The Forgotten Children (12 page)
Read The Forgotten Children Online
Authors: David Hill
Smiley Bayliff, who went to Fairbridge aged eight, was to learn almost forty years later how his parents fought in vain for years to have the family reunited. (Ian Bayliff, Syd Lee, Graham Lee and Stewart Lee all had the same father, Sydney Lee.)
The last time we saw them was on 12 December 1954 at Manchester railway station.
They always believed they could get us back and they tried for years but Fairbridge stopped them. Then they wanted to come out but were stopped. There’s letters on the file which show they went every which way to stop them from coming out.
We were a large family and very poor. Dad was a labourer and struggled to give us much at all. He asked about migrating and Australia House sent all the information and brochures, including about Fairbridge, which told my parents that we could have a much better life with lots of opportunities than if we stayed where we were in Stretford.
The boy’s parents were sold on the idea. Their mother, Dora, wrote to Fairbridge asking if her sons could go: ‘Trusting I will get a reply from you to say they could go for I would like them boys to get something I can’t give them in life.’
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After hearing back from Fairbridge, who sent more information about the scheme, Dora wrote again, full of enthusiasm for what Fairbridge had offered: ‘I have studied your book. The life will be very nice for them. I can’t give them the same here.’
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And later: ‘Both Mr Lee and myself made the decision between us; we would like the boys to go together for they will get a good chance in life.’
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Within a couple of months the boys were taken into the Fairbridge house in Knockholt, and were in a party of twenty-two children who sailed for Australia on the S.S.
Strathnaver
in February 1955.
Smiley says his parents agreed to the scheme believing that they would be able to get back together as a family, either in Australia or back in England, and would not have let the children go otherwise:
My parents would not have let us go if they knew they wouldn’t be able to get us back. They were encouraged by Fairbridge to believe they would be able to eventually follow us out to Australia and join us but also that if we wanted to, we could come home after two years.
At the time the boys were sent away, a standard condition of all assisted migration to Australia was that migrants stayed for two years. If they didn’t they would be forced to repay the cost of the fare.
Smiley says: ‘Mum believed if we were unhappy, we could come home.’ As it turned out, the boys were not happy at Fairbridge. Smiley recalls he and his older brothers, Syd and Graham, writing to say they wanted to come home:
We hated it, particularly Syd and me. Our letters home were aerograms and we only wrote a few lines because we were so young but we made it clear we were very unhappy with the treatment we were getting at Fairbridge.
Within months of the boys arriving in Australia and after receiving letters saying how unhappy they were, Dora wrote back telling the boys she would try to reunite the family: ‘Well, boys, what do you think, shall we all come over to Australia to live or would you like to come to Stretford, so write and let us know.’
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Smiley remembers the letters from his mother and excitedly discussing the idea of a reunion with his brother Syd and the other boys in Blue Cottage at Fairbridge: ‘I was as happy as Larry with the thought I’d be going home. I shouldn’t have, but I boasted to the other kids at Blue Cottage that I was getting out of here.’
Fairbridge, which intercepted all the children’s incoming and outgoing mail, moved to stop the parents. Principal Woods wrote to the director of the Fairbridge Society in London, W. B. Vaughan, to tell him about the parents’ mail to the children. He wrote: ‘I hope you will be able to explain to the parents that notions of going back again to England are both impractical and injurious to the children’s emotional well being.’
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Vaughan, in turn, wrote to Miss E. M. Knight, the regional agent for Fairbridge in Manchester, who had recruited the Lee children to Fairbridge. He asked her to visit the parents and tell them not to encourage the children with any notion they would be getting back together.
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Knight went round to the Lees’ house and told the parents in no uncertain terms they were not getting their children back, and reminded them that they had signed away their rights when they signed over guardianship. Knight wrote in a letter to Vaughan:
I am quite furious at the very suggestion of bringing them home.
I have replied to Mr Lee’s letter reminding him of the statement he signed when the boys went, in which he agreed to leave them in the care of the Fairbridge Society.
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The Lees were not the only parents trying to get their children back. At about the same time as this, Julia Buswell’s parents wrote to Fairbridge to ask if their daughter could come home because she was unsettled and unhappy. Woods wrote to Vaughan:
So, I hope the Buswells can be made to understand that there is just no question of Julia ever going back – unless she reaches a pitch of unmanageability that we would want to send her back and there is no likelihood of that if the parents will undertake not to unsettle her.
10
Meanwhile, Smiley’s parents continued to agitate to be reunited with their children. In a letter later in the year to Miss Knight, Dora pleaded:
I’m writing these few lines to ask you would it be possible for me to have the boys home for I want them back. They have been away for nearly twelve months and it has seemed like twelve years. So, I trust you will let me know how I go about getting them back home again.
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Fifteen months later, Vaughan recorded in a file note that Miss Knight had called to say: ‘Mrs Lee wants her children back. I said they were wards of the State.’
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Dora didn’t stop there. The following year she wrote to the Australian High Commission in London:
Please could you let me know how I go about getting the four boys home from Fairbridge Farm School Molong, they want to come back so I want them back.
13
Before the boys had departed for Australia Fairbridge had left open the possibility of the parents following them out from England. They had made it clear, via a local social worker, that they would have to wait two years, though. Vaughan had written to the social worker:
We do not accept children whose parents plan to follow them shortly, so if Mr. and Mrs. Lee are serious in their intention, we would have to ask them to sign an undertaking to the effect that they would not proceed with the emigration plans until the boys have been in Australia for at least two years.
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Nearly four years after the boys had gone to Fairbridge and after many failed attempts to get them back, the Lees applied to migrate to Australia. Their application was rejected:
This office has recently received application forms from Mr Sydney Lee of 25 Coniston Road, Stretford, Lancs, who states that he wishes to travel to Australia with his wife and four children in order to join the four children who are already at the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong.
You will recall that in 1957 Mrs Lee requested the return of these boys to this country but in view of the cost involved no further action was taken at this time. We have written to Mr Lee indicating that it is not possible to assist him under a group nomination at present, but that it would be helpful if he could obtain a personal nomination for himself and his family.
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Lee tried again the following year to migrate to Australia and was told even more firmly that he would not be accepted:
This office has advised Mr Lee that he would not be considered under a suitable group nomination at present and that the prospect of considering him in this way in the future is not very good. Mr Lee has been further advised that he will not be eligible for consideration as a Commonwealth nominee after his 50th birthday on 6/7/59.
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It was to be more than forty years before Smiley learnt that his parents had fought for years to get him and his brothers back.
For all those years I thought they had abandoned us. I felt terrible. I went to see my mother in 1997 in England and told her I now had my Fairbridge records and asked her why she hadn’t told us that she’d tried for years to get us back. She turned around and said, ‘I thought you wouldn’t believe me.’ And you know what? I probably wouldn’t, but now I know it was true.
Lennie Magee was also to find out forty years later that his mother had wanted to come out to Australia when he was nine years old to be with him, but had been told not to come by Woods. Lennie had missed his mum at Fairbridge and for decades believed she had forgotten him.
I used to ask myself the question, like countless other Fairbridge kids: ‘Will I ever see my mother again?’ I had no idea that the boss had already firmly closed the door on any such notion. In 1955 he had written to her. The letter, which I still have, was short, poorly typed and gave a rather uninterested impression. After telling her how fabulously I was getting on, in the last paragraph he wrote, ‘You speak of selling your home and coming out to Australia. I would strongly recommend you not doing that as housing is even more difficult to get in Australia than in England. Wait for some years at least.’
So she never came. Forty years later when I saw the letter I was dumbfounded. My mother didn’t even own a house. Little boys needed love. I would have been happier in a tent in a sea of mud. If I had a mother.
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Billy King, who sailed to Australia in the same party of children as I did in 1959, found out decades later when he went back to Cornwall that his mother had changed her mind immediately after signing the authorisation for Fairbridge to send him to Australia.
And I can remember Mum telling me before she passed away that she tried to get me back – like it was only a few days after she signed the paper, a week or something. They told her that I was already gone on the boat to Australia and it was too late. But I was still at Knockholt. Because I can remember how long we were there. I think we were there for about six weeks or something.
My brothers and I wrote letters every week to Mum and she wrote as regularly as us. We had been brought up to respect the privacy of other people’s mail and it was upsetting to know that every letter from Mum had already been opened and read – Fairbridge intercepted all the children’s incoming and outgoing mail. When we wrote a letter we had to hand it to the cottage mother unsealed before it was posted.
Having a mother to write to was a great comfort, as was the knowledge that one day we would be out of that place and back together as a family. But in the meantime I had to face the reality from very early on that I was stuck at Fairbridge, probably for some years, and, like everyone else, I had no choice but to try to fit in and make the most of it.
OOK
2
T
HE
B
OSS
The most important person at Fairbridge, the man who ruled over every aspect of our lives, was the principal, and the most prominent of Fairbridge Farm School’s principals was ‘the boss’, Frederick Kinnersley Smithers Woods. He presided over the school from 1942 until 1966 and was the single most dominant figure in the Fairbridge story.
Woods was omnipotent. A giant bear of a man with extraordinary physical strength, he stood over six feet four inches tall and weighed more than twenty stone. He was everything and everywhere at Fairbridge, a part of the lives of almost every one of more than a thousand children who passed through the farm school. He organised our days; hired and fired the staff; rostered every child at work and play; set the rules and enforced discipline; dispensed punishment; and trained the boys and the girls at most sports, including rugby league, soccer, hockey, cricket, athletics and swimming. He was the driver of the old Fairbridge bus, the Boy Scout troop leader and the Wolf Cub pack leader. He ran the Junior Farmers Club and operated the antiquated film projector on the odd occasion we saw a movie. He only rarely took a holiday.
The first principal of the farm school, Richard (‘Dickie’) Beauchamp, a retired Royal Navy officer, was appointed shortly before the first party of boys arrived at Fairbridge in 1938. Len Cowne, who was in the first party of boys, remembers him as a ‘dapper little Englishman of the old school who met us with his wife Molly’ when the boys arrived by ship.
The London Fairbridge Society, which had hired Beauchamp, regarded him as a successful appointment, but after only two years in the job he was suspended by the Sydney Fairbridge Council and immediately resigned. While only the London Fairbridge Society had the power to hire or fire the principal, the local council could suspend him if the circumstances were serious enough. The Sydney council did just this, and offered Beauchamp the opportunity to resign. According to the chairman of the council, Beauchamp had ‘failed in his duty’ to prevent ‘immoral and perverted practices that have been indulged in on a serious scale’ at Fairbridge.
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It seems there had been some nocturnal liaisons between boys and girls, in the cottages and in the principal’s house, and even the suggestion of some homosexual activity. Beauchamp was ordered to leave the property within twelve hours. He later moved to New Zealand.
Len Cowne recalls rumours circulating that the principal had been ‘fondling some of the senior girls’ before leaving ‘for New Zealand in what appeared to be indecent haste’.
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London had no choice but to accept Sydney’s decision, though the society was unimpressed by the suspension of Beauchamp and the appointment of the farm supervisor, Mr E. Heath, to the position of acting principal, over the head of the assistant principal, F. K. S. Woods. The secretary of the London Fairbridge Society reported to his board that they had not received a detailed report of the council’s dissatisfaction with the principal, but that telegrams indicated Mr Beauchamp had failed to control his staff and sufficiently discipline the children. The secretary also said that the New South Wales council had been informed that Mr Heath had neither the training nor qualifications the London committee considered necessary for ‘the direction and care of the Fairbridge children’.
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In a letter dated 25 September 1940, the chairman of the London Fairbridge Society, Sir Charles Hambro, made it clear to Beauchamp that, while London accepted the decision, they disagreed with it:
And now, as to yourself, I must tell you that I am very unhappy that … you have been overtaken by your enemies while serving Fairbridge … We have lost an irreplaceable principal and you have lost the job that gave you scope and suited your aims in life. We are both, then, in sad case and I see no way of winning back the position.
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Hambro told Beauchamp they were trying to think of an alternative way to fit him into the Fairbridge organisation, though it wasn’t clear how they would do so. Hambro was at pains to emphasise that the society would not forget what they owed him, ‘and certainly the children and their parents will not forget’.
In the end, Beauchamp was not found another job in the Fairbridge organisation and Heath continued as acting principal for the next two years.
Heath had come to Fairbridge in May 1938 as the farm supervisor only weeks after the first party of children had arrived. He had been the farm manager at the Dr Barnardo’s child-migrant training farm that had been operating for some years in Picton, New South Wales.
After only two years as acting principal, in 1942 Heath sought leave from Fairbridge to work during the war with the Red Cross, and Woods was left to run the farm school. In 1944 Heath resigned and became a camp welfare officer with the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency.
Woods had started work at Fairbridge in 1939 as assistant to the principal. With his wife, Ruth, he had escorted the fifth party of Fairbridge children from England to Molong on the S.S.
Strathnaver
in August 1939.
Woods was a larger-than-life character whom all of us still vividly remember. I remember him as a person capable of insensitive and even brutal acts, yet on some occasions he displayed remarkable tenderness.
As an eight-year-old, Smiley Bayliff was hospitalised for several months with rheumatic fever. Even years later, when Woods picked us up – shivering, wet and covered in mud – after playing a game of rugby league on a cold winter’s afternoon in Orange, he would always remember to order Smiley to sit up in the front of the truck, where it was warmer.
Woods was always gentle with the tiniest of the children. When we went swimming the small children clung to his huge frame as he swam out to the middle of the farm dam. Linda Gidman, who is critical of many aspects of Fairbridge, has fond memories of Woods:
And the other thing that was lovely about Fairbridge was Woodsy … I recall, when it was your birthday he’d come along and say, ‘Gee, I know it’s someone’s birthday.’ And he’d be like this – he’d be looking up and down like that, and I’m saying, ‘It’s me, it’s me’ – you know, things like that. I do have fond memories of him … I think [he] might have been a father figure.
I used to sit behind him in the Fairbridge bus, and he would be the first one when we got to the dam, he would take me out … this small child he’d bring down to the water, very gently put me into the water and teach me how to swim.
Woods was physically imposing and we were amazed by his great strength. I recall one Saturday morning on village muster we were replacing an old fence in the Ilkley Moor paddock. We were having difficulty digging out the old corner post: there must have been about five of us with crowbars and mattocks and ropes, digging deep around this wooden post, but we couldn’t get it out, however much we tried. Eventually an impatient Woods came over, climbed down into the big hole we had dug around the base, wrapped his huge arms around the post and with a grunt pulled it out. We stood in awe.
We all respected him and most of us feared him. I learnt very quickly at Fairbridge to keep out of his way as much as possible.
Lennie Magee remembers Woods and Ruth:
F. K. S. Woods … was a giant who loomed over us, filling our horizon in every way … He loved the outdoors and wore shorts from which protruded muscular legs of Mr Universe proportions. Behind his strong face and Roman nose was a keen and hungry intellect. There was a rocky concreteness about him. He was masculine, even boyish, except his lips. They had a slight hint of feminine softness. There is no doubt that to his own family he was probably the greatest guy in the whole wide world. From the moment I arrived at the farm to the day I left I was petrified and almost speechless whenever I had to stand before him.
His wife, Ruth, had first represented England in hockey and then went off to Africa as a missionary. She still looked and dressed like one. It was rumoured she was the daughter of an Archbishop of Canterbury. Although they were incredibly selfless and benevolent, to me they were both unapproachable and their austerity frightened the life out of me.
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A number of the Fairbridge kids liked Woods and some of them remember him with great affection. John Ponting remembers Woods as the ‘father I never had’. Gwen Miller has many awful memories of Fairbridge, but she can recall some good times with Woods and was even more positive about Ruth:
I was caned many times by Mr Woods. It hurt, oh, how it hurt, but I didn’t cry once – I looked him in the eye defiantly. But I didn’t mind Mr Woods. I remember all the times he took us to sporting things, the pictures and the circus when it was in town. I liked Mrs Woods. I always got the feeling that she liked me. She was the only one that ever told me that I was a good worker and thanked me for doing a heap of ironing for her.
Woods was accountable to two masters. The power to hire and fire the principal rested with the London Fairbridge Society, but on a day-to-day basis he was answerable to the Fairbridge Council of New South Wales. The chairman of the Sydney council was a regular visitor to Fairbridge, but the council as a whole only came once a year, in spring, when it would judge the cottage garden competition.
The visits of the council were quite staged. The cottage gardens had months of preparation and the village received weeks of sprucing up. We were on our best behaviour and were ordered to wear shoes around the village for the weekend. For our midday dinner in Nuffield Hall we put sheets across the tables to give the impression that we normally had tablecloths and, rather than the usual mutton, we ate wonderful dishes that we would not see again till the same time the next year. As Lennie Magee recalls:
We became unwitting partners and members of the world’s biggest con. Gardens were fastidiously weeded, gleaming white sheets were placed on every table, and large pigs and chickens were slaughtered for their succulent white meat. After we worked our butts off to make every floor shine, we polished every doorknob, scoured every sink and toilet, and turned every cottage dining table into a mirror. The whole world became bright, sunny and genial as every child was scrubbed clean until it hurt, dressed in new clothes and made to wear shoes.
When these well-meaning folk sat on the stage at the staff table in the Nuffield Hall and smiled down at us … politely eating our lunch, they were a hundred million miles away … Eventually, they stood up and waved us all goodbye as they left the hall, clambered into their cars and slowly drove away; no doubt amazed at the impact they were making on the poor and needy. Meanwhile as their dust was still settling, the tablecloths went, the meat went, the clothes and shoes went, and so did the glow and the smiles.
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Woods and his wife committed their lives to the Fairbridge scheme, but over the years he increasingly became an anachronistic Edwardian disciplinarian and an overzealous agent of the British Empire – at a time when the Empire was in decline. He upheld the values of a world that had already been swept away by modernisation. In many respects, Woods and the Fairbridge he ran were out of date from the start.
He was born on 23 December 1906 at Bethlehem in Orange Free State in South Africa. Though his father was also born in South Africa and his mother in Argentina, the family always described themselves as British. As well as sharing the same country of birth, there were other striking similarities between Woods and Kingsley Fairbridge. Both spent most of their boyhood on a farm, then undertook rudimentary schooling and received a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Both were athletic, strong, outdoor types and married dedicated women who committed their lives to their husband’s mission. It is unlikely that the two men ever met, though, as Woods was born twenty years after Fairbridge.
Woods was educated at home until the age of twelve, then sent to St Andrews Diocesan School for boys, Bloemfontein, in Orange Free State, from 1918 till 1923. He became head prefect, second lieutenant in the School Cadet Corps, the school heavyweight boxing representative, and a champion rifle shot and swimmer.
He spent three years at Rhodes University College in the Cape Province and though only gaining a second-class honours degree (majoring in French and Latin) he was awarded a Rhodes scholarship from Orange Free State in 1929. It seems that he was not awarded a degree from Oxford, where he read ‘modern greats’. Although he said he satisfied the examiners in politics and economics, he failed in his third subject, philosophy. Like Kingsley Fairbridge, Woods boxed at Oxford. He also played rugby union for his college and represented the university in jujitsu and swimming.
After leaving Oxford at the age of twenty-six he moved to Nyasaland (now Malawi) to work as assistant aide-decamp to His Excellency Sir Hubert Young KCMG DSO, Governor of Nyasaland. He also tutored the governor’s children. He subsequently became aide-de-camp to the new Governor Kiitermaster in 1935 and it was then that Woods decided to apply for the Fairbridge job.
His decision was no doubt influenced by Ruth, who had become ill in southern Africa and was unable to continue working as a missionary in the harsh environment. Many years later Ruth Woods would tell some of the trainee girls that she saw her work at Fairbridge as a continuation of her missionary work. His wife would be a huge source of strength to Woods over the next thirty years.
When they arrived at the farm school, the Woods lived in the assistant principal’s house at the back of the village, but they moved into the big two-storey principal’s house when Woods became acting principal in 1942.
Woods’s reign as the principal of Fairbridge got off to a rocky start. When the London Fairbridge Society officially confirmed him in the top job in 1945 they were unaware that he was under investigation by child-welfare authorities for sexually abusing a Fairbridge girl. The allegations, which never became public, were made by Joy Watt, one of the trainee girls who worked on domestic duties in the principal’s house.
