Until just fifty years ago Canadian farm families worked the land and raised children, crops, livestock and poultry without the assistance of gasoline powered tractors, electric milking machines, washing machines, refrigerators or ranges. The work was hard. It came in a frenetic rush in the summer season and required many hands. Some families with many children were able to run their own farms. Other couples with fewer children, or whose children had grown up and gone off to the cities or the United States, had to recruit additional labour outside the family.
In eastern Canada from the 1880s onward agricultural help was difficult to find. Recent immigrants went immediately to the West where land was more readily available. Higher urban wages and the greater variety of urban life drew native-born young people away from the rural areas where they had been raised.
In the Maritime provinces, Quebec, and especially in southern Ontario, British children were brought out to replenish the labour force of the family farm. They joined Canadian households and worked alongside family members as apprentice agricultural labourers and domestic servants. Their indentures specified the care and schooling and payment they were to receive. Between 1868 and 1915, 77,000 British boys and girls came to Canada through juvenile immigration agencies, and several thousand more arrived between 1920 and 1939. They were known as "Home Children", having come from British-run distributing homes in various Canadian cities and towns, but perhaps also because they came from Great Britain, the "Home Country". Their history is interesting because the predicament of these children seems so improbable to present day observers and is noteworthy for the light it sheds upon the life of children in the nineteenth century.
In the century between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the beginning of World War I, unprecedented numbers of people left Europe for North America. Some of these emigrants left the Old World in desperation when industrial or agricultural change robbed them of their livelihood. Others were drawn to less densely populated and more richly endowed lands overseas by dreams of great wealth and great power. Almost always, emigrants chose their own destinations, paid their own fares and established themselves in the new country without government aid. The Home Children, however, were exceptions to this general pattern. Ten percent of these young people came from English workhouse schools, and had their passages to Canada paid by the British Government. English and Scottish philanthropic children's homes raised private funds to sponsor the rest.
The assisted emigration of young persons was first proposed in 1826 by an English police magistrate who claimed that London had become "too full of children" and that juvenile crime was increasing as a result. Emigration was to be a safety-valve through which to release, in the interests of public order, the tensions which population pressure produced. The Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy (The Children's Friend Society) sent a small number of young people to Upper Canada and the Cape of Good Hope in the 1830s. The Shaftesbury Society took parties of boys from London Ragged Schools - charitable evening schools for working children - to Australia and Canada throughout the 1850s. But it was in the persistent depression of the last quarter of the century that child emigration found wide application as a remedy for the surplus of orphaned, deserted, neglected and delinquent children in British cities. Until the 1930s, most youngsters who emigrated from Britain under institutional sponsorship were placed in Canada. Thereafter, Australia became the principal destination for juvenile emigrants.
The origins, development and decline of the juvenile emigration policy as a remedy for surplus children in Britain are closely related to changing ideas about the nature of childhood itself, ideas which were particularly in flux during the nineteenth century.
Conceptions of childhood are fluid because this stage in the life cycle is socially rather than physically defined. Infants, in the first months after birth, are different from adults in their stomachs' capacity to digest foods and their eyes' ability to focus. When the young person's body loses these distinctive traits, chiefly when he or she is weaned, the stage in life called infancy ends and the way in which adults treat the young person changes. The nature and duration of infancy have been similar throughout history because the care of such very young persons is fundamentally determined by their physical needs.
Childhood, unlike infancy, is essentially defined by culture and differs between places and through time. Ideas about which people are children and what characteristics and activities are child-like adjust to social and economic circumstances. In the nineteenth century, children were also accorded different rights and roles depending upon whether their parents were wealthy or working-class people.
Changes in attitudes toward childhood brought about legal changes which had far-reaching social and economic effects. The first child emigrants were sent to Canada in the 1830s. By that time, effective legislation had been introduced in Britain stipulating that persons under the age of thirteen ought not to work as many hours in factories or at as difficult tasks as adults. Moreover, their industrial work roles ought to be defined as being different from those of adults. Factory owners were less willing to employ children if they could not be made to work full days in any job where help was needed. This change in ideas about the rights of children among the labouring poor left the guardians of parish workhouses and boards of charitable institutions with more youngsters than they could care for and so, intermittently through the next two decades, officials sent boys and girls off to the colonies where there were no restrictions on their work in agricultural or domestic service.
By the 1870s, when parties of British youngsters first began to arrive regularly each year in Canada, the people who ran large orphanages, workhouses, reformatories, and industrial schools in Britain had begun to worry about the individual characters of wards in their institutions as well as about the kind of work they did. Young people had always been disciplined to learn moral lessons. Now teachers and missionaries began to argue that boys and girls were like plants, that their characters grew strong in healthy surroundings and dwindled when their environment lacked certain things. The most healthful environment for children was considered to be a family group in a rural area.
Young people in British institutions had in the early and mid-nineteenth century lived in great barracks surrounded by high enclosures where they were subject to stern discipline, saw little of the world beyond the walls, and experienced little affection. They adapted by becoming stolid, submissive and self-contained.
The managers of these institutions worried that such youngsters would be neither industrious workers nor good parents when they grew older. Some philanthropists tried to make the children's surroundings more family-like by replacing the barracks with cottages and the stern matrons with more sympathetic cottage mothers. But the best situation for orphaned, deserted and neglected children seemed increasingly to be as boarders or apprentices in private households. There were more stray children than there were appropriate families wanting boarders or apprentices in Great Britain but on Canadian farms children were welcomed for the labour they provided and were little burden because, as one farmer said, "it is as easy to feed a child as feed a chicken."
The agents who brought young boys and girls to Canada did not expect that their young charges would be adopted by Canadian couples, or become family members sharing in the family inheritance. Their British wards looked and spoke and behaved so differently from Canadian children of similar ages that Canadian men and women could not easily think of them as their own. The child emigrants were to be household members - boarders and apprentices who were paid in wages rather than in a promised share in the family inheritance. But as household members, British philanthropists hoped that their young people would receive more individual attention, learn more satisfactory work habits, and prepare to cope better with their own family later in life.
The programme of boarding out and apprenticeship for British children in Canada in the last quarter of the nineteenth century is very similar to the policies which had been employed by Ontario officials to deal with Canadian orphaned and deserted children since the early days of Upper Canada. In the colony, however, children had been apprenticed rather than placed in institutions not because families were viewed as innately preferable to institutions, but because there were not enough government funds nor children in need to make large orphanages feasible.
Child Emigration Agencies
The pioneers in the Canadian juvenile immigration movement were two women of markedly different motivations and temperaments. Maria Susan Rye was a London feminist who had been taking parties of women to Australia and New Zealand during the 1860s, hoping to find for them the useful work and respectable wifely status denied them by congestion in the marriage and labour markets of the Mother Country. In 1868 she shifted her principal destination from the antipodes to Canada and in 1869 gave up her work with young women to concentrate upon the emigration of young girls. She was a women with many influential English connections who brought the child emigration policy before the public in Britain and won for it the support of prominent Canadian politicians.
Annie Macpherson, a Scots-born Quaker, began to bring children from her London Home of Industry in 1870. Macpherson was a well-known British Evangelical Christian who viewed emigration to Canada as a remedy to a religious as well as a social problem. Transfer to temperate and devout rural Canadian households from "dens of iniquity" in Britain would save children's souls as well as safeguard their future sources of livelihood.
Through the 1870s many other prominent evangelical institutions sent youngsters with Miss Macpherson or her sister, Louisa Birt, for placement through their Canadian Homes at Knowlton, Quebec and Belleville, GaIt and Stratford in Ontario. Later, several other agencies established Canadian branches. These included Dr. Barnardo's Homes in East London, William Quarrier's Homes of Bridge of Weir, Renfrewshire, Leonard Shaw's Manchester Boys and Girls Refuges, J.W.C. Fegan's shelters in Southwark and Westminster, Miss Stirling of Edinburgh and Leith and the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society. By the 1890s Dr. Barnardo's Homes had become the leading innovators in the movement and its most vigorous practitioners. One third of the assisted British children who arrived in Canada between Confederation and World War I were wards of that institution. Two other Protestant organisations, the Middlemore Homes of Birmingham and the National Children's Homes, the youth branch of the Methodist Church in England, established child emigration programmes independent of Macpherson's influence. The Roman Catholic dioceses in England conducted a juvenile emigration programme as well. About ten percent of the children placed in Canada were Catholics.
These British societies found compelling financial as well as religious and social reasons for operating Canadian branches. Emigration was an economical rescue policy. The transatlantic passage cost about the same amount as one years keep in an English Home. Once in the colony, the child cost the institution very little. Canada's closeness made it the least expensive and thus the most favoured destination for emigrants. Each child who embarked by ship left an empty bed behind and, thus, allowed an expansion of the rescue work without an addition to British facilities.
The Life Cycle of the Juvenile Immigrant
Most of the child immigrants who came to Canada between 1869 and 1924 were born in British cities, chiefly London, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol and Glasgow. They found their way into the institutions with juvenile immigration programmes for many reasons. Harry Gossage, who had been sold by his mother to two organ-grinders when he was eleven years old and abandoned several months later in a small country town, was placed in an orphanage by a local clergyman who wished to save the boy from the workhouse. Harry emigrated to Quebec because the managers of the children's shelter worried that his mother might return to reclaim him, as indeed she did, four days before he was placed on shipboard.
The father of Sally and Alice Cooper deserted their mother, who then went with her family into the Kenilworth workhouse because she could not earn enough as a seamstress to support them. The parish provided only the poorest of care and two of the children died. In fear the woman left the workhouse and began once more to sew shirts. Again she found that she could not earn enough and in order to reduce the number of mouths to feed surrendered Sally and Alice to a philanthropic home. After a time the managers of the institution, pressed for space in the home and optimistic about the prospects for the children in Canada, informed the mother that her youngsters would be emigrated. She protested but the officials reminded her that she had signed papers consenting to emigration when she placed her children in the homes. At ages nine and eleven the two young Coopers went to begin their apprenticeships in Canada.
Most of the children emigrated to Canada were not orphans. They left family in Britain, family incapable of caring for them adequately in the days before unemployment insurance, welfare payments and widows' pensions. There were some child emigrants who left homes where they had been often abused, some who were foundlings whose parentage was never known, and some whose parents were in prisons, hospitals or insane asylums, or engaged in occupations or relationships which emigration agents judged immoral. But by and large the children who came to Canada were impelled here by the poverty of their families compounded by the poverty of the philanthropic institutions which sought to relieve familiar distress.
Children were encouraged to think of emigration as an adventure. Boys who had watched great ships pass down the Thames and revelled in tales of the West were keen to go to Canada although girls often viewed the prospect with more trepidation. Surely some children had heard adults express fears about emigration as bleak and punishing. Such apprehensions were common among working people. But assurances from home officials won the children's confidence. No young person went off to Canada without first having ostensibly given consent of his or her own free will.
Prior to emigration, each child was outfitted with new footwear, summer and winter clothing, and a Bible. All these goods were installed in the traditional, rectangular wooden box of the immigrant trade, identified by painted markings as the aspiring Canadian's own.
Young emigrants travelled first by train to Liverpool, and then by ship to Halifax or Saint John if they arrived before the St. Lawrence was free of ice or to Quebec City if they sailed later in the navigation season. At the port of entry, officials from the Canadian immigration service conducted cursory medical examinations and then the parties of boys and girls boarded special railway cars for the journey to one of the many distributing homes located throughout eastern Canada.
The distributing homes functioned true to their names. They were large enough to accommodate only clerical and inspection staff and a small number of children in distress. Arriving parties of immigrants were held over temporarily, bunkhouse style, until places were found for them in Canadian households.
Farmers and mistresses who wrote to the homes requesting the children's services were asked to fill out applications stating their church affiliation and the size of their household. A confidential reference was solicited from their clergymen and applicants were then selected. No interview with the employer or inspection of his premises routinely took place.
Rural placements were preferred for all home children. Most boys were sent to farms to begin apprenticeships as agricultural labourers, although a few less sturdy young men entered the employ of professional people as menservants. Girls were sent to smaller urban centres or rural homes to work as domestics.
Becoming accustomed to life in Canadian households was not easy for many British children. Nor were the curious ways of the young strangers easy for Canadian families to accept. Most juvenile immigrants felt the stresses of being an apprentice rather than an adoptee, a household member rather than a family member.
The signs of these tensions were many. British apprentices changed workplaces often. The average home child had four different places during his or her first five years in Canada. One young girl had eleven places between 1888 and 1892 when she was aged nine to thirteen. Many children were returned by their employers because they were not big or skilled enough to do the work expected of them. Generally, Canadian farmers and mistresses were not excessive in their labour demands but they were, it seems, unreflective. They assumed that British boys and girls would be like the Canadian children they knew and that they would be of similar size, physical stamina and emotional disposition. Impoverished British youngsters newly arrived in the Dominion were of smaller stature and less strength than local rural children. They had less food to eat and less healthful environments in which to grow. They felt anxious in their unfamiliar new surroundings. And most troublesome for their masters and mistresses was that they knew nothing of farm work and little about the routine of rural households. Canadians might easily misunderstand their young apprentices' predicament and, confusing lack of experience with lack of intelligence, return the youngsters for being too slow or too stupid to be of use.
There were economic reasons as well for frequent changes in situations. As boys and girls grew older and more skilled they were able to contribute more to the household and the farm. Representatives of British agencies wanted the apprentices under their care to be fairly treated and periodically requested that their wards be paid higher wages in recognition of their greater abilities. These negotiations could be painful for the young immigrant. Masters and mistresses pointed out all the child's failings to argue against new financial terms. When wage negotiations failed, the young apprentices were recalled and placed in a new situation in a different district. Situation changes were a painful reminder to the home children of their tenuous relationship in the Canadian household.
The distinctive position of the British apprentice affected their schooling as well. Most Canadian rural children did not go to school when they were needed at home. Older boys went to class in winter when there was no field work to be done on the farm. Younger boys and girls were sent to summer school in order to be out of the way during the busy season. Older girls who had child care and housework to do year round had more difficulty attending regularly, whatever the season. The child immigrants' school attendance followed these patterns but because they had been hired for their ability to be of use in the farm and household, British youngsters were less likely than the Canadian children with whom they worked to be given time off for schooling. Many child immigrants never went to school regularly again after they arrived in Canada, a disadvantage which could limit their opportunities later in life.
During their first years in Canada the young apprentices were often lonely, homesick for friends and family in Britain, disheartened by the dreary life on isolated farms after the busy variety of British cities, and suspect to Canadian employers and neighbours for their obscure parentage and alien accents.
There were, however, advantages to coming to Canada as a child rather than as an adult. Food was cheaper and more plentiful in Canada. The air and water were cleaner. The children's physical health improved markedly after emigration. They grew taller and stouter, less troubled by the lung, skin and eye diseases which had plagued them in British slums. By the time their indentures were completed, the young apprentices were more accustomed to Canadian work habits and social customs and, thus, more readily able to integrate as adults into Canadian life than more recent and more mature British immigrants. Their worst bouts of homesickness had passed. They had Canadian friends around them and some sense of where the best job opportunities existed in Canada.
Usually men and women who had come to Canada as child immigrants left the rural areas in which they had served their apprenticeships soon after their indentures were completed. Like many Canadian-born young people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, they moved off the isolated farms on which they had been raised in search of excitement and high wages in Canadian and American cities. Young immigrants whose apprenticeships had been harsh or lonely lost the common British romantic notions about agricultural life. Some boys did go west, often with the annual railway harvest excursions, to try their luck at prairie homesteading. Few stayed on the land for long, for the accumulated savings of an apprentice would not buy all the equipment a homesteader needed for a solid beginning.
Rarely did Home children have sufficient academic background or funds with which to acquire professional training as nurses, teachers, doctors or clergy. Few had even the schooling to qualify them for white-collar positions as clerks. Usually they worked in service, manufacturing, and resource extracting occupations.
The child immigrants' record in Canada is an admirable one. They were not conspicuously idle, infirm, nor criminal. Emigration to the Dominion did not often bring them riches or fame. It did, however, bring them a measure of greater prosperity and security than they might have expected to achieve in troubled Britain, and markedly expanded the opportunities for their Canadian-born children.
In the years immediately following World War I, thinking about childhood again began to change in ways which affected Britain's and Canada's child immigration policies. In Canada, a growing group of professional social workers argued that the British emigration agencies did not meet modern child care standards in their placement and supervisory practices. They wanted children to be selected for emigration according to scientific criteria concerning physical and mental health, and wanted homes to be selected to meet the specific needs of individual children. They emphasised the vulnerability of youngsters in strangers' households and called for more stringent regulations to protect them from exploitation and physical abuse.
In Britain, as well, new conceptions of childhood and acceptable standards of child care were forming. Working men had gone willingly to defend their nation during the war. On their return they demanded through their labour unions and the Labour Party that the state should care for all its citizens in the same spirit which it called them to military service. They insisted that working-class children ought to be insured the same rights that middle-class youngsters had long enjoyed: the right to grow up within their own families and to be allowed fourteen years free from labour responsibilities in order to prepare for adulthood both in and out of school. No children ought to be taken from their families and sent overseas until they had reached school leaving age and acquired sufficient maturity to understand the implications of their consent to emigration. In 1925, on the recommendation of the British Government, Canadian immigration authorities decreed that children under age fourteen would no longer be admitted under the juvenile immigration programme. Some few exceptions were made to this ruling in the 1930s but, by and large, after 1924 the juvenile immigration movement worked to bring adolescents to Canada to find their first jobs only after leaving school. Neither Canadians nor Britons were any longer willing to tolerate a policy which required that children, whatever the social class from which they sprang, should work to earn their living, even in a healthful agricultural setting.
The movement to bring surplus British youngsters to the Dominion began in the 1830s as children's work came to be defined as different from adult's work. After 1870, the programme expanded as philanthropists searched for family surroundings for their young wards. The policy came to an end because representatives of British working people, supported by Canadian social workers, demanded and won for their sons and daughters the right to a full portion of childhood - food, shelter and schooling in the land of their birth.
