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Home Children Meet to Remember Mrs. Bell’s husband, William, now 83, has scars of his own. While just four years old and en route to Canada from a British orphanage in the early 1920s, he had boiling water accidentally spilled over his feet. The recollections sound like a heartbreaking sequel to Oliver Twist. But the real-life British children in this story endured far more than hardscrabble lives on the streets or in orphanages. For 100 years they were ripped from British orphanages, workhouses, or poverty-stricken streets and shipped to Canada, often enduring abuse from the farmers who used them as cheap or free labour. In all, 100,000 of the so-called “home children” were shipped to Canada from Britain from 1869-1948. The boys were used as farm labourers; the girls as domestic help. Many lost forever all links to their own heritage. For the past 10 years, David Lorente of Renfrew, Ont., has been trying to change that, helping the home children find birth and family records and erase the stigma many have felt their entire lives. Mr. Lorente has organized a reunion for them and their descendants this Saturday at Halifax’s Pier 21. His own father was a home child, running away from one Ontario farm when the owner prodded him with a pitchfork and threatened to kill him. But like many home children, seared by abuse and the taunts of Canadians who considered them inferior beings, he rarely talked about his experiences. The pain, says Mr. Lorente, still runs deep for those sent over — usually between the ages of six and 14, and their relatives. It can be heard in the voice of Charlotte Bell of Bible Hill, whose father was shipped to Nova Scotia from a Birmingham orphanage or “home” when he was just 12. He’d been there because his parents were too poor to take care of him. “He didn’t have a good life,” she says, choking up as she recalls what her father told her about his experiences on a Brookfield farm. “He was a slave on a farm. He would walk about 15 miles in his bare feet with a flock of sheep to a slaughterhouse, and if he wasn’t back at a certain time, he was whipped and he went to his grave with lash marks on his back.” Mrs. Bell learned later that her own husband, 83-year-old William Bell, had been a home child — also sent here from a Birmingham orphanage when he was just four years old. A nurse accidentally spilled boiling water on his feet during the eight-day boat trip and he then faced the trauma of leaving the other orphanage children who'd become like family. A day after arriving at Pier 21, the children were sent by train to their new homes. “Naturally I got to crying,” he says, recalling getting off at Oxford Junction to meet his new parents. “All the kids waving out the window and I was one of the ones getting off.” But the family always treated him kindly, as one of their own. “I was one of the lucky ones,” he says. Very lucky, according to Mr. Lorente, who says 67 per cent of the home children were either beaten, emotionally abused or raped. Still, Mr. Bell always wondered about his parents and whether he had any siblings. His wife and other family members tried to get records from the Canadian and British governments for years, but Mrs. Bell says they were blocked at every turn. But her daughter-in-law recently uncovered a wealth of long-hidden information, including that he had a half-sister who died young. He was given up because his mother was too poor to care for him. Records from Middlemore orphanage in Birmingham also reveal she tried to get him back, even writing her son a letter when he was nine. Mr. Bell never received it and his wife thinks that’s because it was never sent. “I think the authorities kept it . . . because there was a lot of underhanded work going on.” Halifax artist Suzanne Caines — whose artistic commemoration of her great-grandmother's life will be part of the reunion — says many of the children were just taken off the streets or shipped from orphanages without their parents’ knowledge. That happened to her great-grandmother who once had all her hair shaved off as punishment for trying to escape from a Nova Scotia family. She’d originally been placed in an orphanage when her mother was in hospital, but was sent to Canada without her parents’ permission. Mr. Lorente says two thirds of the children weren’t orphans at all. But many were very poor and, by law, those found wandering the streets were supposed to be taken in and fed in exchange for labour at British workhouses. He says British authorities sent the children away to save the cost of their care. Canada welcomed the cheap farm labour and kicked in two pounds sterling per child to the agencies who sent them over. Mr. Lorente, who has organized similar reunions across Canada, isn’t sure how many people will attend Saturday's event. But he hopes such events will help people talk openly about their own past and erase the childhood stigma imposed on them just for being poor. “I honestly feel that they didn't talk because they wanted to preserve what dignity they had left and they didn’t want their families to suffer the same thing.” [ARTICLES] |