Up until 1970, the UK regularly shipped thousands of orphans and illegitimate children abroad to a life of virtual slave labour and, ofter, abuse. Giulia Rhodes meets two victims of a policy that robbed them of a childhood and a family.
23rd April 1938 … Four child migrants arrive at Fairbridge Farm
School in Molong, New South Wales. From left: Edward (Ted) Gamsley,
Mary Simpson, Clara Park, Cyril Lord. Ted is alive and lives in Molong, the
others are dead.
Giulia Rhodes - Saturday, 24 October 2015.
Sunday evenings were the highlight of the week when Tony Costa was a
child. Then, he and the other boys living at Bindoon Boys Town, an orphanage
run by the Catholic Christian Brothers in Western Australia, were allowed to
watch a television film. Sometimes, says Costa, 74, Mario Lanza, the American
tenor and Hollywood star would feature. “I ordained him the voice of hope. When
he sang I felt I could keep going. It was the only good thing.”
Costa is one of an estimated 100,000
British children sent to institutions in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and
Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) under official migration schemes which ran until 1970.
Most of the children never saw their families again. Many suffered years of
systematic physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Tony’s story is among those told in an exhibition opening at the V&A
Museum of Childhood today. He and several other former child migrants have come
to Britain to share their experiences. “We need to be heard so we never, ever
see this happen again,” he says.
Tony was two when his unmarried mother took him to a London orphanage.
She told the nuns she would come back as soon as she had the means to provide
for him.
Tony Costa was 11 when he left for Australia in 1953 … ‘I was told I
would ride on horseback to school and pick fruit from the trees.’
By the time she did, her son had been sent to the other side of the
world. She was told simply that she was too late. It would be another 50 years
before Tony even found out she had returned.
He was 11 when, in 1953, he set sail for Australia. “I was told I would
ride on horseback to school and pick fruit from the trees. We were going to
enjoy life.”
Official pictures from the time show groups of excited children, smartly
dressed and smiling. As soon as the ship docked at Fremantle, a different
reality emerged. Tony spent the next five years at Bindoon, where an Australian
Royal Commission last year heard that boys were subjected to back-breaking
manual labour, given little food or education and regularly abused.
“We lived in constant fear of being flogged or molested. We had no
dignity or self-esteem. I would cry my eyes out at night and wonder what I had
ever done to deserve such treatment when I had committed no crime. We were told
we were the sons of whores, the lowest form of humanity,” says Tony.
Aged 16, Tony left Bindoon, taking a job in a factory, but only when he
reached 21 was he given his birth certificate. “I learned my parents were
called Kathleen Mary and Thomas Joseph, a Belfast man, and that I was born at
St Mary’s hospital, Islington.”
In 1977, he travelled to Britain seeking some geographical connection
and identity. “I just wandered about like a lost soul.”
In 2011, the film ‘Oranges and Sunshine’ told the story of British
social worker Dr Margaret Humphreys and her fight on behalf of child migrants.
Tony wrote to the charity she set up, the Child Migrants Trust, and six months
later was given details of an aunt living in Belfast. Both his parents were
dead.
The revelation that his mother had tried to get him back was
heartbreaking. “Knowing she wanted me – when I had been told she didn’t – was
wonderful, but we were betrayed. The torment she must have felt haunts me. I
could have had a normal childhood.”
Age does not diminish the pain of a lost identity, says Humphreys,
international director of the Child Migrants Trust.
Tony Costa as a boy. His mother tried to get him back but he only found
out in 2011, when it was too late.
In 2010, a government apology was issued to former child migrants and a
fund established to facilitate trips to meet relatives. It has been used more
than 850 times.
“We can’t give back their childhood,” Humphreys says, “but allowing them
at least to be able to say who their parents were, perhaps meet cousins, hear
stories, understand the very few vague memories they may have is huge.”
Many former migrants only found out 50 or 60 years after leaving the UK
that they were not war orphans. “That was perhaps the cruellest deception,”
says Humphreys.
It is time, she says, the truth was investigated through an independent
judicial inquiry. “The apology was the start of this country’s reconciliation
with the children it sent away. Justice should follow. The migrants need to
give their testimony and we need to hear it, while they are still alive.”
Marcelle O’Brien, 71, from Perth, in Western Australia, is another
migrant determined to tell her story. Unlike Tony, she learned the truth just
in time to meet her mother, who died in 2002.
“She was all hunched in a chair. Her mind was starting to go but I
tapped her on the shoulder, knelt down near her and said, ‘Hello, Mum, it’s
Marcelle.’ She looked at me and said, ‘Praise the Lord. I know who you are. Those bastards took you away from
me.’”
Marcelle O’Brien, from Perth, Australia, was sent to an Australian
orphanage when she was five, where she was maltreated.
On arrival, her luggage was taken – “We had nothing left of England” –
and she was sent to Fairbridge Farm, an orphanage in Pinjarra.
She remained there for 11 years, suffering regular abuse from the
“cottage mothers” assigned to look after the girls. “You would be locked in a
closet for hours, called terrible names,” she says, adding quietly, “I couldn’t
mention some of the stuff.”
“I never thought I had anyone. It was easier without happy memories. I
thought it was tougher for those who knew what they had lost.”
As Marcelle grew older, though, she began to dwell on the snippets of
memory she retained. In particular, she wondered about Valerie and Kenneth,
whom her foster mother had taken in at the same time and gone on to adopt. “We
used to play together. We were about the same age.”
She placed advertisements seeking information – to no avail – in
newspapers in Britain and Australia.
When she was nearly 50, she learned that her foster mother, whom she had
always assumed to be her birth mother, had tried desperately to get her back so
she could adopt her.
Marcelle O’Brien, as a little girl.
When the charity in charge of the orphanage refused, Mrs Chapman – by
now also mourning the death of Valerie – appealed to the royal family for help.
The then Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen Mother, wrote back expressing
sympathy, but ultimately supporting the charity’s position.
Finally, through the Child Migrants Trust, Marcelle was able to trace
her birth mother, who had changed her name. “To know I had a mother, that I
have family, was incredible. She was my mum, I was desperate to see her,” she
says.
By the time she met her mother, though, it was almost too late. “I had a
few days before her dementia became too advanced. She was a frail old lady. I
couldn’t ask her anything. I wouldn’t have wanted to upset her and she was too
confused.”
She felt anger and hurt, but never towards her mother. “I felt deep
compassion for her. I was so thankful to have met her.” With four children and
31 grand and great-grandchildren of her own, Marcelle can imagine the agony of
giving up a baby. “It was only when I started my own family, when I had someone
to look after and who might look after me, that I felt I belonged anywhere.
That is when I learned what love is.”
Marcelle is now in contact with three half-siblings and several cousins,
in the UK and Canada. “You can’t go back for a couple of weeks and cram a
lifetime in, but knowing they are there, that we can talk, is wonderful. I have
an identity, a past. I exist.”
More information, childmigrantstrust.com. On
Their Own: Britain’s Child Migrants is at the Victoria & Albert Museum of
Childhood, London E2. vam.ac.uk/moc
