The Forgotten Children (14 page)

Woods was given a splendid send-off, befitting his huge reputation. It was widely reported and universally accepted that he had chosen to retire and there was absolutely no suggestion that he had in fact been dismissed. The major newspaper in the district, the
Central Western Daily
in Orange, gave his departure extensive news coverage and eulogised Woods, describing him as ‘a great man’. In Fairbridge’s annual report that year the Sydney council recorded:

Woods, with the help of Fairbridge contacts in New South Wales, was able to immediately take up a job as an English and history teacher at the Illawarra Grammar School in Wollongong, south of Sydney. He subsequently married another cottage mother, Mrs Grey, and they lived together until Woods died in 1977. He was seventy-two years old.

Woods’s successor was Mr M. A. G. ‘Jack’ Newberry, who had been the After Care Officer responsible for finding jobs for Fairbridge children when they left the farm school. Newberry, like Woods and Beauchamp before him, would also be sacked, amid allegations of sexual misconduct.

During World War II Newberry had served with the British Army in the Middle East, and after the war he migrated with his wife to Australia. In the 1950s they came to work at Fairbridge, his wife as cottage mother of Canonbar Cottage and he as the supervisor of the village garden. They left Fairbridge and returned in 1959. They wanted their old jobs back but Kurt and Ilse Boelter now held their former positions. For the next couple of years Mrs Newberry was the cottage mother in Brown Cottage, and never let anyone forget her anger at the Boelters, as she believed she and Jack had prior rights to the jobs. No doubt the big drop in the family income fuelled Mrs Newberry’s annoyance: the gardener’s job paid a lot more than that of cottage mother.

Jack left and went to work as a security guard at the Port Kembla steelworks, south of Wollongong in New South Wales. Whenever he was back at Fairbridge visiting his wife he was a regular sight after every meal, marching ramrod straight on his ‘constitutional’ up from the village to the dairy and back. He claimed he had been in the Grenadier Guards, which is where he said he developed the habit.

In 1962, Jack took the job of After Care Officer, which had become vacant because the incumbent, Mr Phillips, had left amid rumours of sexual abuse of children at the farm. Phillips’s victims confirmed the rumours many decades later.

When Woods left, Newberry had a shot at the top job. In his application he claimed to have been a captain in the British Army.
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The director of the Fairbridge Society in London, General Hawthorn, would question Newberry’s credentials three years later when he was visiting Molong. In a report to London of his visit Hawthorn wrote:

Newberry was investigated following a series of allegations of sexual abuse and forced to retire in 1969, three years after being made principal. Stories circulating about Newberry’s sexual perversities would be confirmed by a number of Fairbridge girls years later, including Liz Sharp, who said Newberry ‘touched her up’.

Again, the allegations against the principal were never made public. In the letter notifying Newberry of his sacking, the chairman of the Sydney Fairbridge Council, Mr H. L. Kingsmill wrote that ‘the charges made against you were not substantiated but … at 64 years of age [it was] thought you were too old for the position of principal of Fairbridge.’ Kingsmill informed Newberry that the council was going to advertise for a new principal immediately, gave Newberry one month’s notice of his retirement, and said he would be paid his present salary up to the time that he was sixty-five. The letter finished:

When Newberry was replaced by Mr R. T. Coutts no children had been sent from Britain for four years. By 1970, there were only fifty children living in the village and all but two of them were Australian-born. Coutts was the church army captain from Bathurst in New South Wales and had served in Papua New Guinea and Bougainville during the war, and then with the occupation forces in Japan until 1948. He left Fairbridge in 1971 and later became a church deacon and priest in the diocese of Grafton. The last principal of Fairbridge until the farm school closed in early 1974 was D. W. Aubrey.

One of the most colourful members of staff at Fairbridge was E. T. (Harry) Harrop, the bursar and sometime acting principal from 1953 until he was jailed in 1967 for embezzlement.

In 1966 auditors conducted an investigation and found more than £12,000 missing from the Fairbridge accounts he administered. In April 1966 the New South Wales fraud squad charged Harry with theft. He pleaded guilty before Judge Higgins in the Quarter Sessions Court in Sydney and was sentenced to three years’ jail.

The children at Fairbridge knew very little about what was going on. Ian Dean, a fifteen-year-old trainee who had been at Fairbridge for five years, recalls, ‘Harry just disappeared.’

Most Fairbridge children were uncritical of Harrop when they later heard about his crime. ‘He was the one who treated the kids well,’ recalls Gwen Miller. Eddie Baker also remembers Harry with affection, despite the fact that he went to prison for stealing from Fairbridge: ‘Well, yes, I know, unfortunately. But apart from that, he was the kindest man with children. Most kindest man.’

Peter Bennett left Fairbridge in 1949, before Harry Harrop arrived, but met Harry when he was back at Fairbridge on a visit with his family years later. Harry asked Peter if he wanted to buy some good new shoes for his children. He said he could offer them at a discount price because Fairbridge bought in bulk and was tax exempt. Peter and his three children followed Harry up to the shoe store, which was located behind the deputy principal’s house, and the children were all fitted out with new shoes. ‘I’ve got a good pair for you, too,’ Harry told Peter.

‘But I’m size ten,’ replied Peter.

‘That’s okay,’ said Harry. ‘We’ve got large sizes for the trainee boys.’

Peter left with four pairs of shoes, for which he paid well under half the normal retail price. It was only much later, when he heard of Harrop’s conviction, that he realised the money probably went straight into Harry’s pocket and not into the Fairbridge coffers.

Later, there was much to suggest that the £12,000 Harry had lifted from the Fairbridge bank accounts was only the tip of the iceberg of corruption at the farm school over many years, involving not only Harry but other members of staff, too.

Harry was a gambler. In fact, he was considered to be the biggest customer of the illegal SP bookmaker who operated out of one of the two pubs in Molong’s main street. He was not the only one at Fairbridge with a passion for horse racing. The garden supervisor and then dairyman, Ted Begley, was a punter and the owner of a stable of racehorses that he kept and trained on Fairbridge Farm. He had his own racetrack below the dairy in the homestead paddock.

Begley came to Fairbridge in 1945 and stayed for more than twenty years – longer than anyone else but Woods. His first position was supervisor of the village garden, then he took the higher-paid job of dairyman. Begley lived in the dairyman’s house near the dairy with his wife, two daughters and a son. Mrs Begley was the part-time cleaner of the little primary school at the back of the village, and is remembered for her wonderful Christmas cake decorating.

Begley was almost universally loathed and feared by the boys, most of whom he indiscriminately punched and kicked. It seems the only boys not to have been routinely beaten by him were those who loved horses, and rode and trained his racehorses – no doubt saving him the expense of hiring jockeys. As David Eva recalls: ‘I got on all right. A lot of people never got on with Begley but because I was “horsy” and he had racehorses, I think that’s the reason I got on with him.’

How Begley was able to keep a family and a stable of four to five racehorses, which he regularly raced around the district, on the relatively low farm labourer’s wage of around £13 a week should have aroused the suspicion of Woods and the Fairbridge Council. We Fairbridge kids only became aware of it later. One of the Fairbridge children who did notice something amiss was John Harris. He speaks well of his time at Fairbridge and became the president of the Old Fairbridgians’ Association, but he says the corruption at Fairbridge was on such a large scale it should have been noted earlier:

While working on the piggery, John remembers Begley selling pigs on the side to a local butcher:

Fairbridge generated a wide range of produce, some of which was consumed on the farm. The sale of the rest of the farm produce was a vital source of revenue to Fairbridge. A former Fairbridge boy, Peter ‘Stumpy’ Maycock, came back to work at Fairbridge in the mid-1960s to manage the piggery because there were no longer enough trainees to do the work. Maycock, who had worked as a trainee under Begley, was amazed at the pig reproduction rate. He calculated that only a small proportion of the pigs had previously been accounted for in the official number of pigs sold by the farm. He then remembered that when he had worked on the piggery as a boy, the local butcher would regularly come out to the farm in his utility truck and Begley would tell Peter and the other boys to help load pigs into the back.

One might wonder whether Woods had any inkling or knowledge of the corruption that appears to have flourished around him for years. He was, after all, responsible for the staff as chief executive. However, no one would ever question his own honesty and integrity. He was totally committed – as was Ruth – to the Fairbridge cause, and the idea of stealing from the farm school would have been beyond his comprehension. He was also a notoriously sloppy administrator and, as we shall see, could not even detect children stealing pocket money from literally under his nose.

But serious questions must be asked of the Fairbridge Council, who was ultimately responsible for the day-today running of the farm school, because even the most elementary scrutiny of the management should have revealed something of what was going on.

The first party of Fairbridge children bound for Molong from Britain in February 1938.

The Fairbridge Farm School, built in an arc around Nuffield Hall.