1. British Home Child Day

    Family history research can sometimes be a little like unraveling a ball of wool; you never know what you will find among the twists and turns. I like it like that.  I like to go beyond names and dates and find out what was happening in the world so that I can try to put myself in the shoes of the people I am researching to make them real.

    My ancestors were mainly rural agricultural labourers, often in receipt of poor relief or going in and out of various union workhouses, so I have a connection to and an interest in the rural poor. Many may think the poor were invisible and unrecorded outside of their baptism, marriage or burial. However, there is much to learn among the records of the Parish Chest, the Poor Law Unions, and Newspapers.

    When I was researching the workhouse records of Surrey, I came across a story in the newspapers about a family who had arrived at the Chertsey workhouse in dire straits.  I was gripped by their story which took me from the English countryside of Surrey to Ontario in Canada.  I learned about the experiences of poor children who, with the promise of a better life, were sent from their homeland to a new country over three thousand miles away.

     The Loathly Nightmare of Chertsey Workhouse

    This was the headline in The Pall Mall Gazette of Friday 2nd September 1887. It jumped off the page and made me sit up and take notice. Mary Bushell, together with five children between 13 and 3 years old had arrived at the Chertsey Union Workhouse the previous week. The family had been found outside their home in Barley Mow Lane in Horsell by a policeman who had arrived to evict them.  Seeing their pitiful state, he and the Overseer of the Poor, a Mr Spooner, had taken them to the workhouse.

    The Matron of the workhouse rushed them to the infirmary where they were given milk and beef tea, cleaned up and treated by the Doctor.  They were later described them as ragged and half-naked, swarming with every kind of vermin, filthy beyond all experience and nothing but bones.  Only one boy had been strong enough to speak. He told workhouse staff he was 10 and that for the last three weeks they had eaten nothing but potatoes.  It transpired that Mary Bushell had been abandoned by her husband George Bushell; a man known to have been brutally violent to his wife and children.  This had left her and her children destitute and starving.

    Removal to Guildford

    When the family had sufficiently recovered they were removed to the Guildford Union Workhouse; under the settlement rules of the Poor Law 1834, as the family belonged to the Parish of Woking, the Guildford Union Workhouse was responsible for their costs.

    Mary Bushell never recovered from her experience. She died of heart disease and exhaustion two months after arriving at Guildford; she was just 43 years old.  George Bushell was admitted to the workhouse early in 1888. On 28th May he discharged himself and four of his children. His paternal intentions did not last long and by the end of the day he had deserted the children and they were readmitted to the workhouse.

    Canada Bound

     The three youngest children, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Rose were recorded among the inmates of the Guildford Union Workhouse on the 1891 census. That was all set to change. On the 1st June 1891, along with other children in the care of Middlemore Homes, the three girls boarded “The Parisian” at Liverpool and headed to a new life in Canada.

    The shipping out of poor British children to other countries was not new. From the 17th century, many children in the care of poor law guardians or charities were sent overseas to ‘begin a new life’ in America, or Australia, and then to Canada.

    The Bushell girls were among over 100,000 orphaned and abandoned children, who were sent to Canada between 1869 and the late 1930s.  These children are the ancestors of an estimated 10% of Canada’s population.

    Sadly, not all of the children were orphaned or abandoned.  Some came from families who through sickness or temporary unemployment had temporarily placed their children in the workhouse. There were several examples among the Guildford Union Workhouse records of parents arriving at the workhouse to reclaim their children, only to be told they had already emigrated.

    Organisations operated by Maria Rye, Annie Macpherson and Louisa Birt settled thousands of children in Canada by the 1920s. Children’s homes founded by John Middlemore and Dr Barnardo also sent a substantial number of Britain’s poor children to Canada.

    These organisations believed that homeless and abandoned children would have the chance of a better life with families in Canada. Each child was sent with a trunk which included a basic selection of clothes for all weather and a bible.  Once the ship had docked the children were transferred to a distribution home where they would have stayed for a few days to acclimatise before joining their new families.

    Cheap Labour?

    The arrival of the children was advertised in the newspapers. The Ottawa Daily Citizen of 1899 announced the arrival of 80 children for adoption or hire.   The families that the children joined were expected to feed and clothe them and to send them to church and school.  In reality, this was not always the case.

    While some children did go on to experience a better life, others were poorly treated and often abused.  Boys were hired by farmers as a source of cheap labour, treated like working animals, often housed in barns and outhouses, having to endure extreme weather changes.   Girls were mainly hired out as domestic servants. The children were legally bound by the terms of their indenture contracts to stay at their placements; boys until they were 18, and girls at 21.  Rarely were British Home Children adopted as a member of their host’s family.

    The experiences of many British Home Children are well documented. Some stories are painful and heart wrenching; few have happy endings – a not so palatable episode in British and Canadian history. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=british+home+children

    The Bushell girls

    On the 13th June 1891, Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Rose arrived at the distribution home in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada, where they stayed a few days to acclimatise.   The last record I have of them (so far) are their names entered into a register; after which they were sent to join their new families.  Inspections of the families to whom the children were sent were sometimes taken to assess conditions, but this did not always happen and does not appear to have happened in the case of Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Rose.

    I have not been able to find them on the census records for Canada. As it is likely they were adopted by separate families and given new names, I could have a difficult job on my hands.

    It is difficult to imagine how the girls felt about going to Canada.  In their short lives, they had experienced much hardship and had never settled in one place for very long. They’d been evicted from their home and lived in two workhouses before setting sail for Canada.  I imagine the girls standing on the deck of the Parisian, each of them, small for their age, scared, apprehensive, and trying to take comfort from each other as they watched the shores of England disappear.

    I am not a descendant of the Bushell family, or of anyone who endured being removed from their home to go to a strange land, but I feel so connected to Mary Ann, Elizabeth, and Rose that I will continue to search for them. I do hope I find they had much better and happier lives in Canada than they ever would have had in England.

    The British Home Child Advocacy & Research Organisation

    The BHCARA is an international organisation which strives to catalogue Home Child information and Home Children stories.  It reconnects families and promotes the story of the British Home Children across the world.  https://www.britishhomechildren.com/

     

    Contact me for research in Surrey, Hampshire, and Berkshire:  https://www.timefliesancestry.co.uk/about

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