Oranges and Sunshine: Empty Cradles (24 page)

Over the following days, as I gave interviews to the media, journalists told me that ‘this country is in a state of shock’.

Although the main aim of the phone lines was to get a name and address from each caller so we could get back to them, we had to counsel some for long periods. And the stories they told were often so graphic that the counsellors found it hard to cope.

By the end of the week everyone was exhausted. I didn’t know how I was going to get home. I still had to travel to Adelaide and then back to Sydney. Life got very difficult. If I went to a restaurant, people would come up to me and say, ‘You’re that woman who was on the telly last night. We watched you tell Pam about her mother.’

I had to send Penny out when I needed to buy some new clothes because I was being stopped in the street. I didn’t appreciate the notoriety, but at the same time, getting the story into the open and seeing the truth becoming more widely acknowledged, was long overdue.

In what was described as a positive response to the documentary, Catholic diocesan welfare agencies throughout Australia offered their services to anyone involved in the child migration schemes who had lived under the ‘auspices of the Catholic Church’.

A statement released by the Australian National Catholic Association of Family Agencies said it had been approached by the Catholic Welfare Council in Britain to be the first point of contact for those people who wanted to trace their natural families.

The association’s chairman, David Cappo of Adelaide, said the documentary offered a sobering reminder of the ‘values which prevailed in the area of child care as recently as twenty years ago.’

‘Many of the children who were abandoned to British orphanages were admitted in haste and secrecy, without any professional assistance or advice,’ he said. ‘The British government which was recovering from World War Two, did not recognize the need for quality counselling or other forms of assistance in the decisions to separate children from their origins.’

He said the involvement of Australian government officials and charities like the Catholic Church had been at the request of the then British government. It was the British government’s solution to overcrowded orphanages.

I had one last, and very important, interview to undertake before I went home.

A surveyor from Adelaide had read a copy of the book of
Lost Children of the Empire
and suffered a nervous breakdown.

In hospital he pleaded with doctors, ‘Get hold of this woman Margaret Humphreys. I want to talk to her.’

When I got to Adelaide I went to the hospital and found Walter sitting on the veranda, looking out on the gardens. He told me a story that had been bottled up inside him for the best part of thirty years.

At the age of three he was told his parents were dead, and he was taken from a children’s home in Scotland and put on a ship to Australia. He grew up in an orphanage along with other child migrants.

Walter developed a wonderful voice and when he was seven, a dentist and his wife asked the orphanage if Walter could sing for them on Christmas Eve. They would keep him over Christmas and buy him presents. Much to his delight, Walter was collected by car and taken to this home to join the festivities.

In front of the family and all their friends, Walter sang
Ave Maria
at midnight. Afterwards, three men took him to the bathroom and sexually abused him in turns. He cried and screamed so much that they decided not to keep him over Christmas as promised and instead took him back to the orphanage. They left him on the doorstep. Walter was still crying the next day – not so much because of what had happened, but because he hadn’t received the Christmas presents they had promised him.

My own Christmas was easier that year. I could watch the coloured lights go on at dusk in the cosy sitting-rooms along my street and not feel anger or helplessness for the child migrants. When I sat down to dinner with Mervyn, Rachel and Ben, I felt the desperation of the previous year had gone. Life was more settled and normal.

I had even managed to buy a few Australian treats for the children and had successfully hidden them from Ben, who usually rifles my bags the moment I get in through the door. I brought back some Australian Christmas tree decorations – dried berries and pine cones – and the tree looked splendid. All over the house there were hundreds of Christmas cards from around the world; cards with kangaroos in red hats or pulling a sleigh – and not a snowflake in sight. The messages were full of hope tinged with despair.

Christmas is a very difficult time for people without families. The child migrants had experienced many sad and lonely Christmases in the past. One woman had spoken to me of spending Christmas on a bus, crying as she rode around looking in windows at people having fun.

The telephone began ringing at 5 a.m. on Christmas morning.

‘G’day from Australia!’

It went on until lunch-time and began again in the evening. For many it was the first time they’d rung the UK, and someone explained, ‘Margaret, I’ve never had anyone to ring before.’

The calls continued through to the New Year but I didn’t mind. I walked around with a huge smile on my face, and in my heart, there was a determination that many would hopefully be ringing their own families in the UK next year.

The broadcast of
Lost Children of the Empire
had been a turning point for me. Suddenly I wasn’t alone any more; I wasn’t imagining what had happened to the child migrants. It was no longer just my responsibility because I had helped bring it into the open. By sharing the problem, I helped share the burden.

The response was incredible. The Trust had letters from as far away as Canada and Kenya, from grandmothers, academics, students and former welfare officers. Some sent small donations, or offered to help. Others asked if we could possibly find a brother or sister who they feared had been sent abroad.

And for the first time, I began to find out about the child migrants that had been sent to New Zealand.

After we had received more than a dozen letters from New Zealand, Merv did some more research and discovered that the New Zealand schemes involved an arrangement between the British and New Zealand governments. The Royal Overseas League, a British pro-Empire charity, organized the parties of up to twenty children who travelled six weeks by sea to new homes.

Records also show that between 1948 and 1954 about 300 British children, aged from three to seventeen, were sent to New Zealand, and all were placed in foster families. They were overseen by the Child Welfare Division of the Education Department.

The schemes were abandoned in 1954 because the ‘right type of children’ were unavailable. These were children under ten years of age, girls aged fifteen to seventeen, or boys old enough and strong enough for farm work.

Initially, I was relieved when I learned that the children were sent to foster homes, but this changed when I discovered evidence that more than a third of the children involved had to be transferred from their first foster parents and many were transferred several times.

An official report blamed the problem on unsuitable foster parents, interference from birth parents, children with illnesses or behaviour problems not reported to the foster parents in advance, and unrealistic expectations as to the abilities and qualities of the children.

In one 1953 newspaper article, a sixteen-year-old boy alleged he was treated like a child slave by his foster parents on a North Island farm. The boy said he had worked eighteen hours a day and been beaten often. Another child, debilitated by a hernia operation and with an arm and leg wasted by polio, found himself unable to do the farm work expected of him.

There were also complaints by foster parents of ‘chronic bedwetting’.

I didn’t have the time or the resources to begin investigating what had happened in New Zealand, but resolved that one day I would go there and interview former child migrants. It was a difficult decision, but I had no choice but to wait.

The charities and child care agencies weathered the storm surrounding
Lost Children of the Empire
remarkably well. In truth, they had escaped lightly. I was astonished that nobody questioned them further. There wasn’t one independent journalist who had the courage or the nous to go to the agencies and say, ‘Look, this is a bloody outrage. How can you plead ignorance? How can you say you didn’t know? Tell me, why didn’t you know? And what have you done since 1987 when you were told?’

Anthony Meredith, the director of the Catholic Children’s Society, formerly the Crusade of Rescue, told reporters, ‘We are talking about forty years ago. One has to look at all the child care legislation in those days. We did not have the expertise we do now. It’s easy in hindsight to say that a mess was made of it …

‘We get about 1000 enquiries a year from former clients about their origins. It is upsetting that we cannot give them more information, but we cannot be held responsible for things that were done forty years ago … children’s homes were bursting at the seams. It was a way of making vacancies.’

This became the standard response.

Caroline MacGregor of the Fairbridge Society agreed.

‘Earlier in the century attitudes to children were very different, so to a large extent we are talking about children who would have been institutionalized for most of their young lives anyway …

‘In general it was pre-1950 and before the welfare state, when the country did not take responsibility for each individual child as it does now. Now sending children into care and thus abroad has been replaced by fostering or trying to deal with the family situation.’

The Christian Brothers had to be more aggressive than simply firing off letters to the newspapers or issuing press releases. The allegations of child abuse were far too serious to be ignored, particularly after what had happened in Canada only a few years earlier. Similar claims had cost the Order more than eighteen million dollars in compensation payments to victims, and led to a Royal Commission of Inquiry.

Amid the growing calls for a full and independent investigation, the Christian Brothers launched an internal one, appointing one of their own, a historian called Dr Barry Coldrey, from Victoria, to investigate the allegations of sex abuse and brutality.

Coldrey, a Christian Brother, referred to himself publicly as a troubleshooter and a fair-minded academic who would put a stop to the peddling of rumours and hearsay. He would also compile a history of the Order in Australia and its role in child care. In the meantime, the Order’s stance remained one of outright denials and claims that stories of brutality and neglect were grossly exaggerated.

Amid this virtual silence, I was caught in a dilemma. Part of me wanted to confront the Government and the charities head-on, but what practical use was a row over morals and ethics? What more could be done to convince them?

Maybe the child migrants would be better served if I put my head down and worked solidly on their individual cases. Others could judge while I made sure that child migrants got home to their families while there was still time. People like Harold Haig.

Finding a link to his childhood had made matters more complicated for Harold. By finding his ex-neighbour I had found someone who could remember his family, but in the same breath she’d described a loving, caring mother who would have fought for her children and would never have let them be taken away. Harold suddenly wanted to find ‘the bastards’ who had forced his mother to give him up. He wanted to find them almost as much as he wanted to find his mother.

With new clues, I began searching again.

So far, I hadn’t found any record of his mother’s birth or death, but the woman from Acton had told me she was probably from the North of England and his father from Scotland. I also knew for certain that they hadn’t married in England, Ireland or Scotland under those names, so I made an assumption that they weren’t married.

Why would a couple who lived together and had two children, particularly in those years, not be married? What would stop them? Perhaps, I wondered, one of them was already married to somebody else – or maybe they both were.

I went to St Catherine’s House again, spending weeks before abandoning this trail. There was no record of either ever having married.

Similarly, I trawled the Scottish registers and found only four Harold Haigs – none of whom was Harold’s father. It was bizarre. I could find no record of him being born, marrying or dying. It was as if he hadn’t existed at all.

Perhaps I had the wrong spelling of the name, I thought, and began again.

Twice a week Harold and I caught the train to London and walked through the doors of St Catherine’s. Harold would stand there, looking along row upon row of bound volumes, and knowing that within one of them was the answer. In desperation and pain, I would hear him say, ‘Where are you? You’re in these books. For God’s sake tell us where you are?’

By that time, he was spending hundreds of pounds a month on marriage and birth certificates. I was working with him therapeutically and all the time thinking that if we didn’t find something soon, he was going to hurt himself. We were clutching at straws all over again and I said, ‘Right! Bugger this, I want every marriage certificate of anybody whose maiden name was …’ And we’d investigate every one of them. Different spellings, different combinations, different ages. We tried absolutely everything. Elizabeth Ellen Johnson became Ellen Elizabeth, became Betty Ellen, became Betsy Helen, and so on. Instead of being a mother at eighteen, we tried her in every year until she would have been forty-five.

Twice we found families that could possibly have been right. I wrote letters and they rang back but each time it was obvious that they were the wrong families.

Finally we had to give up and admit that St Catherine’s House held no joy for Harold and Marie. Their mother was as lost as she’d ever been.

The breakthrough that helped me find Elizabeth Ellen Johnson came from a totally different direction. David Spicer suggested that we should look more closely at Marie’s adoption. If we could convince a judge to release her adoption papers, these might have important background information.