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Britain's lost children

29/8/2014

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This summer we have had a house full of children and watching them play and jump endlessly in and out of the swimming pool made me reflect on a book I published last year about three children who lose their home, their family, even their country.  Their lives could not have been more different from the excited little grandchildren charging around our house.


A couple of years ago I came across an article about the children who had been sent to the colonies as migrants, many of them wrongly labelled as orphans and under the delusion that their families were dead.  I was amazed, not only that such a thing could happen in Britain but also that it had been kept secret for so many years.  If it hadn't been for a chance circumstance, many of those children, now adults, would never have been reunited with their families.  A social worker, Margaret Humphreys, was assigned the case of a woman who claimed that she had been deported from Britain when she was only four years old.  That was in 1986; since then Mrs Humphreys has discovered that as many as 150,000 children were sent abroad by the British government to start new lives.  The last case being as recently as 1967.  Director and founder of the Child Migrants' Trust Mrs Humphreys has worked tirelessly to help these children find surviving members of their families.  Her book EMPTY CRADLES tells of the first seven years of her struggle to bring this knowledge out into the open and to help those involved.


The article that I had chanced upon inspired me to read extensively around this subject and in the end to write a book of my own.  THE ONLY BLUE DOOR is fiction, a novel based on true occurrences and drawn from the real experiences of those immigrant children.  It is the story of the three Smith children from Bethnal Green who, through a series of unfortunate incidents, find themselves on a boat to Australia in 1941.  This is not a story of tears and recriminations but rather the story of how each child, in their own way, struggles to make the best of their lives and never gives up the hope of being reunited.


THE ONLY BLUE DOOR is available as an ebook and in paperback.


HISTORICAL NOVEL SOCIETY INDIE REVIEW January 2014

Most of us are familiar with child evacuation during World War 2, but I wonder how many know about child migrants who were sent to South Africa, Australia and Canada to avoid danger? The Only Blue Door follows the story of Maggie, Billy and Grace, siblings who become victims of the good intentions of people believing them to have been orphaned during the Blitz. Shipped to Australia to start a new life, the children are separated and so begins Maggie’s struggle to prove her mother still lives and to bring the family back together.Based on actual events, this beautifully written story had me gripped and emotionally attached to the characters and their struggles. Apparently well researched, it provides some insight into the long term impact of the events unfolding between 1939 and 1945, without being clichéd. The tireless work and battles with ‘red tape’ of the organisations involved in evacuation and subsequent repatriation of thousands of children over this period, is aptly represented in the story.

The writing style is engaging and accurate, with fully rounded and believable characters. I will not only be recommending this book but also looking to read more of this authors work. Not every story has a happy ending, but maybe this one does?


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The children that people forgot: Britain's sea evacuees

30/3/2014

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Britain’s Sea evacuees: “The child, the best immigrant”

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.

Something that only came to light a few years ago was the fact that thousands of children had been sent as child migrants to countries such as Australia and Canada from Britain and never knew their own parents.  A social worker called Margaret Humphreys stumbled on this by accident in 1986, when a former child migrant asked her for assistance in locating her relatives.  She has since formed the Child Migrant Trust and subsequently helped many people to be reunited with their families.

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 children, whose parents 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 Churchil 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.

In the first few months CORB despatched over three thousand children to the Dominions.  Then tragedy struck.  All shipping traffic was subject to attacks from German U-boats and on 17th September 1940, the City of Benares, sailing from Liverpool for Canada with 197 passengers on board, was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic.  Ninety of the passengers were children.  It was a dreadful night, with gale-force winds and driving rain; 131 of the crew and 134 passengers were killed, among them seventy CORB children.  The reaction in Britain was one of horror and recrimination.  It had already been suggested that it was too risky to send children overseas during the war now the sceptics had been proved correct.  It was decided that no more children were to be sent to the Domninions unless their ship was in a protective convoy.  As there were not enough ships to use in the convoys that meant the end of the Sea Evacuee scheme.  The children had to take their chance in Britain.  Unlike other 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’, the three children are sent to Australia under the CORB scheme in one of the last ships to take sea evacuees to the Dominions.  Unlike the other CORB children they are sent from an orphanage which had taken them in, believing them to be orphans.

If you want to read more about 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”.

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    Joan Fallon is a writer and novelist living in Spain.

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