Marjorie Her War Years

by Patricia Skidmore

  “I hated you for staying because I missed you so much and I needed you.” Mum didn’t turn or answer Joyce. She continued to stare at the waves, absorbed in this past hurt that she carried for so long.

  “I needed you more,” Joyce said simply.

  “After a while I stopped needing you. I had to forget. I forgot until you came over for a visit in 1977. Can you forgive me for forgetting you?” Mum grabbed at Joyce’s sleeve.

  “I hadn’t seen you for forty years. It was a lifetime.”

  I stood back, listening quietly, making mental notes.

  “It was hard for me. In the end, I was left all alone in the Middlemore Emigration Home. I had no one. You had Bunny and Kenny. I hated that. It hurt so much that I had to forget about being left behind.” Joyce looked at me and said, “I lost everyone.”

  “Funny, huh? And I was so mad about you staying.” Mum looked at her sister.

  “Sometimes I get so damn mad when I think how they broke up this family. We all lost so much. Our roots were severed. Brothers and sisters were torn apart. I was denied my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins,” I said angrily. I grew up with a mother who didn’t understand why she was sent away. It made me angry but mostly scared because I, too, could not understand.

  The two sisters walked on, ignoring my outburst. Mum always avoided conflict. Her childhood anger at the betrayal she felt from her family and her country had quickly turned to fear as she traversed first through the Middlemore Emigration Home and then the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. She had carried that fear all her life. I quickly realized that it was not fair for me to drag up those emotions now. The two sisters, separated for so long, had found a bit of peace and comfort in each other’s company while travelling down memory lane, back to their once carefree childhood.

  But I am angry, and I am no longer afraid.

  “Oh, I wish Kenny was with us today. I have always missed him.” Joyce sighed.

  “When Bunny arrived they put her in my cottage. Kenny had no one at Fairbridge. He was one of the younger boys, and I know many were picked on.” Mum looked at Joyce. “I wish he was here with us, too.”

  “He died so young, just like Jean.”

  “I think he is here in spirit with us. And we are back now. Together.” Mum touched Joyce’s back, softly, hesitantly, unsure of herself.

  “Yes, we are. I dreamed about coming to Canada to be with you. I had no home. I was going to save up my money, but the time went by and it never amounted to enough.” Joyce turned away. “We have to make the best of things, don’t we?”

  “Oh, Joyce, you are right. And what do we really have but the here and now! I can hardly find the words to describe how it feels to be here. I never thought I’d be here again. I think it’s a dream that I’m standing on the sands at Whitley Bay. I don’t remember a lot about living here as a kid, but I never forgot the sands.”

  The two sisters stood still, watching the waves crash onto the sand.

  “Ouch!” Mum jumped. “What did you pinch me for?”

  “To show you that you’re not dreaming!” Joyce laughed.

  The sisters linked arms as they continued their walk. This simple gesture was so foreign to them. Physical and emotional distance had kept them from this basic intimacy of sisterhood. As they walked arm in arm up the beach, I heard the sisters softly singing “Red Sails in the Sunset.”

  The next tide would wash away their footsteps, but nothing could wash this away, not from them, and not from me.

  Full Circle

  Here we stand

  Heart in hand

  Arm in arm, and

  Cry — Oh, the Whitley Bay sand.

  Seventy long years

  All kinds of tears

  And the toil it took

  To get back to this nook.

  Here we stand

  Tears in our eyes, as

  We peer over the land

  Oh — our Whitley Bay sand.

  Seventy long years if a day

  Innocent issue at play

  Searching this land

  For treasure in the sand.

  Now — full circle at last

  Searching for our past

  Our lives not so bleak

  New treasure we seek.

  Here we stand

  Hand in hand.

  And survey the land

  Of our Whitley Bay sand.

  Afterword (Afterward):

  Peace in Marjorie’s Senior Years

  The child migration scheme is now universally recognised as having been fundamentally flawed with tragic consequences. Indeed, Barnardos Australia stated ‘We have no hesitation in saying that it was a shameful practice, that it was barbaric, and that it was completely against any practices that we would currently uphold’; and the NCH [National Children’s Home] ‘is firmly of the view that child migration was a major mistake and we now deeply regret having taken part in it’. Many of the sending and receiving agencies now recognise that the effects of the Scheme were profoundly damaging to many of the children involved and that they now share a continuing moral responsibility to the well-being of the former migrant children affected by their experience in the agencies’ care.

  — Inquiry into child migration, Parliament of Australia, 2001

  Today, when I look at photographs of my mother, Marjorie, smiling, I try to imagine what the long road to that smile was really like. Over the past few years, I have attempted to travel back in time, often with her by my side, searching for pieces of her in an effort to re-create her lost childhood, her 1937 journey as a British child migrant, and the five years she spent at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. I needed to know what British child migration was all about, why it happened, and especially why it happened to my family. I needed to ensure that our family’s stories would no longer be broken by the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean. I needed to make peace with my mother’s past so that our family’s future stories would be more complete and no longer severed.

  It was sometime in 1999 that I started pestering my mother in earnest for information. The wall of silence that I found as a child was too great for me to penetrate. I gave up for years, and then I just needed to know. It didn’t take me long to realize that my mother wasn’t hiding her past from me — she had lost it, burying it so deep that she could no longer find her own way back.

  Marjorie kept in touch with her family, but she was never able to talk with them about the circumstances around her being sent to Canada. She found out that her English siblings knew nothing as well, as her parents had refused to talk about how three of their eleven children were sent to Canada.

  We had little information, so I had to get out and find what I could. When I started I had only two photographs — one of my mother and her brother arriving at the farm school in the Cowichan Valley on September 22, 1937, and one of her sister Joyce, taken while she was at the Birmingham Middlemore Emigration Home after Marjorie was sent to Canada.[1] I had no documentation about my mother’s 1937 journey to Canada or of her five years at the farm school; however, I had a small handful of her memories from the time when she was with her family in Whitley Bay: playing on the sands, St. Mary’s Lighthouse, and the strongest memory and the one my mother mentioned the most often, of her swinging on a rusty gate and yelling to her mother for a “ha’penny” on her tenth birthday.

  My mother could not recall when she was removed from her family in Whitley Bay or how long she stayed first in Newcastle, then Birmingham, where the Middlemore Emigration Home was located, before heading to the Fairbridge Hostel, Creagh House, in Kensington, London, then up to Liverpool and finally across the Atlantic on the Duchess of Atholl on her way to Canada. For me these were just names, and as such, they held little meaning.

  I didn’t know where to start, so I started at the beginning: Whitley
Bay. Marjorie Arnison’s birth certificate showed that she was born in Whitley Bay, just east of Newcastle, in the Tyneside area of northern England, on September 21, 1926. I found out that she was the fifth child of Thomas Frederick and Winifred Arnison. I read that this area of England had experienced years of crippling unemployment. Sometime in the summer of 1933, Marjorie’s father left Whitley Bay to look for work in London, unaware that Winifred was pregnant with their ninth child. Baby Lawrence was born in February 1934.

  Winifred and her nine children received little money from her husband and not much in the way of social support. The two older boys, Norman and Fred, did what they could to help out, but they took it a step too far in the fall of 1935, when they broke into a home. The boys were caught, and Fred was sent to a borstal, a boys’ juvenile detention home, and Norman was sent to the Castle Howard Reformatory in York. I have been unable to find any records of Fred’s incarceration, but the records show that Norman was at the reformatory for three years.

  Many reformatories in England at that time had the authority to transport children in their care to the colonies, but many first taught their inmates skills that they would need, mainly farming. Norman told me that he was taught farming at Castle Howard. However, I can find no record of boys being sent to the colonies from this particular reformatory. If they had, Norman might have been lost to the family for years after, if not forever.

  By early 1937, the family had not seen Thomas for almost four years, and with her two older boys gone, Winifred and her children — Phyllis, Joyce, Marjorie, Kenny, Audrey, Jean, and baby Lawrence — were having a difficult time living on the money Thomas was sending. The Fairbridge Society was actively recruiting for children in the Tyneside area and had approached the local schools and sent home handbills, searching out children who would be bright enough to pass the Canadian immigration officials’ stringent regulations.[2] I believe that their school attendance officer flagged the Arnison children as potential candidates for immigration with the Fairbridge Society.

  I did not have the actual date when the children were removed, so I started by contacting the Whitley Bay School District. Much to my delight, the school district’s archive had records of the Arnison children, and this included addresses and dates of where the family lived and, most importantly, I could see where Marjorie’s school records ended. I began to get a clearer picture of what it must have been like for my grandmother, as I located fourteen different addresses that the family lived at in Whitley Bay between the years 1923, when their third child, Norman, was born, and 1937, when Marjorie and her siblings were removed.

  The eldest, Fred, was born in Gourock, Scotland, and their second child, Phyllis, was born in Alston in northern England about sixty miles west of Whitley Bay. The next seven children were born in Whitley Bay, and the last two sons were born in the London area.

  Next I contacted the University of Liverpool Library, Special Collections and Archives Department, as that is where the Fairbridge Archive from the London Fairbridge Society (today the Fairbridge Society is amalgamated with The Prince’s Trust) is currently held. One thing led to the next, and in time I located many bits and pieces, including important dates in Marjorie’s young life. I continued my search in Birmingham; the Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa, Ontario; the B.C. Archives in Victoria, British Columbia; the Cowichan Valley Museum and Archives in Duncan, British Columbia; the UBC Archives in Vancouver, British Columbia; and finally the Vernon and District Museum and Archives in the interior of British Columbia. The pieces to the puzzle of Marjorie’s early childhood were starting to fill in.

  By a stroke of luck, I also got in contact with local Whitley Bay resident and historian Morag Horseman, who told me to send her the addresses I had been given by the school district, and she would take photographs of the Whitley Bay homes and email them to me. I forwarded her all the addresses, and I had an immediate response. She said that I would not believe this, but she was living in the house right next door to one of the houses my mother and her family lived in in 1936. Seeing where my mother lived, and having a photograph of the last flat that my mother lived in with her family on Whitley Road in 1937, gave me hope that I could bring back some of my mother’s childhood. Morag’s photographs made me determined to one day take my mother back to Whitley Bay.

  I shared each little finding with my mother, including the photos of her former homes in Whitley Bay. Every little bit that I found contributed to drawing out more of her memories. I told myself that I would stop if this process distressed her, but in my heart I knew that I would not, as it wasn’t just her past that I was finding, it was mine, too. I had hoped for a positive outcome, of course, but I tried to prepare myself for the possibility that she might shut down and continue to keep her past hidden. However, after I shared the findings from Whitley Bay and showed her the Fairbridge file sent from the University of Liverpool Library Archives and her Middlemore file from the Birmingham Archives, my mother said to me with a smile, “Well, they didn’t just throw me away, then; they kept records of me.” I took this as a sign that I could continue this research with her blessing.

  As mentioned earlier, the Fairbridge Society actively recruited children from the Newcastle Tyneside area. “The Commissioner for Special Areas saw in the Fairbridge Society a means of saving some, at least, of the children [of the Tyneside], where there is relentless squalor, where there is relentless injury to body and soul.… A friend came forward with a sum of money in her hand. ‘It is obvious,’ she said, ‘that the children on the Tyneside must be shewn the way to Fairbridge.’”[3]

  Marjorie’s father, Thomas, was contacted while he was working in London and asked for his permission to take four of his children for the Fairbridge Farm School scheme. Thomas responded, saying he was agreeable to what they proposed as long as his wife and children were willing. Thomas was the head of the household, so that was all the consent required. It did not matter that his wife was not willing and that his children did not want to go.[4]

  In February 1937 four Arnison children — Joyce, age twelve; Marjorie, age ten; Kenny, age eight; and Audrey, age seven — were removed from their mother’s care. Their older sister Phyllis recalled helping her mother put the four children on the Whitley Bay train bound for Newcastle. The children were told to get off at Newcastle’s Central Station and wait under the main clock. Someone would meet them there. They were in Newcastle for a brief period, perhaps only one or two nights, before being taken to the Middlemore Emigration Home in Birmingham. At the home they were prepped for emigration and groomed to pass the medical and mental testing given by Canadian officials before their approval to sail to Canada could be granted.

  In September 1937 Marjorie and her younger brother Kenny were sent to Canada. Audrey (a.k.a. Bunny) did not go at that time because she was quarantined in the home’s sick bay. Joyce also stayed at the home for reasons unknown at that time. In early 1995, I wrote to Aunt Joyce, asking her to tell me anything that she would be willing to share from her Middlemore years. Joyce wrote a letter back to me on February 13, 1995: “The last time I saw Ken [and] your mum … I was looking out the window seeing them go down the garden path with all the other children off to Canada, but at the time I did not know where they were going, that was the last time I saw them. I was ill in Sick Bay a long time, they said I was ill with a broken heart, because they had taken them away and left me.” Eight-year-old Audrey was sent over to Canada in August 1938.

  In 2006 we accessed Joyce’s Middlemore Emigration Home file. Her papers show that she was not sent with Marjorie and Kenny because the records listed her as being thirteen and not twelve years old when she arrived at the Middlemore Emigration Home; thus she was considered too old for the Fairbridge Farm School program. It took another year before the Middlemore Home discovered the mistake. By that time Joyce was well into her thirteenth year and definitely too old for the program, so they kept her at the home to work in the kitchen unti
l she was sixteen. Was she the lucky one to have stayed in England? Or had the four siblings sent to Middlemore become a little family, and did Joyce lose her sense of family all over again when her siblings were torn from her a second and then a third time?

  Part of the selection process entailed a rigid screening by Canadian officials based at Canada House, Trafalgar Square, in London. This team travelled to the Middlemore Emigration Home to test prospective children. Of the first 170 to 175 children brought together for the 1935 opening of the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School, Canadian officials rejected 75 percent.[5] This was a blow to the Fairbridge Society and caused tension between the society and the Canadian officials. The firm restrictions placed by the Canadian Immigration Department may have been the reason why few orphans were sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and instead, children were recruited from families, as 95 percent of the 329 children sent to this farm school were not orphans.

  As mentioned earlier, this last wave of British child migration to Canada was allowed after the 1929 ban on bringing in unaccompanied children under the age of fourteen in part because the Fairbridge Society promised the Canadian government that they would be responsible for the children they brought into Canada until they reached twenty-one years of age. When Fairbridge children reached the age of sixteen, they were usually placed out to work on local B.C. farms for the boys and in homes in Victoria and Vancouver for the girls. The job placements were organized by the Fairbridge Farm School. The children placed to work from the age of sixteen to twenty-one had half their wages taken from them and kept by the Fairbridge Society. The children were told that this would give them a nest egg to start their independent lives. However, I have only heard of one person who had her money returned; many never saw a penny of their savings, including Marjorie.