The Forgotten Children (5 page)

It is unlikely that any of the migrants coming to Australia with us on the ship had ever experienced anything like the sumptuous cuisine provided on the
Strathaird
. The ship’s bell rang for breakfast, luncheon, tea and dinner – in that order, which caused some initial confusion as we were accustomed to meals in the working-class order of breakfast, dinner and tea. When we had boarded in Tilbury it had been ‘teatime’. Where we came from ‘tea’ was the term for the evening meal so we were pretty unimpressed by the bread and jam and buns on offer, wrongly thinking that was all we would have to eat until the next day. Then at eight o’clock the bell rang for dinner and we were introduced to a five-course silver-service meal the likes of which we had never seen before.

Very proud waiters from Goa, dressed impeccably in stiff, starched, white uniforms, served our meals in a splendid dining room. Our waiter told us that Goans had worked on P&O ships for over a hundred years and that for several generations his family had worked in the service of the line. Before the
Strathaird
our only restaurant dining had been egg and chips in the café behind the Gaiety cinema in Eastbourne, Mum trying to teach us how to hold a knife and fork properly when eating in company.

The breakfast menu on the
Strathaird
included tea, coffee and cocoa, steamed peaches, fish kedgeree, eggs to order, grilled breakfast bacon, lamb’s liver with brown gravy, snow potatoes, bread and butter, and toast, jam, golden syrup, honey and marmalade.
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Here is an example of one of our luncheon menus: Potage Windsor, Fried Fillets of Pamphlet Tartar, Hamburger Steak and Fried Egg, Malay Curry and Rice, Potatoes Creamed or Berrichronne, Marrow and Portagaise or a Cold Sideboard of Roulade of Veal, Ham Loaf or Ox Tongue plus a salad of lettuce, tomato, potato and caper, followed by Rusk Custard or Neapolitan Cream Ices and cheeses, including Danish Blue, Wensleydale, Kraft and Greyers.
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This is an example of a dinner menu, which was changed daily and was always printed with a pleasant still-life painting on the front: Cream Pompadour, Fillets of Plaice, Romoulade, Medallions of Veal Jardinière, Roast Quarter of Lamb with mint sauce, Potatoes Roasted or Maitre d’Hotel or from the Cold Sideboard, Roast Beef or Savoury Brawn and Salade Polonaise, followed by Plum Apple Tart or Coupe Alexandra. Adults also had a selection of fine French and German wines, and the children an unlimited supply of ice-cream.
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Mary O’Brien remembers the opulence:

We had never seen food so beautifully presented and in such quantities. It was little wonder that I put on a lot of weight. On arrival at Fairbridge the children already there immediately gave me the nickname of ‘Faddy’. While I quickly lost the excess weight (no one at Fairbridge was fat), the nickname would stick so that even decades later many Fairbridge kids knew me as ‘Faddy ’ill’ rather than by my real name.

On most afternoons we would sit in giant armchairs in the first-class lounge learning to play chess and being served by waiters who put ice and straws in our drinks, while a string quartet dressed in tails played Brahms and Tchaikovsky. It was the first time I had seen a violin or heard live classical music. The quartet would play requests but we and most of the other British migrants had no knowledge of classical music so it was the German passengers who did most of the requesting.

As we sailed south, the weather warmed and the officers switched from navy blue to white uniforms. We began to spend more of our time in the swimming pool or playing deck sports with the young Germans, mainly single men who were going out to Australia to work on the Snowy Mountains hydro-electric scheme or other construction projects. We made friends with a number of them and were surprised how polite and friendly they were – we had been brought up in an environment where the memory of two bitterly fought wars in the past forty years was still strong. They were very patient with us and would play chess with us in the afternoons. I recall them being puzzled at the idea of a group of British children being sent to the other side of the world without any parents.

In the tropics I suffered from prickly heat and my body was completely covered in a blotchy red rash. On instruction from the ship’s doctor I was confined to our cabin for several days. I lay all day, painted head to foot in calamine lotion, on top of a cabinet to catch the breeze coming through the portholes.

The ship’s crew worked hard on providing entertainment and practically every night there was a party or a concert, including the customary Neptune party as we crossed the equator. Much of what was on offer was too adult for us – but it wasn’t too adult for our escorts, who were both single and in their twenties. As the voyage progressed we saw less and less of them. By the time we were approaching Australia our general cleanliness, hygiene and discipline had deteriorated. No one was even checking that we washed and bathed regularly.

Like most Fairbridge children I found the voyage a marvel. My brothers and I had never even seen a big city like London before our proposed emigration. Now we were seeing the world: the Rock of Gibraltar, the Suez Canal, elephants in the main street of Colombo. It was all like something out of a picture book: giant palm trees, pyramids through our cabin portholes, the desert, and the Union Jack flying from the highest point to remind us of the great British Empire.

Mary O’Brien has similar memories:

At our first port of call, Port Said on the entrance to the Suez, we were not allowed ashore because it was thought to be unsafe for passengers to wander unprotected around the city. It was, after all, only three years since the Suez crisis and the British were not popular in Egypt. While we were in Port Said little boats came alongside to sell toy camels, leather photograph albums, clothes and assorted other memorabilia. The vendor would throw one end of a rope up for a passenger to tie to the railing on the upper deck; on the other end they would tie a basket so their wares could be pulled up on deck.

Wendy Harris wrote about arriving at Port Said in her diary:

We were allowed ashore in both Aden and Colombo, which were both great outposts of the British Empire. We were treated extremely well by the resident senior P&O managers who appeared to have attained almost vice-regal status and were living in huge houses with scores of local black, turbaned servants. It was the first time we ate abundant tropical fruits and we became sick eating the coconuts.

When everyone was getting a little bored – as you do toward the end of the long school summer holidays – we reached the West Australian coast. The weather cooled when we landed in Fremantle harbour on a wet winter’s day at the beginning of June. I realised that in all the photographs I had seen of Australia it was always bathed in sunshine. Of course we knew that it rained in Australia, but this was not what we were expecting. While in Fremantle we were taken on a picnic and a tour of Perth. This happened in Adelaide and Melbourne, too. Local charities were happy to give a good time to the kiddies destined for the ‘orphanage’. Meanwhile, at each port a steady stream of migrants departed the ship for their new lives in Australia.

Finally, we arrived in Sydney in the early dawn. Full of excitement, we rushed to the front of the top deck as we sailed under the Sydney Harbour Bridge. We were convinced that the funnel of the ship would not fit under the bridge, but of course it did. We docked safely at Pyrmont’s pier thirteen, where so many migrants and Fairbridge children had landed before us.

Waiting for us at Pyrmont was a huge man we were to come to fear and respect. Mr F. K. S. Woods – ‘the boss’ – was the principal of Fairbridge. Woods’s immediate no-nonsense manner signalled to us that the fun was over. We spent the morning being ordered through a variety of medical checks, then were marched around Taronga Zoo and taken to Sydney’s Central railway station.

After a meal of baked beans on toast in the Railway Refreshment Rooms, we took our seats in the second-class passenger compartment of the steam-hauled, unheated Forbes mail train for the 300-kilometre overnight journey across the Blue Mountains to Molong. We had enough compartments to spread out along the bench seats and were able to have at least a little sleep.

Like many other Fairbridge kids before us, the harsh thud of reality hit as we disembarked after a fitful night’s sleep into the cold pre-dawn darkness of a deserted Molong railway station. The memory of the luxury of the
Strathaird
was quickly beginning to fade.

The temperature was close to freezing as we stood huddled together out the front of the station, across from the main street of this little country town. The Mason’s Arms pub on the corner still had a hitching rail for horses. We were all frightened and anxious. I heard Paddy O’Brien and my older brother, Dudley, already whispering together about how we might plan our escape. The transport to take us out to Fairbridge Farm School was late and Woods was angry when his wife Ruth finally arrived in a canvas-covered truck.

Paddy’s sister Mary vividly remembers arriving at Molong:

A number of other Fairbridge children have similar recollections. David Eva had arrived five years before from Cornwall, as a ten-year-old:

I remember the cold six-kilometre ride with the wind blowing through the back of the truck. We sat in the darkness saying very little and exchanging anxious glances. The levity was gone and we all felt fear and apprehension about what lay ahead.

The Fairbridge Farm School Scheme was the brainchild of Kingsley Fairbridge, who was born in South Africa in 1885, a member of the upper middle class of the Edwardian era and a ‘child of the Empire’. His great-grandfather James William Fairbridge left England in 1824 to become a surgeon and physician in the Cape. James became a member of the Children’s Friend Society, which failed in its attempt to start a scheme to have destitute British children migrate to British South Africa. Kingsley’s grandfather Charles Aken Fairbridge became a lawyer, politician and famous book collector. A wing of the South African Library in Cape Town was named in his honour. Kingsley’s father, Rhys Seymour Fairbridge, moved the family from the Cape Colony in 1897 to Umtari in Rhodesia, which is now on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia. He built a new family home and called it Utopia.
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As he got older, Kingsley Fairbridge was struck by what he believed was the unrealised potential of the farming land in Rhodesia for want of white settlers. In his autobiography, he notes that his dream of increasing white settlement was formed long before he travelled to England and became aware of the needs of destitute English children.

Like his great-grandfather, grandfather and father before him, Kingsley Fairbridge was educated in England. In 1906 he cashed in his insurance policy, sailed to England and went to stay with an aunt in East Grinstead in Sussex, where he met Ruby, whom he would later marry.
²
He would never return to Africa. Fairbridge was no great scholar but was fortunate in that his cousin administered the Rhodes scholarship scheme in Rhodesia. While Rhodes scholars usually have at least two years’ university before arriving at Oxford, Fairbridge had none. Nor did he have any formal secondary school training. He had to sit the prerequisite Responsiones, or ‘smalls’ exam, four times at Oxford before passing. Once admitted, he chose to study forestry because he believed it would be an easier course than law, which he had initially chosen.

In 1908, while he was at Oxford, the young Kingsley Fairbridge first published his views on child migration, in a pamphlet titled ‘Two Problems and a Solution’.
³
The two problems were: how to extend white settlement of the Empire’s colonies, and what to do with Britain’s poor and destitute children. The solution was simply to combine them.

The following year, at a meeting in a Japanese restaurant on Oxford’s High Street, he addressed Oxford’s Colonial Club, a formidable group of supporters of Empire.
⁴
In a speech titled ‘The Emigration of Poor Children to the Colonies’ he called for the establishment of a child-migrant scheme:

‘I told them I believed in Imperial Unity,’ he wrote later in an account of the speech. ‘Great Britain and Greater Britain are and must remain one.’
⁶

Fairbridge went on to explain that Britain should not continue to send out to the colonies its upper classes, which it needed in Britain. Rather, it should send out its poor children. ‘The best emigrant farmers have been the aristocracy of English Yeomen, such as England can ill afford to lose,’ he said. ‘The colonies should take something England does not need … if both sides are to profit.’
⁷

Fairbridge placed great emphasis on the interests of Empire, and that would be a feature of the Fairbridge scheme for nearly the next seventy years. Britain would be rid of a problem and the colonies would be opened up by the availability of white labour. Both sides would profit.

Fairbridge also stressed the importance of sending poor children out to the colonies at a young age: ‘Adult paupers are useless to new countries but the children of the Poor Laws have in them the makings of excellent citizens.’
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The fifty men at the Colonial Club meeting passed a motion that ‘We should declare ourselves the Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies.’
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Fairbridge, who by now was a handsome, sociable twenty-four-year-old, was accepted into the higher echelons of British society and managed to attract considerable support for his scheme from influential people, including Earl Grey, the governor-general of Canada, the bishop of Kingston and the mayor of London. In May 1910 an article he wrote on child emigration was published in the Empire day edition of
The Times
. In it he argued that the farm school system would create ‘patriotic, capable and self reliant citizens’.
¹⁰

As Kingsley Fairbridge was to admit later, he didn’t plan to start the scheme in Australia. He intended to launch it in Canada, and secured a commitment from the Newfoundland Government to support a local farm school there. But that commitment fell through.

In 1910 some Australian friends at Oxford arranged for Fairbridge to meet with Premier Frank Wilson of Western Australia, who was in London for the coronation of King George V, and his London-based agent-general, Sir Newton More.
¹¹
Wilson offered Fairbridge 400 hectares of land at a peppercorn rent, and £6 for each child toward assisted passage on a boat to Australia.

In designing the first Child Emigration Society Farm School, Fairbridge recognised two necessary requirements for the success of the scheme. The first was the need to appoint qualified staff. He wrote: ‘Our chief care must be to entrust training of these children only to men and women truly and fully able to undertake it.’
¹²
Second, he noted the need for capital if children were to become farmers. He planned that each boy would leave the farm school with a certain amount of money and a land grant from the dominion or colonial government.

With the help of his wife Ruby, in 1912 Kingsley Fairbridge opened the first Child Emigration Society Farm School in Pinjarra, eighty kilometres south of Perth, Western Australia. Fairbridge spent the next few months preparing the school for the first party of thirteen boys, aged eight to thirteen, who arrived in January 1913. They initially lived at the farm in tents.

Ruby Fairbridge would later write a book about Pinjarra and in it she describes the arrival of the first party:

In the early days, Kingsley Fairbridge laid out the routine of the Pinjarra Farm School in what he called ‘Orders of the Week’.
¹⁴
The older boys would be up earliest to work at the dairy and on other parts of the farm, while the rest of the children would be assigned household and other work around the village before and after breakfast. Schooling followed, and after school more work at the farm and village before the evening meal and then bed. Almost every waking hour at the Fairbridge farms in Australia, Canada and Rhodesia would be governed by a similar routine for the next seventy years.

The Pinjarra Farm School did not get off to an altogether good start. In July 1913, six months after the first children arrived, a further twenty-two boys came from England. Mr A. O. Neville, an official from the West Australian Colonial Secretaries Department, inspected the centre and, though he described the scheme as ‘excellent’, he reported critically on the condition of the farm school.

The report caused considerable consternation, leading Ruby Fairbridge to later complain that in England ‘the report did us incalculable damage’.
¹⁶
Nevertheless, the scheme continued, as it had strong support in high places in England. Children kept coming until the scheme was interrupted by World War I. After the war there was little interest in child migration, leading Fairbridge’s friend Lady Talbot to write ‘all over England is against emigration for anyone – except perhaps tired soldiers who want a change’.
¹⁷

Kingsley Fairbridge reinvigorated support for the scheme, first with a letter-writing campaign and then by returning to England in September of 1919 to meet with important and influential supporters. He made an address to parliamentarians, including Prime Minister Lloyd George.
¹⁸
He also addressed meetings of potential financial supporters in England and Scotland, and secured a commitment from the British Government’s Overseas Settlement Committee.

Fairbridge was politically conservative and had become a member of the Western Australian Country Party. He believed child migration would discourage the spread of communism, which was becoming an increasing threat to the Empire following the revolution in Russia. In 1919 he wrote to a good friend and supporter, the British Conservative MP Leo Amery, to say:

Amery, the Secretary of State for the Dominions, was a significant supporter and played an important role throughout the Fairbridge story. He was a confidant of Kingsley Fairbridge, and wrote the foreword to Fairbridge’s autobiography.

In August 1920 Fairbridge returned and immediately purchased a farm of 1250 hectares on the north side of Pinjarra, to replace the sixty-five-hectare site that had been the school since 1912. In 1921, three parties totalling fifty-eight children who were all under ten years old went to Pinjarra. It was the first year that girls had been sent. The new farm school was officially opened by the governor of Western Australia in April 1923. The children’s cottages bore the names of heroes of the British Empire: Nelson, Livingstone, Clive, Rhodes, Wolfe and Haig. Fairbridge remained loyal and committed first and foremost to the British Empire. He was to name his first son Rhodes, having been in awe of Cecil Rhodes when he had met him as a boy in Rhodesia.

Fairbridge was attracting financial support from the governments of Australia and Britain, and from the local Farm School Society in Perth, but the scheme was administered and financed principally from London, where the Child Emigration Society shifted its headquarters, from Oxford, in 1920.
²⁰

In 1922, Pinjarra received more criticism – this time from Miss Williams Freeman, a former matron at the farm, who alleged maltreatment of the children. Again Kingsley Fairbridge sailed for London, where he successfully addressed his critics and secured more government and private funding. He returned home to Australia ill and exhausted. He struggled on for another eighteen months, then died in the Perth hospital of a lymphatic tumour on 24 July 1924. He was only thirty-nine years old.

After his death the Child Emigration Society increasingly referred to itself as the Kingsley Fairbridge School, and officially changed its name to the Kingsley Fairbridge Farm School in 1935. It would eventually come to be known as the Fairbridge Society.
²¹

Throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s the Fairbridge model was regarded as a highly successful emigration scheme and was increasingly embraced by the British establishment. By the late 1920s the Duke and Duchess of York, the Duke of Gloucester, the governor-general of Australia, Lord Stonehaven, and the governor of Western Australia had all visited Pinjarra.

Fairbridge and child migration attracted further attention during the Depression. Its many upper-class supporters saw the scheme as a vehicle for rescuing destitute children and providing them with greater employment opportunities than existed in Britain. Fairbridge received a further boost in 1932 when the British Government’s Interdepartmental Committee on Migration Policy reported to the parliament: