Marjorie Her War Years
Page 1
This book is in memory of my mother, Marjorie, her siblings — Frederick, Norman, Phyllis, Joyce, Kenneth, Audrey, Jean, Lawrence, Richard, and David — and to my grandfather, Thomas Frederick Arnison. However, this book is most especially dedicated to my grandmother, Winifred Arnison.
Contents
Author’s Note
Foreword by former British prime minister Gordon Brown
Introduction: There Is No One More Vulnerable Than a Child
1Winifred’s Children
2A Difficult Year: Forced Adaptation to a New Daily Routine
3Bunny’s Birthday
4Exiled: A One-Way Ticket to Nowhere
5I Ain’t Gonna Be a Farmer’s Wife
6A Partial Eclipse
7Little Farmers
8Off to Fintry: Now What Did I Do Wrong?
9A Bad Home Is Better Than Any Institution
10Fintry or Fairbridge?
11For Now and Evermore
12I Think I Can … Make It …
13Bullies! It’s Not Fair!
14Christmas Eve: Survival Is the Most Important Thing
15Why Would I Go Back? My Country Didn’t Want Me
Afterword (Afterward): Peace in Marjorie’s Senior Years
Acknowledgements
Appendix: “Fairbridge the Founder”
Notes
Bibliography
Photo Credits
This is the earliest photo we have of Marjorie Arnison, taken at the Middlemore Emigration Home in Birmingham, 1937. The M on her tunic stands for “Middlemore.”
Author’s Note
While only a child, Marjorie was removed from her family in the Tyneside area of northeastern England and sent to Canada as part of the British child migration scheme. She was doing her duty to her king and country and, as Kingsley Fairbridge in 1909 and then the Prince of Wales in 1935 both emphasized, she was seen as an “imperial investment” in the British colonies.
Marjorie arrived at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School near Cowichan Station, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, on September 22, 1937, one day after her eleventh birthday.
Propaganda, in a variety of forms, such as brochures, newspaper ads, as well as newspaper and magazine articles from the philanthropic organizations seeking to be involved in the migration of children to the colonies, portrayed British child migration in the brightest of lights. Opposition was voiced but rarely heeded.
This venture is backed by His Majesty’s Government … the consent of the Canadian Government and of the Provincial Government in British Columbia has already been secured for the starting of a school in that great province in the Great West.
— “Fairbridge Farm School,” The Times (London), July 25, 1934
Marjorie’s mother had little power to prevent three of her young children from being sent overseas to be trained as domestics and farm workers in the colonies, as this family was up against a system that was supported by the powerful in both Britain and Canada. Marjorie told me in an interview in January 2015 that she wasn’t brought up, she was dragged up at this Canadian farm school. She survived because that is what her instincts told her to do. She had her two siblings and a few close friends in her cottage, and she “got by because we had each other and because we had no choice.”
This full-page article leaves no doubt that the Fairbridge Farm School scheme was fully endorsed by the Royal Family. Surrounding these three men are hundreds of donor names. The Fairbridge Society (a.k.a. The Child Emigration Society) had the backing of many influential people.[1]
Britain alone of the European Colonial powers seems to have made an industry of the export of its children.
— Geoff Blackburn, The Children’s Friend Society, 1993
Strictly speaking, the Fairbridge Farm School is somewhat in the nature of a broker. They ask these public assistance authorities, who are like wholesalers, to supply the children to ourselves, who are the retailers.
— Letter to Frederick Charles Blair, Canadian Department of Immigration and Colonization, Ottawa, Ontario, regarding the material submitted for the Fairbridge Farm School, 1935
Farm School Plan is British-Backed. Number of English Children will be Trained on Vancouver Island to Become Canadians.… They will know Canadian farming thoroughly when they are through with us.
— The Gazette (Montreal), February 14, 1935
What better for the Empire than that in the newer lands it should be fed with trained material from the homeland, and its scattered elements united by the common culture and loyalty of those who from childhood had owed everything to St. George’s England?
— “Youth and the Empire,” The Times (London), April 25, 1935
Child emigration pamphlet, circa 1910, and Building Young Canada on the Playing Fields of Fairbridge, circa 1949. Both images were from the Fairbridge Society’s appeal for support, one at the beginning of Kingsley Fairbridge’s campaign and the other when the Fairbridge Society found itself at a crossroads in Canada.
Foreword
This is a worthy sequel to Marjorie Too Afraid to Cry, which told a painful but critically important story of lives turned upside down by the then U.K. government’s policy of sending children overseas and away from their families forever.
In February 2010, when I made a formal, full, and unconditional apology to the victims of the child migrant program on behalf of the British people, Marjorie’s life was one of the stories at the forefront of my thoughts.
What happened at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, where 95 percent of the 329 children sent there were not orphans but had families from whom they were cut off, continues to distress everyone who hears what went on there.
It was right that we said sorry to Marjorie and to all those who were truly let down.
Now we have another important chapter in her story. Marjorie: Her War Years recalls a childhood filled with loneliness, pain, and a sense of rejection. The children had no one to turn to and did not feel that anyone cared. Communication to the outside world was censored. Letters home had to give glowing reports — or the children were punished. Letters coming to Marjorie from her mother had sections blacked out or cut from the page.
This account shows how wrong it was that Marjorie and so many others like her were sent away at the time when they were at their most vulnerable. It was wrong that our country turned its back and did not see the tears or hear the cries for help. It was wrong that it took so long for an apology to be made and for Marjorie to be united with her brother.
The determination shown by Marjorie and all former child migrants to have the failures of the past acknowledged challenges us to do more. Like so many others, I am inspired by her spirit and resilience.
Marjorie Too Afraid to Cry shared a moving story of courage in the face of suffering, and this important sequel educates us about the callous and cruel mistakes that were made by decision makers — mistakes that should never happen again. While we cannot wipe out the pain, we can show that we understand it, that we are trying to make amends, and that we really do care.
— Gordon Brown, prime minister of the United Kingdom, 2007–2010
Marjorie (Arnison) Skidmore receiving a personal apology from the former British prime minister, Gordon Brown, London, February 2010.
Winifred’s Children
She wrapped her heart
Around their imaginary little bodies
If she held them too tight
Their essence wou
ld disappear
If she fought too hard
To hold them in her mind
She would squeeze the life out of them
And they would vanish like the mist
Her memories of them were illusive
Best seen out of the corner of her mind
Like a mirage
They could not be touched
Like the end of the rainbow
They could not be reached
She never stopped needing
To reach them again
To touch them again
To hold them again.
Introduction
There Is No One More Vulnerable Than a Child
Unless the children are very carefully selected in England, some of them may have nervous breakdowns.
— Harry Morris Cassidy, British Columbia’s director of social welfare, was opposed to the opening of the Fairbridge institution. February 14, 1935[1]
All will not be rosy for these little girls and boys … but they will be of an adaptable age.
— Daily Province (Vancouver), September 21, 1935
Nowhere in the annals of British emigration history is there a more calloused expulsion of children, and nowhere in Canadian history is there a more shameful response to and treatment of the young and vulnerable.
— Rooke and Schnell, Discarding the Asylum, 1983
The tale of my mother, Marjorie’s, 6,600-mile journey as a ten-year-old girl in 1937, from Whitley Bay in northeastern England to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School near Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, is told in my book Marjorie Too Afraid to Cry: A Home Child Experience.
Most of the children, once they arrived in their “new homeland,” found themselves locked into a form of slavery until they reached adulthood. For so many, running from this past, burying the shame and the cruelty they had faced as defenceless children, was the only route to a sane future and a way to make a life for themselves. It was a childhood that far too few spoke of, and this worked to ensure this shameful episode of history was kept hidden from public view. The children who were sent away to help build Canada between the early 1830s and the late 1940s now need to find their proper and prominent places in the history lessons of the Canadian schools.
Even today I have people look me in the eye, their body language and tone of voice daring me to disagree, and claim: It was the very best thing for each and every one of them. Those children were all better off.
Others have challenged me: Those children had nothing, they came from nothing, and whatever they found here had to be better than what they were removed from. Do you have any idea of the conditions in Britain at that time?
What time? When? In 1618–1619, when King James I set in motion a policy of shipping children to the colonies? This policy was embraced, and as a result, child migration continued right into the 1970s.
This 1618 letter written by King James I authorizing sending British children to Virginia appears to be the starting point of British child migration to the colonies.
Trustie and well beloved we greet you well, whereas our Court hath of late been troubled by divers idle young people, who although they have been twise punished still continue to followe the same having noe employment.
We having noe other course to cleer our Court from them have thought fitt to send them unto you desiring you att the next opportunitie to send them away to Virginia, and to take sure order that they may sett to worke there, wherein you shall not only do so good service, but also do a deed of charity by employing them who otherwise will never be reclaimed from the idle life of vagabonds.
Given att our Court att Newmarket the thirteenth day of January 1618.
There were some difficult economic times over that 350-year period, I am sure. The poor were underpaid, and families could work together for twelve to sixteen hours a day and still not make enough to get by — and not getting by was seen as their fault.
However, the conditions that the children faced without their families, all alone, thousands of miles from anything that was familiar, were often terrifying, and the loneliness was soul destroying.
They had nothing!
Not true. They had families, they had identity, they had a community, they had their culture, and they had a country. They had roots.
It was the very best thing for each and every one of them!
Again, not true. My mother had the love of her mother. It was never replaced. My mother had the love of her siblings. They were torn apart. My mother was cast adrift at a very early age to find her own way. Once exiled to this strange country, she really did have nothing.
Marjorie’s bearings were gone. She struggled with who she was without her family and the protection they offered. Her identity was lost as a new one was being crammed down her throat. She might have wondered, If I try to be who you want me to be, then who will be me? And like the children in the bottom photo on the front cover, she was forced to become a mere shadow of her former self. She was given the tools for her new life — mops and brooms, shovels, rakes, and hoes — while the tools they used to control her were threats, fear and isolation.
As Marjorie left Liverpool, her ten-year-old heart heavy with grief, her tears flowing into the River Mersey, she knew she had to forget her family, her country, and her roots in order to move forward and face her frightening and uncertain future, or all would be lost. She struggled to make sense of what she had done to deserve this fate. She worried about how to avoid repeating her unknown mistake, as from the start her captors made sure she knew that it could get worse, far, far worse, if she disobeyed them.
My mother was sent thousands of miles away from all that was familiar and brought up in an institution where most of her new “mothers” reminded her each and every day that she was a wretched British orphan. Marjorie screamed to herself, But I am not an orphan, her voice echoing with nowhere to go but inward. She was told regularly that she was a no-good guttersnipe, barely worth the effort it took to care for her.
The very best thing? For all those children over that entire 350-year period?
No one seemed to care how the children fared. The loneliness mixed with fear and confusion. The loss. The shame. The powerlessness. Missing identities. Homesickness. The abuse. The adult workload that so many were forced to do. No voice. Silenced. The lack of love and care.
Yes, it is true that some of the 120,000 children sent to Canada between 1833 and 1948 made good homes, and it’s also true that regardless of their situation, many had a good life. But what choice did they have? The human will to survive can be strong. However, many did not or could not talk about their past, and they kept their “child migrant” history hidden from their new Canadian families. They tried to hide their British accent that would not go away, bury the pain caused by deportation, and conceal who they used to be because they could not make peace with their lost past and forced future.
It took me the first fifty years of my life before I was finally able to gain enough insight into my mother’s hidden past to find out who she really was. My mother, Marjorie, was well into her seventies before I had a breakthrough. For years I faced the wall of silence. Nevertheless, I persisted, looking for a crack in the wall, as my need to have answers didn’t diminish over the years, but grew. When my mother finally told me that she would get into trouble for speaking about her Fairbridge years, I realized the complexity and depth of her fear. I expected the silence to continue, but naming her fear helped to dissipate it. Thus, finally my mother was able to go back to that time, and slowly her memories emerged. Then, with research of my own, I was able to discover the many pieces of her lost childhood, and, at last, I was able to fully accept that former stranger who was my mother. Finding her past ultimately opened an avenue into who I am: now a person with roots, albeit severed, a person with a family — grandparents, aunts, uncles, and co
usins — even if they are mostly unknown to me. But they are mine, and I now know who they are.
How could I know me fully without knowing the circumstances of my mother’s life? They not only took the child migrants’ roots away; they also denied these roots, the sense of family and identity, to the next generation.
Although the practice of child migration was strongly opposed throughout its history, its critics’ opinions never seemed to carry as much weight as those of its supporters. Throughout the 1600s the practice of deporting Britain’s unwanted children to the colonies expanded and it appeared that there was little control over the process, and the kidnapping of children became commonplace. The earliest newspaper record that I have located regarding the kidnapping of children was printed in London’s The Flying Post on August 30, 1698. A vessel near the Thames was found to have two hundred kidnapped boys on board. The defence given to the judge by a crew member was that “he and three others, have for some time made it their practice to Kidnap boys, in order to sell them to the West-Indies.” The article did not mention whether the crew were held accountable or whether the children were released.
Today we are aware that for eons Britain successfully hid some of the more sordid pieces of its past, and child slavery was just part of this hidden history. Historically, the negativity surrounding slave ownership has been placed, for the most part, on the United States, while the history of Britain’s slave ownership during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has largely gone unknown, just like its child migration schemes, which began around the same time.
David Olusoga, in an article titled, “The History of British Slave Ownership Has Been Buried: Now Its Scale Can Be Revealed,” stated that “geographic distance made it possible for slavery to be largely airbrushed out of British history, following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833.” Olusoga went on to say that for the forty-six thousand British slave owners,