by Abrams, Fran
Jerry, Burt confessed, was the only child murderer he had met during his researches. But he felt that in many ways his case, though extreme, could illustrate the common causes of child crime. The little lad had been the product of a chance encounter between his mother, then a chambermaid, and ‘a quiet gentleman, well connected and seemingly well-to-do’, who had been passing through and who had subsequently vanished without trace. Jerry’s Welsh mother was ‘in temperament somewhat dull and erratic’. She now worked as a packer in a warehouse and shared the subterranean bedsit room with Jerry and with her own elderly mother, who doted on the boy.
A fatal interplay between defective nature and inadequate nurture had been Jerry’s undoing, Burt explained. Jerry was ‘a weak, backward and excitable boy – just the type of youngster likely to dive into the first mischief that offered’. But he could only have come to commit such an appalling crime, he went on, because of the conditions in which he was placed – a lax, foolish grandmother, a school too far away from home and the daily absence of his mother had all played their parts.
At six, Jerry had fractured his skull while climbing on to a moving lorry. After a long spell away from school, first in hospital and later in a convalescent home, he had failed to settle, and had begun truanting – hanging around the station, which was near his home, as well as the nearby Regent’s Canal. And it was during one of these illicit fishing trips that he had committed his crime. On a summer evening, he had been at the canal with two other little truants, one of whom had a little toy aeroplane. Jerry, coveting the toy, demanded he be given it. The other boy refused.
‘Jerry, still cool and self-contained, announced that unless he “had that airyplane” he would “drahnd” the owner. The owner merely scoffed and pulled a face. So Jerry carried out his threat,’ Burt reported. ‘With a little skilful footwork, he threw the other off his balance; tipped him backwards into the water, well knowing (so he said) that “the water would choke him”; kicked away the child’s fingers as he clutched the bank; and then watched him, with jibes and taunts, while his body went under.’
The crime initially went undetected. At the inquest, Jerry – still apparently emotionless in the face of his friend’s death – maintained that the boy had fallen backwards into the canal. Indeed, he was congratulated by the coroner on his ultimately vain efforts to save his friend. Yet afterwards, his crime began to find him out: his behaviour became increasingly erratic – the sign, Burt suggested, of a guilty conscience. ‘There were wild outbursts of inexplicable passion, half terror and half temper, such as in an adult would have been called hysteria or mild mania.’ Burt was called in, and quickly obtained a full confession. Jerry had a longstanding resentment of the other boy, and had more than once threatened to ‘take him to the cut and shove him in’.
The causes of Jerry’s crime, Burt concluded, were as much social as they were congenital: ‘Jerry, dimly conscious of a shadow on his birth, slowly framing to himself a notion of some social grievance, had grown fiercely resentful of the slurs that the neighbours cast upon his parentage. The very play-fellow, whose life he took, was wont to taunt him with an ugly name. This longstanding provocation, more than any passing whim for a twopenny toy, was the ulterior motive, though doubtless a half-unconscious motive, for his sudden violence.’ Psychoanalysis, Burt thought, would have unearthed a deeper instinctive cause of Jerry’s violent reaction to these slurs, and would also have cast light on how the boy’s natural development had been twisted by his unfortunate circumstances.
The psychologist having detected the crime, the forces of the law might have been expected to take over. But what happened next was, to the modern eye, one of the most striking parts of the story. Burt made no mention at all of any police involvement in the case. His solution was not punishment, but treatment: ‘The new device of mental testing, and particularly the measurement of intelligence, have entirely revolutionised the old methods of studying the criminal,’ he wrote. Indeed, had the father of the dead boy not learned the truth and begun threatening both Jerry and his mother, he might have remained in the tenement basement where he had spent his early years. Even then, nothing seems to have happened, except that with Burt’s help Jerry was removed to ‘another home’ outside London, presumably in the hope that immersion in a more desirable social setting would effect a cure for his criminal nature.
When the book was published in 1925, Burt wrote in its introductory section that Jerry had now been in three such ‘homes’, and that ‘there evidently remains a great deal more that has yet to be learnt about his capabilities for good and evil’. It seems extraordinary, looking at this case now, that a child murderer should have gone unpunished in this way. Extraordinary, indeed, not just in the light of modern sensibilities but also in the light of the fact that the Victorians seemingly made little distinction between a child in the dock and an adult in the dock – in the late nineteenth century, the newspapers had often reported that a child had been punished for some minor offence by imprisonment or deportation.
Could Burt have made the whole story up? If it were true, then certainly it never made the papers. They did report several cases of drowning in the Regent’s Canal in the early 1920s – indeed, at one point there was such a spate that the coroner issued a warning that it was dangerous for children to play near the water. Yet none quite fitted the tale the psychologist told. And, of course, Burt was later accused of fabricating research evidence. So it is indeed possible that the tale of little ‘Jerry’ was a fiction, or a half-truth.
Yet the fact that an eminent psychologist could report such an occurrence without attracting comment was surely indicative of something significant about attitudes at the time. If Burt did make it up, he was at least confident that he would not be discovered. No one, in any of the numerous reviews of the book – most of which recounted the story of Jerry’s crime – raised the question. Who was Jerry? Why had the grieving family of his dead friend not had justice? And why had the boy not been punished?
The Spectator commented in its review of the book that it was hard, in these more liberal times, to imagine the way child criminals had been treated in the past: ‘It is difficult to realise that less than a century ago children were liable to death or transportation for petty offences, and that there is, for instance, a case on record of a boy of eight who was convicted of arson “with malice, revenge, craft and cunning” . . . and duly hanged. Yet until the Childrens Act of 1908 [which established juvenile courts], several thousand children under the age of sixteen were annually consigned to prison.’ Conversely, the Daily News did reflect that the ‘common sense school’ might have had Jerry flogged. But ‘in the case of Jerry the psychologists won. He has been sent to three homes . . . and the experiences he has been through and the ways he has met them have been helpful both in forming his character and in shedding new light on his inner mental needs. It is hoped that in the end he may be trusted to go back to his own mother and behave like a normal schoolboy.’
Whatever the truth about Jerry, Burt certainly was in the habit of sending young ‘delinquents’ out of London – rather like the Swiss rest cure, to places where the air was more pure – to live with families which, he hoped, might be able to cure them. In his personal papers,19 there was a letter from a woman in Melton Mowbray who had taken some of them in, apparently with little success: ‘I am sorry to say that the boys have been behaving most disgracefully what with smashing doors, windows, crockery etc. We don’t know what to do about it.’
There is, too, a sense that Burt was keeping a wary eye on the religious angle to this debate. ‘The psychologist, the teacher, the harassed parent, know too well that moral perfection is no innate gift, but a hard and difficult acquirement,’ he wrote. Darwin’s notions of heredity were still very controversial, and the idea of ‘original sin’ had certainly not been completely banished. Burt strived, it seems, to tread a fine line between the belief that criminality could be innate and the conflicting notion that it could be learn
ed, and unlearned.
The mobile child
Not every unwanted child was a bad child, of course. There was concern, too, about whether the children growing up in Britain were fit for purpose. And so in this age of fear about the future of the Empire, a neat solution came to mind. If Britain wanted quality children, and the Empire wanted just about any children it could get, why not export the quantity, and hang on to the quality?
The growth of child migration between the wars was not quite so simply conceived, of course. But the movement to send parentless or abandoned children to grow up in the colonies did mark the advent of an era in which children would become increasingly geographically mobile, for various reasons. In the 1930s, children would arrive unaccompanied from Spain, fleeing the civil war, and from Germany and central Europe – some of them via the Kindertransport. During the early part of World War Two, they would be shipped across the Atlantic, parentless, to safety in Canada and the United States, as well as to New Zealand.
The transportation of children to Canada and the United States had actually begun in the 1870s, driven by the energies of two women called Maria Rye and Annie Macpherson. Maria Rye, having visited Canada in 1868, had concluded that its inhabitants were desperately short of farm labour and domestic servants. Meanwhile, the slums of Liverpool, Manchester and London were overflowing with what she described as ‘gutter children’. She set up two houses, one at Niagara and one in Peckham, south London. Under her command, children would be shipped from one to the other, then farmed out to families on their arrival.20 Rye’s efforts were soon supplemented by those of Annie Macpherson, a Scottish evangelist who had opened a ‘Home of Industry’ in the East End of London, and who began taking parties of children to Canada in 1870. By the outbreak of World War One, the numbers being sent had reached around 80,000 a year. Thomas Barnardo also became involved, and sponsored the migration of 20,000 children to Canada by 1930.
But as so often happened, what started out as charitable exercises became government operations as the state gradually extended its reach into the realm of family life. In 1923, an Empire Settlement Act was passed, allowing the state to fund the migration of children via an Overseas Settlement Board. This funding went largely to Kingsley Fairbridge, who had devised a new method of settling the children into the colonies – the farm school. Fairbridge, who would die just a year later in 1924 of a lymphatic tumour at the age of thirty-nine, had by then set up his first such school at Pinjarra, Western Australia. Fairbridge had a dream: to fill the empty lands of the Empire with farmers.21 Born in South Africa, he had visited England in 1903 and had been struck by how overpopulated it seemed. His theory was that town-dwellers would adapt much more quickly if they were transplanted young: ‘Eight years’ schooling would barely give a man a glimpse of the possibilities which lie before a farmer,’ he wrote. ‘This will not be charity, it will be an imperial investment.’
In the ensuing years, further farm schools would be established in two other locations within Australia, and the Roman Catholic church would also begin organizing migrations there too. Few of the children who were ‘migrated’ in this way between the wars were given any say at all in what happened to them. In many ways the scheme devised in the 1920s was a throwback to the Victorian days when the migrations of children had begun. And in fact the lives these children lived in the slums of British cities were little changed from those of their grandparents.
One of them was Flo Brown, who was put into a Barnardo’s home with an older half-sister, Gwynneth, and a younger half-brother, Joe, by her stepfather after the death of their mother. Their family’s tale was a familiar one of a cycle of poverty and dislocation. Flo’s mother had also been raised in a home, in Liverpool, and had lost two husbands in the space of four years, one in a mine accident and the other in a factory explosion. Her third husband was a womanizer, a drinker and an abuser: ‘He hit Gwynneth often, as well as my mother, and physical violence was not the only abuse he subjected my sister to.’22 In 1925, after the birth of her fourth child, Flo’s mother dropped dead during a violent argument with her husband. Her baby died later the same day of ‘unsuitable feeding – infantile asthenia’, meaning that it faded away for lack of nutrients. Later, Flo would discover that her stepfather, too, had been a Barnardo’s boy. Her little brother, Joe, had rickets, and was separated from his sisters – something that never ceased to distress Flo: ‘The rest of my life was to be dominated by this need to find Joey. I always knew where Gwynneth was but never Joey.’23
Flo was taken to Barnardo’s, and spent more than a year at a home in London before setting sail for Australia with no joy at all in her heart. The voyage was presented as ‘an exciting adventure’, she said, but she felt only misery at the prospect: ‘Apparently I cried for five days, so my guide lieutenant told me in a letter years later, and if I had cried for one more day they were going to put me off the ship and send me back.’24
They arrived at Fremantle on 28 May 1928, and settled into a home which Flo described as being not inhumane, but certainly harsh: the children’s daily routine was ruled by a bugle and was militaristic in style. Her work included dusting and polishing, sweeping and scrubbing benches. Boys who transgressed – stealing fruit from the orchard, forgetting to do their work – were publicly thrashed in the dining hall.
Kingsley Fairbridge and his ilk had imagined they were giving slum children a fresh start or a clean slate. They were wrong, according to Flo. Even on the other side of the world, children such as her were second-class citizens. She had hoped to become a kindergarten teacher, but was told bluntly that she did not have the intelligence of the average Australian: ‘Those words sank so deeply into my being that I was to be well into my fifties before I began to challenge the untruth and the handicap those words laid on me. I was offered no extra tuition, no alternative education. I was truly brought down a peg or two.’25 Flo eventually found her brother, Joey, in 1991, living in Warrington. Her sister, Gwynneth, returned to Liverpool, where she married happily and had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Some of these migrant children did thrive, but few ever really managed to shake off their past. John Lane, who had been abandoned by his unmarried mother and then happily fostered to a family in the Cotswolds until the age of ten, wrote later that he always felt there was a void in his life, even though in his later years he was united with a family of half-brothers and sisters he had never known existed: ‘Despite my apparent success, I found that at seventy years of age, the absence of a childhood relationship with any of them had left me with distinct feeling of remoteness – of a void in my subconscious like a deep well which yields no water.’ His puzzlement at having been wrenched from the bosom of foster-parents whom he regarded as his real family never left him, he wrote.26
There were some positive experiences among the misery. But already there were concerns about the conditions in which these migrant children had to live – in 1924, the Overseas Settlement Board had sent Margaret Bondfield, MP, to Canada to investigate conditions there, and by the mid-1930s the clamour for change was such that the migration, shut down during World War Two, would take place only on a much smaller scale after 1945. In a sense, it was this new awareness of potential abuse, rather than the abuse itself, that was striking about attitudes to migration during this period. This was a movement that had gone on for years with little adverse comment. But now children were beginning to be seen as individuals, with needs. Soon, it would no longer be acceptable for the adult world to simply move them around like pieces on a chessboard. Soon, the children would have to be consulted.
The educational angle
Incrementally, all this new thinking was beginning to impact on the education system. For most children, the change would be imperceptible. But for a few, in particular the difficult, the socially awkward and the ‘backward’, it would blow into their childhood like a gale. Over the next decade, an extraordinarily motley, eccentric and inspiring group of people would assemble u
nder the newly painted banner of ‘progressive’ education. For those who experienced their unique take on childhood, life would never be the same again.
Cyril Burt would certainly be regarded now as being among the more conservative proponents of this new style of education. ‘Child study has done much to foster individual and differential teaching – the adaptation of education to individual children or at least to groups and types of different individuals,’ he told an audience of educationists in 1927.27 ‘Already a better understanding of child nature has led to the substitution of “internal” for “external” discipline, and the predetermined routine demanded of entire classes is giving way to the growing recognition of the educational value of spontaneous efforts initiated by the individual, alone or in social co-operation with his fellows.’ The most advanced ‘educational experiments’, Burt said, were being conducted by Maria Montessori, whose method of educating children through ‘spontaneous self-development’ was creating interest in the United States, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, who had founded a school in Germany dedicated to teaching music through movement; and Homer Lane, who had started a community for juvenile delinquents in Dorset.
That Burt should have publicly praised Lane in this way in 1927, two years after his death, is significant because it indicated that those close to the heart of the education system were becoming aware of – and even approving of – this activity on its wilder fringes. Lane’s colony, the Little Commonwealth, in fact existed only from 1913 until 1918, when it was abruptly closed down after two of its female ‘citizens’ accused Lane of having ‘immoral relations’ with them.28 Lane, an American psychotherapist, was subsequently deported for failing to maintain his registration under the wartime ‘Aliens Act’. But his ideas lived on for many decades. Lane believed real education was about ‘the path of freedom instead of imposed authority, of self-expression instead of a pouring-in of knowledge, of evoking and exploiting the child’s natural sense of wonder and curiosity instead of a repetitious hammering home of dull facts’.29 In Dorset, he pioneered techniques such as group therapy, in particular with delinquents aged between thirteen and nineteen. Residents aged over fourteen became ‘citizens’, free to choose which of the colony’s ‘families’ they would live in. The atmosphere could hardly have been more different from the regime at institutions such as Barnardo’s and Fairbridge. Here, there was little or no adult discipline. The boys and girls developed their own ‘judicial machinery’ to deal with transgressions, and the adults studiously avoided giving the impression they were in charge. The ‘citizens’ drew wages for working to provide the commonwealth with food, clothing or recreation, and there was, Lane reported, little time left for them to take part in formal schooling.
