Marchmont in Belleville with latest batch of children to place out.
After writing two historical novels dealing with the birth of the British Home Child emigration movement and its effects in Canada, I can still be surprised. This movement, created by social reformers, swept up destitute, abused and abandoned children and sent them off as farm and domestic workers overseas to new lives in Canada. This activity went on from 1870 to the 1940s.
To me and many others, this is all in the past. Yet whenever I have been out in public with my books, The Tomorrow Country and The Accidental Bootlegger, I am regularly approached by people wanting to tell me about the Home Child in their family. “Grandma was placed on a farm near Consecon and she had never seen a pig before.” “My great grandfather was born in Liverpool. He never found the brother that was sent to Canada after him.” “My father would never talk about where he came from. I think he was one of those Home Children.”
Youngsters were found in terrible poverty.
The frequency of these stories can be explained by the site of the distribution home, Marchmont, in Belleville, in the centre of the Quinte region. Every year dozens of British children would arrive at our little train station and march to the large building waiting for them. Their stay would not be long. In a rural land hungry for labour, there were multiple applications for each child. Buggies and and wagons would line up outside waiting to take their scared little worker home. From the beginning, Marchmont placed over 6000 children in the region so it is no wonder their progeny abound.
In return for chores, the children were to receive food, shelter and schooling. Some lucky ones were treated like family. Too many others were exploited, abused and never saw the inside of a school. Some children were kept working hard during the busy season and returned to Marchmont when things were slow. This meant a child could go from placement to placement and never find stability. Others turned defiant, horrified upstanding farmers with their light-fingered street urchin ways or ran away to disappear altogether.
Party of youngsters heading off to unknown fates.
Contrary to popular belief, only a small number of these children were orphans. They were gathered from the streets or from families who, through sickness, accident, loss of work or the breadwinner, could no longer feed their young ones and were forced to give them up to keep them alive. Siblings were not kept together. Contact was lost. Heartbreak and loneliness was often the lot of the Home Child.
To make things worse, Home Children were periodically attacked in the press was off-scourings of British gutters and carriers of disease foisted on Canada, filling the little strangers with shame and making them further outcasts. Many joined the army in WWI just to get to England to look for the families they had been torn away from.
Despite these tribulations, Canada offered many opportunities impossible in Britain. Most of the Home Children grew up to become fine Canadians and raise families of their own. Too often their hid their origins so that only now are descendants discovering they have a Home Child in their family. With new enthusiasm they can research online the newly opened records of the emigration organizations to find out who great grandma really was.
Today, with over four million descendants in Canada from these brave little emigrants, their stories continue to echo through the generations. If you have a story, keep it, tell it and pass it down so that those who come after you will never forget.