Involuntary Immigrants

School teachers struggling to make Canadian history appealing to the young must sometimes envy their American and Australian counterparts, at least for the relative glamour of their stories of early European settlement. Courageous and greedy fur traders, never mind land-hungry habitants and pioneers, cannot really compete with the Pilgrims’ quest for religious freedom or with shiploads of abused convicts, some of them children.

So one hopes the schools are devoting some attention to Canada’s own involuntary immigrants, the 80,000 British children shipped here from Confederation until the last years of the First World War. Their story offers both extremes: evangelicals and social workers driven (at least in their own evaluation) by Christian fervour, wedded to a level of suffering among many of the children that rivals the misery of any transported felon.

There is, by now, a great deal of material to draw on. Even today, the best introductory works probably remain The Home Children, by Phyllis Harrison, and Kenneth Bagnell’s marvellously readable The Little Immigrants (the 2001 edition of which is to be recommended, not least because of a new preface detailing the history of the book’s own success and impact). Harrison’s book draws on a compilation of letters from the children themselves. Bagnell’s is a journalistic history, highlighting some of the most dramatic characters and incidents in a 50-year story.

Should these books arouse greater curiosity, the reader can turn to the seven pages of bibliography devoted to books and articles (as opposed to the additional listings for official reports and publications, reports of charitable agencies and their in-house journals, archives, newspapers and periodicals) in Roy Parker’s comprehensive Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867–1917. Or you could simply read Uprooted itself.

Parker, a professor emeritus of social policy at the University of Bristol, has produced a completely different kind of work from the popular histories mentioned above. This is a sober, scholarly study of the forces that fed and restricted the forced emigration of British children to Canada, largely to Canadian farms. It does not neglect the most emotionally poignant stories, but nor does it dwell on them. Bagnell devotes five pages to the case of George Green, beaten to death at the age of 16 on the farm of one Helen Findlay. She was clearly guilty—neighbours had witnessed her abuse of the boy and she had admitted she enjoyed beating him—but she was acquitted of manslaughter. The Canadian newspapers reporting on the trial concentrated on Green’s deficiencies, mental and physical, rather than Findlay’s brutality. Parker gives it a paragraph (although a paragraph that includes all the facts) in the context of the Canadian perception of the children as damaged goods.

Parker is similarly austere in presenting the oversized personalities responsible for the Home Children movement. He notes, for instance, that more has been written about Thomas John Barnardo and his charity than about any other child welfare society in Britain and concludes that it “is therefore unnecessary to dwell on his biographical details or the rather tempestuous history of the organization in the nineteenth century.” So you have to search elsewhere to learn how Barnardo transformed his Sephardic Jewish ancestors into Italian aristocrats, rode roughshod over his rivals and some of his friends, fought off rumours of immoral liaisons and lavish spending, and styled himself “Doctor” long before he returned, under duress, to complete the medical studies that justified the title. (Don’t look to Wikipedia in your quest: someone has sanitized the entry.)

Parker’s attention is instead focused on what the facts and figures reveal about the Home Children movement. Because the book examines the full 50 years so thoroughly, it is impossible to summarize the many conclusions that it reaches. This is truly an interdisciplinary study, giving due weight to a stunning number of factors, not just economic downturns and upswings in Britain and Canada and political machinations in both countries, and the relations between the Mother Country and the touchy new Dominion. It also gives weight to the bickering personalities that initiated the forced emigration of children, the agencies and religious institutions that supported them and the administrators who tried to control them, as well as the social beliefs—often unfounded—that shaped public reactions in both countries and the sometimes unrelated legislation. Examples of such legislation are Canadian laws on mandatory schooling or Britain’s laws governing children found in brothels, which influenced both Britain’s desire to get rid of the children and the demand for them on Canadian farms.

For a Canadian reader, one of the most painful lessons of the book is the attitudes of the families who took the children in. The Home Children movement ended less than a century ago, but the motives that fuelled it seem light years away. In our world, families generally want to adopt babies as soon as possible after birth and will travel thousands of kilometres and spend tens of thousands of dollars to get them. But there was no place for imported infants then. Desirable children were children who could work. In the words of a deputy minister in the Department of Agriculture in 1887: “It costs so very little to keep a child which very soon begins to be useful and earns much more than it costs.”

Even J.J. Kelso, the founder and first president of Toronto’s Children’s Aid Society, observed that it was undesirable to keep children suitable for fostering out in institutions until “they are ready for the market.” The perception of the children as mere units of labour runs through the entire history of the movement. British authorities were often less eager to send girls than boys—because middle class families at home wanted cheap, young maids. Among the relatively small number of children returned to Britain were not just juvenile delinquents but also children crippled by their work in Canada, sometimes because they were kept shoeless even in winter.

These are attitudes that provoke horror—but then, it is easy for us to condemn the rapaciousness of our ancestors. Parker does not stress the point, but we do not need child labour any more. Machines do the work that once fell to boys on farms, while vacuum cleaners and washing machines have replaced the under-aged skivvy. For the desperate smallholder, an unpaid hired hand might be the last hedge against financial ruin.

Understandably then, one of the main opponents of the children was Canada’s labour movement, which saw them, quite correctly, as unpaid substitutes for hired men and women. But the deepest resistance to importing the children was emotional—and not the emotions a contemporary reader might expect.

Shockingly few observers were concerned about the way the children might be treated. To be fair, Canada did rescue them from highly uncertain lives at home, to some extent justifying the argument of the Howard Society that “the worst of Colonial life is more free from temptation and abuses than the ordinary life of English city slums.” But Canadians enjoyed a complacency about their own essential decentness that should fill their descendants with shame. One judge told a committee examining the issue that “Canadian social habits are such as to make it morally certain, that some neighbour or other, if not the whole neighbourhood will protect any children from wrong.”

Of course, the definition of wrong was more elastic than ours: corporal punishment, often extremely harsh, was neither illegal nor censured. But there was also a romantic dream, especially among the movement’s sponsors, that a Canadian farm was a pastoral, Christian, untainted environment.

The general Canadian concern was that London’s refuse—waifs and strays, as they were called—would be the serpent in this Eden. Certainly some of the children were thieves, prostitutes and bullies. The values of the day ascribed such sins to the children’s heredity, not their upbringing. And there were deeper fears: the book repeatedly deals with the anxiety, almost panic, that the children might spread syphilis among their playmates—a belief fostered by physicians, some of them also members of Parliament. (Parker deals in fact, not speculation, so he does not consider a conclusion that may strike some of his readers: many Home Children may have been victims of fetal alcohol syndrome, since parental drunkenness often served as a reason for removing the offspring in the first place.) Government at all levels was particularly concerned that defective children might prove a drain on the public purse.

Parker is careful in his conclusions to warn against applying 21st-century morality and knowledge to Victorian Britain and Canada. One brief but immensely valuable final section deals with the perceptions of children’s psychology at the time of the movement. Even in 1917, when the emigration ended, most doctors were fixated on the idea of mental illness as hereditary or at least physiological. No one seemed to have noticed that stress, deprivation and loneliness could affect emotional health. Moreover, there was a strong belief in the resilience of children—apparently almost no one was willing to recognize that emotional suffering in childhood would leave lasting scars.

These and other recurring 19th and early 20th-century social attitudes are revolting—the tendency, for instance, to blame the victims of sexual abuse rather than the perpetrators, to soften what was obviously rape with the term “seduction” and to punish the victims even when authorities recognized that they were victims. Almost equally distressing is the treatment of the children’s parents, dismissed by the charities as “unfit” for crimes that ranged from true depravity to—most commonly—simple poverty. The reader can see that Parker himself is occasionally unable to remain fully detached and analytical when he is dealing with the impervious callousness so often revealed in this history.

But he warns against that emotional response. The book as a whole is a salutary reminder that the past truly is a different country and that the protagonists in these events thought rather differently than we do.

Historical fiction is not under the same restraints as social history, and Freda Jackson makes full use of her freedom in her novel Searching for Billie. Billie is a Home Child of exactly the kind Canada never wanted in the first place, but the novel is less about him than about Jane Priddle, a genteel Englishwoman sent to Canada by a missionary society to look for him and three other children who have disappeared.

Jackson has clearly drawn from some of the books listed in Parker’s bibliography in her portrait of Billie’s life, not to mention from works on Canada’s Northwest, on Cree life in the late 19th century and on Victorian social history. There are none of the glaring errors of fact that make so much historical fiction an embarrassment (although I strongly doubt that any nun, of any age, greeted a visiting male with an embrace in the late 19th century). Miss Priddle herself is the spiritual descendant of Katherine Hepburn as Rose Sayer in The African Queen. In the course of the novel, she abandons her starchy virtue along with her voluminous skirts in favour of trousers, riding and romance on the range.

This is not to say that Searching for Billie is a Harlequin romance with a Home Child thrown in—although a charismatic French-Canadian carter figures heavily in the action. But it does substitute the pieties of our own age for those of the time it depicts. Priddle has a wholly contemporary attitude to a 15-year-old who has become pregnant, radiates respect for her Cree hosts and develops such a close relationship with nature that I started to think of her as old Walks with Coyotes.

Billie is, to my mind, a more satisfying portrait. He may owe a little to another fictional model, the Artful Dodger, but he is a believable little survivor—thieving, slippery, but not without compassion. One highly unlikely feature of the book is the wise and sympathetic local Mountie—who in real life, I feel sure, would have dispatched Billie to the nearest reform school or deportation centre.

Searching for Billie is a good read and the source of some interesting details of Canadian history. But it teaches nothing about the spirit of the age, because it essentially places a 21st century woman in a late 19th-century environment. Priddle becomes disgusted with the selfishness, hypocrisy and conventions of middle class British life and embraces values that would fit perfectly in today’s Toronto Star.

The underlying assumption is, of course, that we know better now. Parker would disagree. Perhaps the most valuable single feature of Uprooted is his final humility—for himself and on our behalf. He writes of the Home Children movement that, “with hindsight, a damning verdict is inescapable.” But his outrage about the past never transmutes into complacency about the present. His final sentence reads: “One cannot help wondering how the convictions that are entertained today about the needs of vulnerable children and how these are or should be met might, in their turn, be judged 100 years from now.” Future historians may well look at the history of our residential schools, the children of Davis Inlet, the case studies of our Children’s Aid Societies, the wreckage that is our foster care systems—and shake their heads over the delusions, selfishness and wilful blindness that unite us with our ancestors in Parker’s book.