Marjorie Too Afraid to Cry: A Home Child Experience

This book is dedicated to my mother, Marjorie Skidmore (née Arnison),

who let me believe that I was the driving force behind unlocking her story.

I thank her for taking me back to her lost childhood. She always was

— and still is — a much stronger woman than I can ever hope to be.

In 2007, sisters Joyce Earl and Marjorie Skidmore revisited the Whitley Bay sands of their childhood days. This was their first return to their place of birth since being removed from their mother’s care in February 1937, over seventy years earlier. The experience allowed for some very curative memories to surface.

Photo by Patricia Skidmore.

Table of Contents

Foreword by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Preface

What’s in a Name?

One

Butterflies Prevail

Two

Winifred’s Children

Three

Adrift

Four

Winifred’s Sorrow

Five

Middlemore Emigration Home, Birmingham

Six

Fading Memories

Seven

Off to London

Eight

The Last Tea Party

Nine

Joyce’s Sorrow

Ten

Leaving Liverpool

Eleven

Pier D, Port of Vancouver

Twelve

Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School

Thirteen

A Mother’s Lament

Fourteen

Family Is Important

Fifteen

Marjorie Waited Seventy-Three Years

Afterword

Patricia’s Perspective

Appendix A

Outfitted for Canada

Appendix B

The Fairbridge March

Appendix C

Brief Background of the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, near Cowichan Station, British Columbia

Appendix D

Child Migration Timeline

Appendix E

Transcript of Gordon Brown’s Apology to British Child Migrants

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Foreword

This is an important book telling a life-changing story, and its publication is long overdue.

When, in February 2010, I made a formal full and unconditional apology to the victims of the child migrant program on behalf of the U.K. government, it was with the story of Marjorie right at the forefront of my thoughts.

It was right that we said sorry to Marjorie and all those truly let down. Sorry — as I said then — that she and so many others were allowed to be sent away at the time when they were most vulnerable, sorry that instead of caring for her and thousands more, this country turned its head and their tears were not seen and their cries for help not heeded. Sorry also that it has taken so long for the day of atonement to come, and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved to be given.

In addition I am delighted that Marjorie was able to be reunited with her brother as a result of the family restoration fund we set up with a £6 million grant.

I am humbled by the determination of Marjorie and all former child migrants to have the failures of the past acknowledged, I’m inspired by her and their refusal to be victims, and I’m inspired also by the strength of her spirit. The actions we took in government cannot change the past but can go some way to easing even a small amount of the pain Marjorie and child migrants have endured for many decades.

I believe that Marjorie, Too Afraid to Cry will also play a role in helping share with the world an astonishing story of courage in the face of unthinkable hardship. Courage is the greatest quality of all, for on it everything else depends — and Marjorie has shown a courage that all should applaud.

Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown

Preface

This is a story of my mother, Marjorie, who was one of the thousands upon thousands of children who were removed from their families, their communities, and their country to be placed in one of the British colonies to provide white stock and cheap labour for that colony.

As a child, it angered me when I asked my mother about her past and she would not tell me. The anger stemmed from fear, as I imagined the many horrid secrets that she was keeping from me about her past. I felt such a strong sense of not belonging that I told the other children in my school that I came from Mars. We had no past. There was nothing to root me to my birthplace. I did not understand why my mother was so vague about her family and why they all lived in England while we lived in Canada.

It took me many years to discover why my mother would not tell me about her childhood family — it was not because she was keeping a dark secret, but because she had lost her roots.

By 1937, Marjorie’s family had been living in Whitley Bay, in northern England, since the early 1920s. Unemployment there was high, and Marjorie’s father had left his family and the area to look for work. He did find employment around London but had not returned home for the past four years. From time to time he sent some money to his wife and their nine children, but it was rarely enough to sustain them.

In February 1937, with the permission of Marjorie’s father, Marjorie, two sisters, and a brother were removed from their mother’s care by one of Britain’s many emigration societies, the Fairbridge Society. (Kingsley Fairbridge started the Society for the Furtherance of Child Migration to the Colonies in 1909. It was soon shortened to the Child Emigration Society. In 1935 it was renamed the Fairbridge Farm Schools Incorporation, and by the early 1950s it was renamed again to the Fairbridge Society Incorporation. For the purposes of this book, the Fairbridge Society will be the main title used.) The society placed the four children in the Middlemore Emigration Home, over two hundred miles southwest of Whitley Bay, in Selly Oak, Birmingham. There they waited their turn to be tested to see if they were mentally and physically fit enough to be accepted for emigration to Canada.

Six months later, ten-year-old Marjorie and her eight-year-old brother were sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Marjorie recalled that when leaving Liverpool on the Duchess of Atholl she physically pulled an imaginary cloak of protection around her as the shoreline slipped away. For this ten-year-old, forgetting her past, her family, and England was the only survival tool she had to enable her to face her frightening and uncertain future. She and her brother were separated and continued to be so until they were well into adulthood. Two of her sisters were at the Middlemore Emigration Home and her beloved mother was in Whitley Bay with her other siblings. She had no one.

Their younger sister was sent out eleven months later, but the older sister, Joyce, was left behind at the home in Birmingham. She was deemed to be too old for the Fairbridge farm school scheme. She was only twelve, but her records incorrectly showed that she was thirteen.[1] Her loss was as great as her siblings’. They were simply gone one day, and she was not even allowed to say goodbye to them when they left for Canada. Joyce stayed at the home until she was sixteen, then was sent back to her family.

I started my research with a small handful of my mother’s early memories, mostly from her childhood at Whitley Bay: she recalled swinging on an old rusty gate, yelling to her mother for a half penny. It was her tenth birthday. She eventually ran off across the alley to school without so much as a farthing. She also recalled playing on the sands at Whitley Bay, the Spanish City Fun Fair at the north end of the town and walking over to St. Mary’s Lighthouse at low tide. I had a photograph of my mother (see top front cover and page 172), although it would take finding several other pieces of her journey before we recognized this as a photograph from the day she arrived at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. She had vague memories of Canada House in London and of leaving Liverpool. The rest was locked away.

I was determined to unlock her hidden past. I contacted the Whitley Bay School District. They still had records from the 1930s, and I was not only able to discover which schools she attended, but also the dates she attended and the addresses she lived at while at each school. I tracked down the only home where they lived, across the alley from a school: a brownstone house on John Street. I stood and imagined her swinging on a rusty gate and running off to school. I walked the Whitley Bay sand and imagined her playing there as a child. I visited the lighthouse and the old fairgrounds. I walked the same streets that she did as a child.

When I felt that I had found what I could of her first ten years in Whitley Bay, I brought my mother back to the little seaside town of her birth in 2007 to share with her all that I had found. Her big sister Joyce came with us. Seventy years had passed since the sisters had seen Whitley Bay. They both said that they did not remember much, but I walked quietly behind them, with a notepad, as memory after memory poured out.

Together, we walked from the last flat they lived in with their family, on Whitley Road, to the train station — the very station the children left from in February 1937. We stood by the new gate at the John Street brownstone and imagined the squeaky, rusty old gate and ten-year-old Marjorie running across the lane to Cullercoats Primary School. It was torn down years ago, but standing there I felt I could see Marjorie running across the alley to the school. Marjorie and Joyce stood by the Rockcliffe School, the last school they attended in Whitley Bay, and memories of skipping school and running to play on the beach came back to them. We visited the other houses where the family had lived and the other schools the children attended.

A fuller picture of her childhood slowly emerged. Together we pieced her last few months at home with her mother, and then her journey from the Whitley Bay train station to Newcastle upon Tyne, down to Birmingham, and eventually to London, and finally up to Liverpool. The crossing of the Atlantic aboard the Duchess of Atholl, landing in Montreal and the train ride to Vancouver, the ferry to Nanaimo, and finally the last bus ride to Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island. These events all had dates attached to them now. We had a framework to work from, and with it details of her childhood and her journey to Canada emerged.

The pieces of the puzzle were coming together to portray a picture, each piece helping to unlock her painful past. But there was still one pain that needed addressing: the feeling of betrayal towards her mother that Marjorie had carried for seventy years. By the time Marjorie turned ten, she had not seen her father for almost four years, thus, removed from her mother’s care, it was natural for her to blame only her mother for sending her away and not keeping her safe.

My grandmother managed to get to Canada for a brief visit with her Canadian children in 1969. It would be the only time after being sent away that Marjorie would see her. It was not a successful visit. Marjorie wanted answers and her mother could not give any. My grandmother returned to England, the bond with her daughter still as broken as ever.

During our visit to England we were able to visit my grandparent’s grave. They are buried at the Greenwich Cemetery on Shooters Hill, Eltham, London. As Marjorie stood by the grave, she was able to tell her mother that she forgave her and that she finally realizes, after all these years, that it was not her mother who sent her away. Marjorie had been told so frequently by her English family members that it was to her mother’s eternal distress that she lost her children to Canada. To know that they both shared this distress at being parted helped Marjorie’s healing and allowed her to forgive.

In February 2010, Marjorie received a call to be present at the formal apology that the then-British-prime-minister, Gordon Brown, was scheduled to give to all child emigrants sent from Britain to the colonies from 1619 to the 1970s. The 350-year history of child migration was finally being recognized for what it was for so many of the children — a shameful part of British history. Marjorie waited for seventy-three years to hear it. In her heart, she knew from the start that it was wrong to separate her from her family and send her to the colonies.

When the prime minister took Marjorie’s hand during his very personal and individual apology to each of home children present, he looked directly at Marjorie and said to her, I am truly sorry. I sensed that she fully believed that he was sorry for what happened to her and even appeared to be a little shocked at the whole phenomena of child migration. With that recognition and understanding, she was finally able to shed the last of her shame.

This is Marjorie’s story. It is a story of a little girl who learned at a very young age that it would do no good to cry, no matter how frightened she was. The only person who could stop those tears was 6,000 miles away. When Marjorie was removed from her mother’s care, they not only took her away from her family, her community, and her country, they took away the love of the most important person in her world — her mother. It is a story of loss and a story of discovery. It is a story of healing and of forgiveness.

This is also my story. As a little girl I struggled to accept my mother — this woman without a past. As a teenager I simply left. After my first son was born, I wondered how I could be a good mother if I couldn’t be a good daughter. It took many years to find a way to walk together with my mother. I needed answers and it was not until I fully understood that she wasn’t keeping anything from me, that we could truly communicate. She had lost her past. Together we went and found it.

What’s in a Name?

Many of the British child migrants sent to Canada between 1833 and 1948 are known as Home Children or British Home Children. Marjorie was one of the 329 children sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, near Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, between 1935 and 1948. This group — the only British child migrants sent directly to British Columbia, Canada — most often refer to themselves as Child Migrants or Former Fairbridgians. Children sent to the Fairbridge farm schools in Australia and former Rhodesia have been called Child Migrants or Former Fairbridgians, but most frequently Old Fairbridgians. The narratives have changed over the centuries, from ridding Britain of its idle young people (see chapter 13, note 1), to child rescue and Empire settlement. Stories of the kidnapping of children run throughout most of the history of child migration. Today, even though many migrants were happy to be sent to the colonies, there are numerous stories that centre on loss: loss of county, loss of records, loss of family and roots. Regardless of what the stories are or what these children are referred to as, they were all part of the British child migration movement, which went on for over 350 years — from 1618 to the mid 1970s.

One

Butterflies Prevail

Nervous. Pacing. Wandering abroad.

Wondering what? Wondering aloud ...

If there can be a resolution in this clime

For this loss carried over a lifetime?

Westminster Palace, London, England,

February 24, 2010

Emotions hung heavy, like late fall fruit dangling precariously in a forgotten orchard. Faces open, fearful, waiting; cheeks glistening with the ancient tears of pain held for years. For some, this pain was the only connection to their past.

Sixty-five or so men and women had been brought to London — back to their land of birth. They had waited a long time for this moment — their moment. Dressed in their town clothes, they mixed and mingled, nervously sharing bits of their stories. I, too, was there, having accompanied my mother to England.

I was five, but my papers said I was three, and they changed my name. It made it hard to find my way back, you know. One woman offered me this bit of information.

Yes, I can only imagine. I wanted to provide more, but what could I give? Besides, the woman had already moved away. It was an apology she was looking for, not my attention.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown presenting a personal apology to the former child migrants brought to London for this occasion, on February 24, 2010.

Photo by Patricia Skidmore.

They sent me to Australia and my brother to Canada. That wasn’t right you know, to split us up like that. The man wore his uneasiness like a shield. I had no one, he muttered as he too walked away.

I know. It happened too many times, I replied after him.

I walked by an elderly man, cradling a framed photograph, his face lined with a record of a life long-lived. It’s me mum, he told me, pushing back a tear. It took me twenty years to find her, and I only saw her just the once before she passed. Just the once.

I found it difficult to know what to say. Others talked to me, but only in passing while they paced about. Wandering, waiting, wondering. Would they finally find what they were looking for? The room seemed crowded, but this group represented just a tiny portion of the whole number of children and families affected by Britain’s 350-year policy of migrating children to the colonies. Even though I knew better, I still found it difficult to believe that, at fifty-nine, I was older than some.

I kept my eye on my mother. Marjorie looked regal in her burgundy brocade jacket. Patient. She had been waiting for seventy-three of her eighty-three years for this moment. Nervous, stomach full of butterflies. Of this present group, it was just her and one other Canadian child migrant, along with three offspring and two spouses, invited to represent the more than 110,000 child migrants who had been shipped to Canada between 1833 and 1948.

The tone shifted and those in the room paused. I looked over as British Prime Minister Gordon Brown walked through the door.

February 9, 2010

I had arrived home in the evening to my partially packed house after a long, fruitless weekend of searching for a new home, to find an unexpected urgent message from Dave Lorente, the founder of Home Children Canada. Can you come to the formal apology that the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, is giving to all British child migrants? It is just two weeks away. We need an answer tonight.

The apology was an important issue for me, but never in my wildest dreams had I imagined that I might actually be present for it. I knew the event was imminent, because it had been announced the previous fall that Britain would follow the lead of the Australian prime minister, Kevin Rudd. In November 2009, Rudd had given a formal apology for the wrongs experienced by all children, including the child migrants who found themselves in his country’s care between the 1920s and the 1970s. I had been waiting for the date of Brown’s apology to be announced, but Dave’s call made it so that my mother and I were among the first to hear about it, since the event had not yet been formally publicized.

Well, yes, I could go. I heard myself say without hesitation. I could drop my house search, my packing, and everything else, and go to London. I listened intently to the details, then recalled that my passport was due to expire. I cradled the phone on my shoulder and dug through my papers searching for it. Just as I thought, it would expire before our return date. My mind immediately started to make lists. First, forget everything and race to the passport office in the morning, then …

Pat, are you listening? Can you bring a home child? Dave’s tone urged me to pay attention.

A home child? His question caught me off guard since I had always called my mother a child migrant. It was the children sent to the provinces in eastern Canada who were most often referred to as home children. But child migrants and home children were really one and the same. I came to my senses. My mother?

Your mother! She is still with us? Can she still travel?

Oh yes indeed! I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Absolutely perfect. The British High Commissioner here in Ottawa will be in contact with you in a day or two. I listened to another twenty minutes of details, all of which I really wanted to hear, but I also wanted to hang up and phone my mother before she went to bed.

Why are you phoning so late? Marjorie sounded cautious, perhaps afraid of bad news that prompts calls in the dead of night.

You will never guess. We have been invited to go to London to hear the British prime minister’s apology.

London, England? You are pulling my leg.

No, seriously, it is true. At least I think it is. It does seem a little unreal, doesn’t it?

Well, I can’t go. No. No, I just can’t drop everything and go. I have too many commitments. When does this take place?

It is scheduled for the twenty-fourth, which is two weeks tomorrow. We would have to leave by the twenty-first to have time to settle in before the big day.

No, I can’t. Her voice determined.

Well, can you at least think about it? I begged, even though I found it difficult to be persuasive when I felt so uncertain myself.

Yes, I will think about it. Goodnight.

An email flashed on my computer as I hung up. More details of the trip, making it seem very plausible. I forwarded the email to my mother. Ten minutes later the phone rang.

Okay, I will go.

Letter from Malcolm Jackson, branch secretary, Fairbridge Farm School, June 11, 1940, to Marjorie’s mother. Jackson claimed that Marjorie asked for her siblings to join them at the farm school. When Marjorie saw this letter in 2009, she vehemently stated that she would never have said anything like that.

University of Liverpool Archives, Special Collections Branch, Fairbridge Archives, Arnison Family Records, D296.E1 .

I had always hoped for some formal recognition for the thousands of child migrants or home children sent to Canada. It was a little-known part of Canadian history. At one point there were up to fifty sending agencies in Britain shipping children overseas. While the numbers most commonly used for child migrants sent to Canada’s have varied widely from 80,000 to 100,000, Dave Lorente of Home Children Canada has pointed out that the Library and Archives Canada now has a list of 118,000 home children taken from ship lists that date back to 1865 at www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/databases/home-children/index-e.html. Many of the children had a difficult time accepting their new lives and all too often they found themselves in communities that did not fully accept them. A belief that the child migrants were of inferior blood led some of the new communities to not want these children to mingle with their own children. Home children were sent to Canada to work and then to find their own way once they were adults. It would not do to coddle them.

The farm school that my mother had been sent to was named the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. Prince of Wales was for the support the Fairbridge Society received from Edward, the Prince of Wales, and Fairbridge, after Kingsley Fairbridge, a man who advocated for the migration of Britain’s pauper children and for training them to become farmhands and domestic servants in the colonies. This farm school was established near Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The children were housed in cottages that held between twelve to fourteen children. Each cottage was headed by a cottage mother, and the boys and girls were separated. Between 1935 and 1948 the farm school received 329 child migrants.

A number of these Canadian Fairbridgians claim that being sent to Canada was the very best of luck, however many of them do not hold that sentiment. As a daughter of a child migrant, and thus having experienced firsthand the effect it can have on families, I believe the system of migrating children to be fundamentally flawed. The family is the nucleus of our society, and it was precisely the family support system that was torn away from many of the children and replaced with something quite inferior.

Isobel Harvey, a B.C. child welfare worker in the 1940s, visited the farm school in 1944 and presented a nine-page report on the conditions she found at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School at that time. The cottages were, in Harvey’s opinion, "planned on an outmoded plan which allows the cottage mother little opportunity to foster any feeling of home … most of the children appear in aprons designed by the school clothing head, one might imagine they were residents of an orphanage in