Victorian child migration

I heard on the NZ news this morning that Gordon Brown (the British PM) apologised for the role of the UK in sending child migrants (many of whom were orphans) to commonwealth countries to work as indentured labourers: a programme started by Victorian philanthropists like Barnardo and continuing till the 1960s.

I'm not sure what I think about formal State apologies for the wrongdoings of the past. Especially in this case when the programmes were started by individual philanthropists and supported by the charitable donations of the public. It can be very invidious to pass judgements with contemporary child-centered sensibilities on the actions of people in the past whose motives were - in their eyes and in their historical context - very much in the interests of the children.

Anyway...the story reminded me of one of the projects I worked on in the UK when I was with IRISS. We created a website that told the story of Scottish child migrants sent to Canada from 1869 to 1939. When I left on my own migration journey to NZ the team gave me a copy of a photograph of a group of child migrants sitting outside the home they lived in before they sailed for Canada: it has pride of place in my study. The group of boys in this image sailed from Scotland to Canada on the 31st March 1897. Over 7,000 children were migrated from Scotland and over 130,000 from across the UK.

You can find out more about the story by visiting the Golden Bridge website. You might be interested in the library of historic photographs.