Starting a new life in the New World

Apr 8 2008 by David Charters, Liverpool Daily Post

At the height of Britian’s Imperial might, thousands of destitute children were shipped from Liverpool to the colonies, as a new book reveals. David Charters reports

MOST judgments about how life should be for other people depend on where you are sitting at the time. Then up spring two writers with a book about an extraordinary period in our history and how it affected poor children.

Yet, despite all the facts and statistics, it is difficult to know now whether what happened to those children was good or bad.

The book tells of events in Liverpool and other towns, when our country was building the biggest and richest empire the world has known.

So, from the warmth and comfort of today, you must stretch your imagination into dark, sad places, to have even the slightest sense of how those children felt – in the cobbled courts and gin-stewed hovels, where hungry dogs snapped at undertakers carrying away the little, limp bundles and steam rose from the unlit corners, while priests stepped lightly with their Bibles and pick-pockets sniffed the air. The children were half-starved, bruised, coughing, abandoned or sold, filthy, itching, crying, but still hoping that God would be kind to them, one day.

And one day a few of them were taken to a huge brick warehouse. They were cleaned, fed porridge and soup, taught to read and write, and told how good God had been to them. So they prayed to Him as the coals spat in the dormitory hearths, when they were alone in bed, and the heavy door was shut.

Then a stranger came and said they were to be sent thousands of miles away to homes in a place called the New World, where the sun shone and the grass grew green. Was that near heaven?

This is the almost forgotten story about thousands of children sent to the British colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Rhodesia.

Christians called them “the bricks of the British Empire”. Well, that was a positive name. At home, they had been known as gutter children, urchins, waifs and strays, whose ragged clothes and haunted faces were an embarrassment to the authorities.

Spices and fruits, cloths, sugar, juices and artefacts of distant lands arrived on ships in Liverpool – ironically, the port from which most of our children departed for the unknown.

Child migration schemes began with the American colonies. In 1619, one hundred street children were taken from London to labour in the tobacco plantations of Virginia.

Innumerable others followed to work in our American and West Indian colonies. The flow slowed after the American Revolution (1766), but Australia was there to take over. As far as the law was concerned, any child over seven could be regarded as criminal. A penal station for boys was opened in Van Diemen’s land (Tasmania) in 1834. In 1787, a fleet set sail for America from London. Among the children was Elizabeth Hayward, 13, a clogmaker, sentenced at the Old Bailey for stealing a bonnet and dress.

The relationship between parent and child was often governed by finance, rather than love or morality. Destitute parents sold their sons and daughters to employers or people who could offer them a better life.

However, serious efforts to regulate the care of paupers came with the Poor Law Act of 1834. Poor Law Commissioners and boards of guardians were appointed to monitor the workhouses and other institutions. Selected children, aged five to their teens, from the workhouses and orphanages, were sent to the colonies.

In the 19th century, organisations such as the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society and Dr Barnardo’s homes entered the picture.

Liverpool’s main involvement was in taking children to Canada, usually on Allen Line ships. Although the workhouses were not ideal, as is known to every- one familiar with the stories of Charles Dickens, their children were educated and disciplined to a level unknown on the streets.

This made them an attractive proposition in Canada, where there was a steady demand for farm labourers, lumber and factory workers, servants and seamstresses. Eventually, some 100,000 children were settled there.

Liverpool’s central role was highlighted by the Reverend HD Barrett, who had been to Canada to report on the work being done by the Waifs and Strays Society. He also took an opportunity to explore Liverpool, the last bit of the old country to be touched by many children.

By then, the city’s population had been swollen by 80,000 people, who had left Ireland during the Potato Famine.