Why did the British send their children into slavery until the 1970s

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

At the end of the 19th and first half of the 20th century, children's charities were very popular in Great Britain. Kind-hearted English ladies and gentlemen worried about the poor children helped them find new families. Homeless and poor children were promised a new happy life among farmers. True, this "earthly paradise" was located far away - in Australia, New Zealand and other countries of the British Commonwealth … Huge beautiful ships were taking tens of thousands of children from the shores of foggy Albion across the ocean. Most of the young “settlers” never returned to their homeland.

The Home Children program was founded in 1869 by the evangelist Annie MacPherson, although the practice of kidnapping children and sending cheap laborers to the colony has existed since the 17th century. Of course, like any good undertaking, this business was conceived with noble intentions. First, Annie and her sister opened several "Industrial Houses", where children of the poor and street children could work and at the same time get an education. However, over time, the active lady came to the conclusion that the best way for the unfortunate orphans would be migration to fabulous and well-fed colonies. It is warm there, there is work, so it is worth sending the children there.

In its first year, the Migration Aid Foundation sent 500 orphans from London orphanages to Canada. This was the beginning of the mass migration of children. Some of the “lucky ones” were found by kind-hearted helpers on the streets, others were already brought up in orphanages, but sometimes the children were taken from their families if they looked dysfunctional. Sometimes babies were simply kidnapped on the streets or deceived with the promise of a "heavenly life." Future settlers were put on ships and sent overseas. It was believed that adoptive families were waiting for them in the colonies. Local farmers, they say, traditionally raise many children and need helpers.

In fact, only a few fell into foster families. Thousands of children who were taken from the UK to Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa ended up in real labor camps upon arrival in their new homeland. They were used as free labor in the fields of farmers, at construction sites, in factories, and older boys were even sent to the mines. The children often lived in simple sheds, not far from their places of work, and, of course, they could not even dream of any kind of study. Their conditions of detention ranged from bearable to downright awful. Some small settlers were sent to orphanages or church shelters, but often it was even worse.

The reason for this barbaric attitude towards children was, of course, money. Very simple calculations show that it cost about £ 5 a day to keep a child in a British government institution, compared to only ten shillings in Australia. Plus the use of free labor. The business turned out to be extremely profitable, so it flourished for a very long time.

Many immigrant children left England at the beginning of the 20th century. Then, during the Great Depression, this practice stopped, but after the Second World War it resumed with renewed vigor, because there were so many orphans on the streets … The program completely stopped in the 1970s, and twenty years later shocking facts emerged.

In 1986, social worker Margaret Humphries received a letter in which a woman from Australia told her story: at the age of four, she was sent from the UK to her new home in an orphanage, and now she was looking for parents. Margaret began to delve into this case and realized that she was dealing with a large-scale crime that had been committed for hundreds of years. After the exposing materials were made public, the woman created and headed the charitable organization Union of Migrant Children. For several decades, activists of this movement have been trying to at least partially compensate for the harm done to thousands of families. Former migrants are looking for their relatives, although this task is often impossible.

In 1998, the Special Committee of the British Parliament conducted its own investigation. In the published report, the reality of child migration looks even worse. Religious organizations were especially criticized. Numerous facts indicate that in Catholic shelters, migrant children were subjected to various types of violence. The Western Australian Legislature issued a statement on August 13, 1998, in which it apologized to the former young migrants.

After data on child migration was collected and consolidated around the world, society was horrified. According to published data, over 350 years (from 1618 to the late 1960s) about 150,000 children were sent from Great Britain overseas. Contemporaries were sure that all these settlers were orphans, but today researchers believe that many small migrants were taken from poor families by force or simply kidnapped.

The resettlement of peoples often occurs for natural reasons, but sometimes it is associated with national tragedies. Photographer Dagmar van Wiigel has created a series of colorful portraits of Migrants from African countries: Portraits of those who are usually overlooked