Redeeming Children: Child Emigration to Canada. Nov. 4, 2005.

1. Child saving in the US and Britain compared

1. Numbers similar:

* 80,000 British ‘home children’ sent to Canada 1865-1925 (100,000 by 1948)

* 100,000 on US orphan trains, 1850s to 1929

2. Child savers = protestant, evangelical

* Emigration promised safety valve for cities, salvation for the individual child

* Emphasize children’s need for a family (as opposed to institution)

* Romanticized view of rural ‘frontier’

C. Different political context:

* US: western settlement & right to rise

* Britain/Canada: imperial context

D. Paradox: reformers stress children’s need for nurture, protection & education,

but send children far away to work… alone

2. Britain’s long history of child emigration

A. 130,000 poor children shipped overseas btw 1619 (Virginia) & 1967 (Australia)

B. Child emigrants = under the legal age of consent (public = guardian)

C. Child emigration is essentially indentured servitude

(children required to work, not free to leave)

3. Economics of Child Emigration

A. British context: industry & working-class poverty → overcrowded institutions

B. Canadian context: farmers need labour

* Ten times more Canadian families requested home children than got them

4. Child Emigration as an Imperial Strategy

A. Children = bricks for empire-building; Anglo-Saxon settlement on dominion lands

5. Child Savers (Maria Rye, Annie MacPherson, Thomas Barnardo)

1. Rye brought the first British children to Canada, 1869
2. Andrew Doyle report, 1874
3. Barnardo’s sent its first group to Canada in 1882

6. Barnardo Children in Canada

A. By 1939: 39,000 Barnardo children sent to Canada

B. Work & indenture

3. Punishment (excessive for 9 % boys & 15 % girls) & Pregnancy
4. Abuse (George Everitt Green, 1895)
5. Hostility (because that they drive down wages & pose a burden on the taxpayer)
6. Family break-up & instability
7. As adults: Families work to track down lost relatives

- class action lawsuit by Harold Vennell (2002)