on this topic I can recommend “New Lives for Old” by
Roger Kershaw and Janet Sacks, “Innocents Abroad” by Edward Stokes and Margaret
Humphreys’ book “Empty Cradles”.

It is September 1940, Maggie and her young siblings, Grace and Billy, are living in the East End of London with their mother. Their father has been killed at Dunkirk and their mother goes into hospital to have her fourth child, leaving the children with a neighbour. In one of the worst bombing raids of the war their home is destroyed and the neighbour is killed. Bewildered and frightened, the children wander the streets until they are taken in by some nuns. But their problems are not over; no-one can trace their mother and, labelled as orphans, they are sent as child migrants to Australia.

Learn more about author Joan Fallon and her books at the author’s website