Adventurers And Exiles_The Great Scottish Exodus

by Marjory Harper

  On a number of occasions emigrants enclosed donations with their letters, often in order to bring out younger siblings, and some successful immigrants later applied for home children of their own. This former Quarrier boy had been in Canada for twelve years when he wrote to the homes with such a request:

  If I ever go back to the old country (Scotland) I will visit the Homes, as I would like to see them. I hope I will be able to give something to the Homes sometimes for the good it has done me. We had a very rough road since our mother died. We were very young too. I was in the Homes about two years, I guess, and came out here very small. I am twenty-two years old now. Are you sending out any boys to Canada now? Could you send me out one, or do you send them out in that way now? I am farming now, and I would like to get a good little Scotch boy, about ten years old. 61

  But we do not need to read many of these letters before we smell a very large rat. Their formulaic nature, with striking similarities of style and content, is hardly surprising, since annual reports were mailed to the children’s Canadian addresses, and no doubt they modelled their letters on what others had written, on what their employers told them to say and on what they thought the sending institutions would wish to hear. Such correspondence clearly cannot be taken at face value. In the first place, unhappy or unsuccessful children were highly unlikely to express their grievances in letters at all. Furthermore, only the most positive letters were selected for publication by institutions obsessed with good publicity and the need to appeal to the hearts and pockets of a charitable public through carefully crafted annual reports.

  Yet even in these positive reports there are sometimes hints of problems. From time to time staff at Quarrier’s Fairknowe Home admitted that ‘undesirable ’ placements had been made, that children had run away, or that they had been returned to the receiving home because of bad conduct or persistent bed-wetting (a recurring problem and a clear indication in itself that these children were unsettled). The constant shifting of residence was very disruptive, whether because placements were unsuitable or simply because a child had outgrown its placement. And from time to time there was a clear recognition — at least in private correspondence — that mistakes had been made. One such case was George, a Whinwell boy who, among other misdemeanours, ‘got a March-mont girl into trouble ’, stole money from his employer and a gold chain from a visitor, and ‘caused death of valuable heifer by sticking fork in it’. 62

  Loneliness was a huge problem for many children. If an employer did not come to the receiving home to collect them, or if a member of staff was not free to accompany them to a placement, newly arrived immigrants could well be dispatched alone on the train with a name tag around their neck, bound for an unknown destination and an unknown employer. One Quarrier immigrant, writing in old age about his impressions as a newly arrived ten-year-old in 1894, recalled his mixed emotions during the early days in Canada, and in particular the lack-lustre way in which he had been greeted by his foster parents:

  We were 18 days reaching Halifax, and sat and slept on the slats in colonist cars to Brockville. A big boy looked after a small one. The menu was very plain. It took me three days to reach the farm in Monteagle Township, 175 miles from Brockville. I travelled by train to Ormsby the first day, then 16 miles to Bancroft on the old stage coach that carried the mail, and by wagon to the farm on the third day.

  It was nice meeting my sister, Sara, but still I had the feeling of meeting a stranger. James and Elizabeth Price, who were to be my foster parents for the next 12 years, were 40 years old at the time. There was no tender kiss on the cheek, no kindly handshake, no enthusiasm shown in meeting this small Scottish boy. It was just a matter-of-fact meeting. 63

  The problem of loneliness is perhaps brought out more explicitly in the annual journals of Aberlour Orphanage, particularly in the immigrants’ correspondence published in them. There were certainly success stories — one boy in 1887 advised his former guardians to build their next orphanage in Ontario, where ‘you can live so much cheaper’; 64 other letters praised the abundant harvests and the ease with which immigrants could make money. But that was only one side of the coin, and the Aberlour authorities, which saw emigration as a supplementary rather than integral part of their work, admitted that sending children to Canada was always something of a gamble:

  They left us with rather heavy hearts, poor boys, and we could not part with them without feeling. Life is such a lottery so to speak, we cannot tell what is before them. Trials and difficulties they and we know nothing of may await them; may they have strength to overcome all. We feel we have done our best to train and fit them for the trials of life, and can only pray that something they have been taught may be put into practice. They go out to some of our lads already there, so that we are comforted in this. 65

  Some of these fears were confirmed by the criticism voiced by children whose letters appeared in Aberlour’s journals. Several openly admitted that they were lonely and often cried for home. One boy wrote wistfully in 1888:

  America is rightly called the ‘New World’ — everything is new here, and one seems to be in another planet altogether. But it is not all sunshine out here, the cold in winter is terrible, and the heat in summer overpowering. And it is not all who get on here, any more than in the old country, there are many failures, only none starve here, food is plentiful. The mind, somehow, will cross the Atlantic and wander among the dear old glens of home. I often seem to hear the roar of the old Spay [sic], as it dances among the stones and rocks. Tell the lads if they can live at home to do so, if not, they should come here. Let me hear all the news when you write. 66

  Others complained of onerous farm work and expressed bitter regret that they had come to Canada. One such correspondent wrote in 1891:

  If people patiently bore at home the hardships they have to bear here, and if they worked half as hard at home as they have to do now, they would be far better off than they are here. Clothing is very dear, and very poor stuff too. There is plenty of food, but it is very rough altogether. Everybody seems to be trying to save money, and they don’t seem to care how they do it. But if I ever set my foot on the soil of the old country, I shall say no more Canada for me. 67

  Problems in adjusting to a different culture were evident in the letter of an outwardly successful Whinwell emigrant writing from New York, where he was about to enter medical school:

  Dear Miss Croall, I scarcely know how to write. Your ’Xmas card has made me feel a bit homesick. You may think I have forgotten you, but that can never be. Oh, no, Miss Croall, Whinwell shall never be erased from my memory, the days of my youth, tho’ long gone can never be forgotten, and even yet are as dreams over which memory loves to linger, and as I sit here in the office, night after night when everything is quiet and still, I steal back on wing of memory and play in the old garden at Whinwell again … and sometimes wish I was back in reality again and to spend even one Sabbath in the ‘auld hoose at hame.’ Here Sunday is like every other day, the same bustle and hurry, everyone seems to be bent on taking all they can out of this world never thinking of the next. 68

  In many ways the dice were loaded against the immigrant children. On the farmsteads they were often alienated by their employers’ attitudes, for even if they were not physically maltreated, they were rarely integrated into family life. They were in an ambivalent position: because they were not members of the family, their status and rights had to be protected by means of legal agreements, but those indentures in themselves set them apart, and further eroded any illusions that they were like other members of the farm families. School could also be an uncomfortable place, for most children were not given the opportunity to attain anything like the level reached by the Whinwell correspondent. Employers whose primary requirement was a working pair of hands might well be reluctant to send the children to school, and non-fulfilment of educational obligations was a recurring complaint among the Quarrier immigrants. Even neutral or positive letters reflect these problems. ‘I
haven’t started to go to school yet, as we are so busy cutting wood for the rest of the winter,’ wrote one Quarrier child in January 1886, while later the same year another wrote, even more tellingly, ‘I am not going to school till I learn to speak like the rest of the people.’ 69 For the children, interrupted schooling often meant verbal and physical abuse, both from the teachers, because of their inevitable backwardness, and from the other pupils, because they were so demonstrably different in their background and experience of childhood, as well as their accents.

  Many home children also felt themselves ostracized by the host society at large. Canadian attitudes to home children were somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, they welcomed the availability of cheap labour, but on the other hand, they resented their country being used as a dumping ground for what they suspected were misfits and ne ’er-do-wells who were not wanted in Britain. The very appellation ‘home child’ was a derogatory one, and sweeping generalizations about the overall character of juvenile immigrants were often drawn from the few well-publicized cases of children who had gone astray. They were stigmatized as the dregs of Britain’s city slums, cheap — but potentially dangerous — commodities who were widely suspected of importing medical and moral pollution to rural Canada. Many employers expressed disappointment at the immigrants’ sullenness, rough manners and failure to adapt readily to their new environments, and their complaints frequently ‘rang with claims of promises betrayed’. 70 Yet many children had also been betrayed, and perhaps these employers expected too much, too quickly, from recruits whose traumatic experiences in their early years had often left them with deep psychological scars. In such an atmosphere mutual distrust and hostility could easily build up, which in turn sometimes led to physical abuse on the part of the employer, and on a few (well-publicized) occasions to the child’s taking revenge by sabotaging the work of the farm or household. Even this self-consciously upbeat letter in Quarrier’s 1912 annual report contained a veiled warning:

  I like the Canadian people and ways. They seem friendly and quick in their ways. Mistress says she thought she would have to attach an electric wire to me to make me smart. I guess if the Canadians were as slow as we Scotch they would freeze here in the winter. Tell all the girls who think of coming to Canada to get a hustle on them, for the girls who came out before me all tell that the Canadians think they are slow. 71

  In cases of ill-treatment, receiving homes were more inclined to believe the employer than the child. When ten-year-old George West was found wandering the streets of Ottawa after running away from his employer following a horsewhipping, he was sent back to his placement by Fairknowe Home at the insistence of the employer, despite a recommendation by the Canadian immigration authorities that William Graham was ‘not a proper person to have charge of this boy and it is deemed advisable that you should at once remove him to some other home’. In its defence, Fairknowe claimed, rather complacently, that no complaints had previously been made against Graham, and, while condemning the use of the whip as an instrument of punishment, ‘we do not think he beat the boy severely’. 72

  Conclusion

  How should posterity judge the merits and demerits of a movement that over a sixty-year period sent 100,000 unaccompanied British children to Canada, most of them under the age of fourteen? Did this constitute a totally unacceptable face of emigration policy, or could such social engineering be justified in the context of the age? Philanthropists like Macpher-son, Barnardo and Quarrier had not a shred of doubt about the ethics of sponsored emigration, although perhaps the most ringing endorsement and summary are found in the 1910 annual report of the less well-known Whin-well Home. As we have seen, Annie Croall claimed that ‘no branch’ of child rescue work was so successful as assisted emigration, asserting that those sent abroad had ‘a better future ... far more scope ... [and] every advantage on their side ’ while their relocation was equally beneficial to the donor and receiver countries.

  Others offered more qualified support. Although Mrs Blaikie ’s visit to Canada inspired her with ‘greater confidence than ever in the good done by the emigration of little children’, she did not dismiss the importance of parental responsibilities, and was also aware of the need to placate employers, who feared her policies would create a scarcity of labour at home. 73 The Aberlour Orphanage played the emigration card sparingly and with many reservations, but the most unequivocal contemporary criticism came from outside the ranks of the institutions, notably from the press. In 1883 a leading article in the Glasgow Herald, while acknowledging the ‘benevolent’ intentions of the emi-grationists, expressed concern at the unregulated nature of a trade that saw children ‘shipped off in large batches’ by autocratic individuals who opposed any challenge to their authority as ‘a deadly sin, to be regarded with uplifted hands, upturned eyes, and pious objurgations’. The editor continued to press his case in no uncertain terms:

  Whatever may be the intentions of the promoters of this juvenile emigration — and we have never questioned the purity and goodness of their motives — there can be little doubt that their system of procedure is entirely wrong. We have said that they are practically irresponsible, and as such the children are made over to them for emigration. Considerable difficulty is often experienced in gaining the consent of the generally wretched parents of the children, and there is little wonder, because parental feeling, even in the poorest and most degraded, is not easily extinguished altogether, and the parents know that they will in all probability neither see nor hear from their children again. Once all control of the one has been signed away by the other, parent and offspring in too many cases become absolutely dead to each other. It will be maintained, of course, that in the cases referred to absolute separation between parents and children is the best thing that could happen, which may or may not be true; but it certainly ought not to be in the power of any irresponsible individual, male or female, to decide upon a matter of so much importance, and to act upon the decision, without the shadow of control.

  Once a child was in Canada, the editorial continued, it became virtually impossible for outsiders to trace its progress, since the homes on both sides of the Atlantic ‘allow no independent inquiries to be made, or take very good care that if they are made, no information will be forthcoming’. The carefully monitored correspondence of upbeat annual reports concealed all problems, and the article was highly critical of the apathy of the British government in tacitly condoning ‘the irresponsible deportation of the unprotected’. 74

  Retrospective criticism has been even more vehement. After the First World War the policy came under political attack from socialists who claimed that it was a device designed to preserve the existing social structure and to divert attention from the need to introduce welfare provision in Britain. From a different perspective, child psychologists also began to stress the importance of maintaining the family unit and the damaging effects of uprooting children from their natural environment, particularly if their parents were still alive. They also pointed out that most of the children involved had no conception of what emigration involved. Many emigrants themselves later recalled that they had viewed the prospect of ‘going to Canada’ in the same way that they might regard an annual outing to the seaside, and they complained that their guardians had never made clear to them the irrevocable nature of the step they were taking. Added to this misunderstanding was the question of whether the movement was prompted by a desire of the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic to benefit the children, or whether the real motive was to secure cheap labour for Canadian farms. ‘I really thought when I got off that boat that there ’d be a bucket of gold, but all I ever got was a scrub bucket,’ recalled a Quarrier girl who emigrated in 1911. 75 And it was certainly ironic that children who were too young to leave school in Britain were shipped to Canada primarily as cheap labour, with scant provision made for the completion of their formal education in a country which stigmatized them as social misfits.

  More serious still, however,
were the practical dangers involved in sending vulnerable children to unknown, isolated situations, where they could all too easily fall victim to physical, sexual and psychological abuse. Such problems have received extensive publicity in the media in recent years, and some home children have spoken bitterly of the misery of their early years in Canada, when they were at the mercy of brutal employers, but were either too young to articulate their grievances or too frightened to complain for fear of reprisals. Even those who were not ill-treated often longed to exchange the isolation of the Canadian farm for the cramped intimacy of the Scottish orphanage.

  The receiving homes seem to have put too much faith in written indentures that employers could ignore at will with regard to treatment, schooling and wages, while some emigrationists, notably Emma Stirling, were more concerned with self-righteous image-building than with the practicalities of child care. Inspections of placements by most organizations were infrequent and cursory, with the result that employers could pull the wool over an inspector’s eyes, and abused children, particularly in isolated communities which closed ranks against them, very often had no one in authority to whom they could complain. Only in 1924, a year after three home boys had committed suicide in Canada, was a British delegation sent out to investigate the whole system of juvenile emigration, which was subsequently restricted to the over-fourteens through new legislation in 1925.