The SPCC was also involved in referring children who had suffered as a result of crimes perpetrated by their parents or guardians. Mary and Elizabeth Watts, half-sisters from Montrose, were brought to Quarrier’s by their mother’s landlady in Glasgow in 1890 while the mother was serving a prison sentence for harbouring prostitutes. They were subsequently sent to Canada after the mother, who had initially demanded them back, agreed that they should be taken into care. 34 Three years later James, Robert and David Smith were admitted after their father was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a fellow farm servant and wounding another at his workplace near Stonehaven. The mother, who handed over her sons but kept three other children, ‘sees the desirability of removing them as far as possible from scene of father’s crime ’, and the boys were sent to Canada in 1897 and 1907. 35 Frequently, however, the children were the direct victims of their parents’ or guardians’ crimes, many of which involved sexual abuse. In 1894, for example, Quarrier’s admitted ‘a very nice boy, with a very bad history’. This was the three-year-old product of an incestuous relationship between a domestic servant and her father. After the case came to light the father was imprisoned and the family scattered. The boy’s removal to Quarrier’s was recommended by a local minister, the admission papers were forwarded to the mother, who had emigrated to Boston, and the boy was sent to Canada in 1904. 36
Most cases of cruelty and neglect were not discussed outside Quarrier’s admission records, but a few attracted detailed press attention. In 1887 three brothers were taken from the Greenock Poorhouse to Quarrier’s, and later sent to Canada, after their father had been convicted of a ‘revolting case of assault’ against the oldest boy, eleven-year-old Robert:
At Greenock Police Court this morning James Blackwood, joiner, was charged with assaulting his son Robert … In the course of his evidence, the little boy, who told his story in a very distinct manner, said that on Thursday night his father came home drunk after eleven o’clock, when he and his youngest brother William were in bed. Shortly after coming in his father vomited, and ordered him to get out of bed and lick it up. On his refusing to do so, he dragged him out of bed, forced him to do as he had ordered, thrashed him with a leather strap, and kicked him with his feet; and after ordering his other son James to lift the black coal from off the fire, he caught Robert by the body and thrust his head into the fire, singeing his hair and bruising his head. He again took up the strap and thrashed him, and compelled him to lick up some dirty water which was lying on the floor. Following up this, he ordered Robert and go and wash his hands, and, taking advantage of the chance thus given him, the boy opened the door, and getting out ran along Cowgate Street and Market Street, and up Ann Street, where he was found stark naked about three o’clock by a railway official who took him to a signal box at the Caledonian Railway Station in Regent Street, where he was kindly treated and wrapped in a heavy overcoat. 37
Among the admissions to Quarrier’s in 1910 were two illegitimate children whose stepfathers had both been charged with ill-treatment after Christmastime confrontations. Ernest McFarlane (eleven) of Edinburgh was beaten by a stepfather who had known nothing of his existence when he married his mother and who objected to paying 1s a week for his education in an industrial school:
it came to a climax on Christmas Eve. His mother was out, making purchases at the time. His step-father asked him to take off his clothes and lie down on the floor, while he went for the strap. The boy refused to lie down, although he had stripped, so the man took a hold of him, knocked him down, and commenced to beat him with the strap … The boy screamed with pain, but the man only put him into the bath and, as the boy said, tried to rub the marks off. His mother did not know of his injuries until the Monday, when she decided to send him to the Children’s Shelter. Just as they were about to go the step-father came into the house, and on being challenged about his ill-treatment of the boy by a neighbour, he replied that he would kill him. 38
The stepfather was imprisoned for twenty-one days and Ernest, after a spell at Quarrier’s, was sent to Canada in 1911, a year ahead of Annie Harper (fourteen) from Gartly, Aberdeenshire, who had also been admitted to the Homes in 1910 as a result of parental cruelty. Regularly victimized in contrast to her four legitimate half-brothers, Annie had fled in desperation to a neighbour on Christmas Day, 1909. He immediately reported the case to the local police, setting in motion a chain of events that led to a court case, the conviction of her mother (but not her stepfather), Annie’s admission to Quar-rier’s and her subsequent removal to Canada. In evidence at her parents’ trial, Annie complained that:
She did not get the same food, and had to take her meals at another table, and often had to take what the others left … She had to get out of bed at 5.30. when her step-father rose, and had to clean all the boots, and sweep and wash out the floor, carry water and provide firewood. Her bed was made in the floor among some bags, but the others had a bedstead to lie on … Her mother often beat her with her hand and sometimes with a stick. The boys had not to do any work, and were well treated. She hoped she had not to go back to her mother; she would rather go any where.
Annie’s claims were corroborated by the procurator fiscal, who reported that:
The girl had to lie on the bare floor, the only protection from the floor being two pieces of wet and filthy sacking. She had no under-clothing for months and months. She had to go about in the cold weather with boots which were quite worn down, and to such an extent that her feet got broken out in chilblains and then in open sores, and while she was so suffering her mother never gave her any treatment whatever. After a time a pair of new boots were got, and the girl was obliged to put these new boots upon the open sores. There were four other children in the family, and they were not ill-used. 39
In the same area, four brothers from Cairnie, aged between one and eleven, were sent to Quarrier’s in 1911 after their father was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for the culpable homicide of his wife. At 2.30 a.m. on 20 December 1910 William Cumming (eleven) and his mother had come home after searching fruitlessly for the father, who had not returned from a trip to Huntly. On finding him in the house in a drunken state, a quarrel arose between the parents, and when William Cumming senior began to attack his wife, young William escaped with his brother George (nine), who had already suffered a head injury at the hands of his father. The boys ran to the police office in Huntly to get help, but by the time officers went to the household, it was too late:
A shudder swept the Court when … Sergeant Scott described his visit to the cottage. There on the floor lay the body of Mrs Cumming. Near at hand lay a pair of tongs, a ladle, and a poker — all bloodstained. On a bed, as soundly asleep as an innocent child, was William Cumming. Rousing the man they seized him, and soon the suspect was securely housed in the police station. Here his two little sons … were soundly asleep before the fire. ‘Cumming took no notice of them,’ concluded the sergeant.
By the time the case came to court it had already been decided that the boys should be sent to Quarrier’s, not least because the parish council thought it wise to remove them from the ‘gruesome associations’ of their father’s crime. William and George were sent to Canada in 1913 and their younger brothers in 1921. 40
William Quarrier, like his English counterparts, experienced some opposition. A man who liked to work independently and get his own way, he was impatient with committees and brooked no restrictions on the work which he believed had been entrusted to him by God. In 1882 that lack of accountability led to a court case and brought Quarrier into bad odour with both the Roman Catholic Church and the Glasgow Herald. The catalyst was the case of William Bradshaw, an orphan who had been admitted to the Orphan Homes at the request of his maternal grandmother, a Catholic. As a result of pressure from a daughter and the Roman Catholic clergy, the grandmother subsequently requested the child’s return, whereupon Quarrier allegedly refused to relinquish the boy and physically assaulted a law agent employed to p
ress his case. Although these allegations — made by Father Alexander Munro of Glasgow — were disproved and costs were awarded to Quarrier, his cause had been tarnished by the accusation that he misused public funds in order to entrap and convert Catholics, who were then sent to exclusively Protestant parts of Canada. More seriously, in the opinion of the Glasgow Herald, Quarrier’s lack of accountability laid him wide open to any charge of misuse of funds and created legitimate grounds for public concern that ‘Mr Quarrier himself is the Orphan Homes Institution’. 41 On another occasion, in the Court of Session, he engaged in unsuccessful litigation with Renfrew County Council over its demand that, after sixteen years’ exemption, the homes should pay an annual rate. 42 At the same time, Quarrier’s emigration practices were opposed on the two rather different arguments that ‘you cannot do worse to a kingdom than to rob it of its people’ and that Scotland’s slums were allegedly being cleansed ‘by the simple process of pouring their unpurified contents into our neighbour’s premises across the water’. 43 In 1897 the Ontario authorities, heeding Canadian demands that the traffic in children should be more strictly regulated, and in specific response to scandal surrounding the death of a Barnardo boy, passed an act which subjected the Canadian receiving homes to much greater scrutiny. Although Quarrier’s enterprise was singled out for praise rather than censure by the Ontario authorities, he still regarded the act as a personal insult and an unwarranted interference in charitable schemes which the province did not support financially. He therefore refused to send any more children to Canada, and it was only after his death, in 1903, that his family reactivated the practice, convinced that the legislation offered better protection for the children rather than being a hindrance to their removal.
The network expands: supplementary Scottish schemes
Although Quarrier’s Homes undoubtedly dominated the Scottish scene as far as child emigration was concerned, they did not have a monopoly of the trade. Records survive for at least four smaller Scottish children’s homes — in Edinburgh, Aberlour and Stirling — that dispatched around 650 recruits to Canada in the half-century after 1875, reflecting extensive cooperation among philanthropists in the practical arrangements for sending children across the Atlantic. One of the earliest, Mrs Blaikie ’s Orphan and Emigration Home in Edinburgh developed out of a chance meeting between the Blaikies and Annie Macpherson in Toronto in 1870. William Garden Blaikie, Free Church Professor and in 1892 Moderator of the General Assembly, was a well-known figure in Scotland, not least as a philanthropist. After meeting Macpherson, he and his wife returned to Edinburgh, ‘with the conviction that here was a valuable outlet for the disposal of multitudes of children in our large cities who would otherwise be brought up in vice, misery, and degradation’. This led to the opening of a home which, like Macpherson’s and Quarrier’s, was funded by freewill donations, and which over a twenty-year period received an annual income of between £300 and £500. Of the 708 children taken under its roof, 301 were sent to Canada, and the alleged success rate of 95 per cent was identical to that claimed by Quarrier’s. While some of the children were orphans, case notes indicate that many came from broken, drunken or violent homes, removal from which, it was argued, was their only route to safety. Typical is this account of the plight of two sisters, brought to Mrs Blaikie ’s notice by a city missionary:
E. & H. — Mother dead. Father a drunkard. The children were found in a filthy room; no fire, no furniture, nothing in the room but a few bricks for a pillow; the father lying in the corner on a few straws with a coal sack over him. The children had a little bread and butter, and a jug of water on the dirty floor, and a piece of candle on the top of the loaf. 44
The father’s initial objections to his daughters’ emigration were removed when he died from alcoholism, and the girls were included in the home ’s second batch of emigrants to Canada. There they were adopted and, when visited by the Blaikies in 1880, were about to embark on teaching and dressmaking careers respectively.
The closure of Mrs Blaikie ’s home after twenty years was attributed partly to the expiry of the lease on her premises, partly to the increasing difficulty in obtaining parental permission for the emigration of children, and partly to the perceived duplication of her work by the formation in Edinburgh in 1884 of a new shelter for the prevention of cruelty to children. That shelter was one of several linked enterprises initiated by Emma Stirling, who between 1886 and 1895 sent 200 children from Edinburgh to Nova Scotia. Raised in a gentry family in St Andrews, Emma Stirling’s practical interest in philanthropy began after the death of her mother in 1874. Sustained by a substantial inheritance and an uncompromising Christian faith, she moved to Edinburgh, where in 1877 she opened the Stockbridge Day Nursery and Infant Home, the former for the benefit of working mothers, the latter for motherless children. Within a year she had appointed an advisory board of directors and renamed her enterprise the Edinburgh and Leith Children’s Aid and Refuge Society (ELCARS). Her Shelter from Cruelty, opened at 150 High Street, represented an expansion of her work into the realm of abused children and soon eclipsed efforts by a group of Edinburgh citizens to establish a local SPCC. By 1886, when she launched the Canadian dimension of her work, she was operating — in addition to these institutions — two girls’ homes, two boys’ homes and a training farm, catering for 300, although illegitimate children were excluded except in cases of physical abuse. She had also recruited the Earl of Aberdeen as patron of her organization and had, on her own estimate, spent £8,000 of her personal fortune on the work, supplementing public donations and annual grants from Edinburgh Town Council. 45
The extension of Emma Stirling’s work to Canada was prompted by the need to find a cheap new outlet for the increasing number of children. As reported in the minutes of a meeting of the directors of ELCARS in November 1885:
Miss Stirling gave a long and interesting account of her recent tour in America, and in particular of what she had seen of Nova Scotia and the Valley of Annapolis. Her tour had been undertaken partly with the view of ascertaining whether a favourable outlet existed in America for the young lads in the Homes who were rapidly growing up and for whom provision would soon require to be made with the view of setting them out in the world for themselves. After careful enquiries and consultations with various parties able to give advice in the matter … she had come to be of opinion that it would be practicable for her to take a farm in America, to which a number of the lads might be transferred under suitable and responsible supervision, and these taught farming in a way which would enable them by & bye to hive off for themselves and be independent. She further showed that by means of the liberal grants which the government out there would give in and of such a scheme, it would not be so expensive as might be supposed, and at the same time she intimated that while she was anxious that the interest of the Directors should be engaged in this scheme, she could not expect them to regard it as within the limits of the work of the Institution. She therefore intended in the meantime at least to attempt it more as a private enterprise and for the purpose of carrying it out she intended to return to America in the ensuing Spring. 46
With the initial blessing of her directors, Stirling accompanied her first party of twenty-five children across the Atlantic in May 1886, purchasing Hillfoot Farm at Aylesford in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley shortly after arriving. Another party of thirty-six arrived in September, after which Stirling returned temporarily to Scotland, going back to Nova Scotia with an even larger contingent of fifty-six in April 1887. By August 1887 she had decided to move permanently to Canada, informing the directors of her decision somewhat peremptorily:
After due consideration, I find the time has come to arrange my future position with the Society. I have now done what I wanted, and made a bridge between this and Scotland to give poor children a safe outlet, and fair chance here — on such terms that I can honestly advise sending them. In so far my object is accomplished, and those children for whom I care most are getting the benefit of
it. If you carry out my request and send off the party of 20 or thereabouts you will clear off all boarded out children and also lighten the Homes. I now give warning that I will not be responsible for any expense connected with any of the Homes after the 11th of November … This leaves me free to give all my attention to this place, where I shall be willing to receive such children as you send me and place them in homes, when I can be assured they are fairly worthy. But it must be understood the Society is to bear the expense of sending them. The work here prospers wonderfully and children are greatly in request. I have also a large house and means of receiving them comfortably. I think you should call a special Meeting of Directors and announce this conclusion at once in order that there may be no disappointment. 47
Between autumn 1887 and the destruction of Hillfoot Farm by fire in April 1895, small parties of children continued to be sent out to Miss Stirling, not primarily by her former associates, but by another Scottish child rescue institution, Miss Croall’s Home for Destitute Children in Stirling, or Whinwell Home. Following Emma Stirling’s example, Annie Croall had opened a crèche for working mothers and a small orphanage in 1884, but in sending 100 children abroad over the next forty years she made more use of the infrastructure created by Barnardo and Macpherson than of Emma Stirling’s limited facilities. Whinwell children, most of whom came from the central belt, found their way to the United States, South Africa and Australia as well as Canada, and also had an alleged success rate of 95 per cent. Annie Croall justified her emigration policy on the same grounds as her more famous contemporaries:
Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus Page 24
