Pamela would spend the next two years at the Sisters of Mercy Goodwood Orphanage, an imposing redbrick Catholic institution, home to about children. She was one of as many as , British children to be sent overseas to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries as child migrants between and Run by a partnership of charities, churches and governments, the schemes were sold as an opportunity for a better life for children from impoverished backgrounds and broken homes.
In reality, an isolated and brutal childhood awaited many of them. Pamela was one of an estimated 7, children to go to Australia, some as young as four. They were often given the false status of "orphans" to simplify proceedings - and most never saw their homes, or their families again.
This was not something which happened under the radar - the vast majority of children were sent to Australia with government funding. Upon arrival at Goodwood, all the children's personal mementos - photographs, letters, toys - were taken from them and they were left with just a Bible. Everyone was terrified of the Reverend Mother, even the other nuns, says Pamela. She recalls the big strap the nun had around her waist which her rosaries would hang from.
When she arrived, Pamela remembers defiantly shouting out "God Bless England! Eventually, the nun retired and was replaced with someone much kinder and more progressive, according to Pamela. Daily life at Goodwood consisted of early prayers, chores and then school, followed by more chores, prayers and an early bedtime of 6pm. A few hours a day would be spent making the strings butchers use to hang their meat.
Child labour helped schemes like the one at Goodwood to be financially viable, according to Lynch. Pamela also remembers working in the laundry room and would spend school holidays living with a family and being worked hard throughout her stay. In , Laurie Humphreys, a year-old boy living in an orphanage in Southampton, was sent to a 'better life' in Australia under the Child Migrants Programme, along with hundreds of other children.
In many cases they were taught only farm work, and suffered cruelty and hardship - including physical, psychological and sexual abuse. Recently, the Australian prime minister made a belated apology to the former child migrants. Here, Laurie, now 76, tells his story. My mother died when I was four and my father, on the advice of a priest, put me into an orphanage in Southampton. Pretty much all of us said yes, even though we didn't even know where it was.
Soon afterwards, a Christian Brother came and spoke to us about this faraway land where the sun shone 14 hours a day and where we would be able to ride horses to school. He described it as 'a land of milk and honey'. I was 13 years old and it sounded like paradise. I was selected to go, along with a couple of other boys, and we were given a new set of clothes.
We disembarked ready for our new life. I was classified as 'a war orphan', and given to understand that my father was dead. About 20 of us were taken to Boys Town, a home for youngsters at Bindoon, about 60 miles away. It was quite a shock. For a start, it was such a barren place in contrast to the green fields of England and there were hardly any roads. We were immediately put to work.
I learnt how to milk a cow within a week, and then we began constructing a new building. By the time I was 14, I was driving a truck.
We'd work, sleep and eat. That was it. And there wasn't much in the way of schooling. I'd always been good at school in England but it pretty much ended overnight. A lot of the boys at Bindoon never learnt how to read or write.
Foodwise, we'd get crushed wheat or porridge for breakfast, followed by bread in dripping. The rest of the meals were similarly plain: we seemed to subsist on a diet of swedes and turnips. They told us it was paradise, but we got the shock of our lives. You just worked, slept and ate - that was it. And then there was the horrific abuse.
And then there was the abuse. The Christian Brothers used to walk around with a thick 18in leather strap hanging from the waist of their long, black outfits, and they'd give you a wallop at the slightest opportunity. They'd hit you wherever they could - be it on the backside or sole of the foot - and boy, did it hurt. Once I was on the receiving end of a real hiding from one of them. He was giving a younger lad a hard time and I must have said something under my breath.
If we do not supply from our own stock, we are leaving ourselves all the more exposed to the menace of the teeming millions of our neighbouring Asiatic races.
We have in the past featured that it is an advantage to Australia to have immigrants of good sound British stock. If they are neither good nor sound we must modify our statements and lose one of our most profitable items of propaganda. Britain is the only country in the world with a sustained history of child migration. Only Britain has used child migration as a key part of its child care strategy over four centuries rather than as a last resort during times of war or civil unrest.
The reality of this policy was to remove children, some as young as three years old from their mothers and fathers, from all that was familiar to them, and to ship them thousands of miles away from their home country to institutions in distant lands within the Commonwealth.
Many of these children were removed without their parents' knowledge or consent. The origins of the scheme go back to when a hundred children were sent from London to Virginia which is now one of the United States of America.
The final party arrived in Australia in In the post-war era, approximately 3, children were shipped to Australia while New Zealand, Rhodesia and Canada received a combined total of about 1, children. Governments lack precise figures about the numbers of children sent by the United Kingdom.
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