Lost Children of the Empire by Philip Bean Joy Melville

Author:Philip Bean, Joy Melville [Philip Bean, Joy Melville]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General
ISBN: 9781351171991
Google: 9EIiEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-03-14T05:05:02+00:00

George Wilkins went on to become a millionaire but says fiercely that he did it in spite of Fairbridge, rather than because of it.

Many agencies, including Fairbridge, arranged that children should have a proportion of their wages sent to the agency and kept until they were twenty-one, when they could reclaim this lump sum. Inevitably, however, particularly with the early Canadian migrants, the children lost touch and failed to do so. As one woman, who went to Fairbridge Farm School in Vancouver Island, said, “Half your wages would go back to the school and it was put into a bank account for you until you were twenty-one. I got mine, but an awful lot of the children say they did not and I suppose it was because they did not write for it. The auditors that were handling our books, they say it is now all just dusty files. That money is lost, but where is the interest? I know there is a lot of bitterness from some of the kids.”

This same farm school was financially aided by people in Britain and Canadian businessmen. When the property and land were sold, the money went back to the society in England with an “understanding” the money would go towards setting up a scholarship for the Fairbridge children’s children, if they needed help. But nothing happened. As one Old Fairbridgean said, “If the sale of the land is actually rightfully ours, what is the hesitation about getting it back to us?”

The First World War brought child migration to a temporary halt and interrupted Fairbridge’s plans to develop more farm schools. He fell out with the Australian government, who were becoming less and less keen on the idea and, with the contributions of his Oxford friends drying up, it looked at one stage as if the project would close. An annual report of the Fairbridge Society said:

The land too had proved disappointing. Local knowledge is needed to enable one to select wisely and lacking that knowledge he had established himself on unsuitable country.

But due to Fairbridge’s eloquence, the demand for migrants to Australia after the First World War and the help of grants, the project survived and for a time even prospered. Kingsley Fairbridge died on 19 July 1924. A note at the end of his autobiography says:

Kingsley’s health began to fail. He lived however to see part of his dream come true. He saw 200 children from many a dark and dreary back street, brimful of happiness, enjoying the ever varied teeming interests of a farm. He saw his old boys returning, men now, and some of them owning their own land: they one and all said “We thank you”.

One and all? Not perhaps Violet Davis, who lost the sight of one eye due to a careless accident with ether in the school “hospital”. Or her husband Francis who on leaving Pinjarra, was sent by Fairbridge to Bruce Rock, some 200 miles east of Perth, to be a farm hand, where the

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