Margaret Humphreys, CBE,AO (born 1944) is a British social worker and author from Nottingham, England. She worked for Nottinghamshire County Council operating around Radford, Nottingham and Hyson Green in child protection and adoption services. In 1986, she received a letter from a woman in Australia who, believing she was an orphan, was looking to locate her birth certificate so she could get married.[1]
In 1987, she investigated and brought to public attention the British government programme of Home Children. This involved forcibly relocating poor British children to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the former Rhodesia, and other parts of the Commonwealth of Nations[2] often without their parents' knowledge. Children were often told their parents had died, and parents were told their children had been placed for adoption elsewhere in the UK. According to Humphreys, up to 150,000 children are believed to have been resettled under the scheme,[3] some as young as three,[2] about 7,000 of whom were sent to Australia.[4]
Saving money was one of the motives behind this policy. The children were allegedly deported because it was cheaper to care for them overseas. It cost an estimated £5 per day to keep a child on welfare in a British institution, but only 10% of that, ten shillings, in an Australian one.[4]
Child Migrants Trust
Humphreys' investigations led to the exposure of the child migration scheme in two major articles by Annabel Ferriman in The Observer newspaper in July 1987 and to the establishment of the Child Migrants Trust, initially financed by Nottinghamshire County Council, her employer, and later by the British and Australian governments, and constituted as a registered charity under English law.[5] The Trust was later established as an incorporated body to comply with Australian regulations and opened offices in Melbourne and Perth.
The primary aims of the Trust are to enable former British child migrants to reclaim their personal identity and reunite them with their parents and relatives.[6] A key feature of the work of the Child Migrants Trust has been a sustained attempt via the mass media to develop public awareness of this previously obscure chapter in the social history of all the countries concerned. Humphreys took part in the British television documentary The Lost Children of the Empire screened in 1989 and later broadcast in Australia. A popular history book with the same title was published to coincide with the documentary. Its description of child migration policy begins with Britain's early involvement which started in the 17th century when children were sent from London to boost the population of Virginia—the first British outpost in America. Child migration continued over the next 350 years across three continents, including North America and Africa, ending in Australia in 1970.
Christian Brothers
In 1998, a British Parliamentary Select Committee began an inquiry into child migration schemes, and published a report in August that year which criticized the policy in general, and particularly certain Roman Catholic institutions in Western Australia and Queensland such as the Christian Brothers where child migrants were housed and allegedly abused. The Western Australian Legislative Assembly passed a motion on 13 August 1998 apologizing to former child migrants.[7]
Australian affairs
In 2007, both the Queensland and Western Australia governments announced redress schemes for those who as children were abused while in State care. These schemes allow former British child migrants to apply for financial compensation if they do not wish to or cannot pursue civil litigation claims against the State.
Honours and recognition
Humphreys was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in March 1993 and an honorary Master of Arts in 1996 by Nottingham Trent University in recognition of her work. She was named a Paul Harris Fellow in 1997 by the Rotary Foundation of Rotary International "in appreciation of tangible and significant assistance given for the furtherance of better understanding and friendly relations among peoples of the world".[8] On 30 May 1998 an honorary master's degree was awarded to Humphreys by the Open University as an "ambassador both for Nottinghamshire and for Britain". More recently, in December 2011, Humphreys was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by the University of Nottingham.
Both Kevin Rudd and Gordon Brown, the respective Prime Ministers of Australia and Britain, in their public apologies in 2009 and 2010, thanked Humphreys for her campaigning and for her contribution to the cause of UK child migrants and their families. [9]
On 10 April 2019, Humphreys was made an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) "for distinguished service to the community, particularly to former child migrants".[11]
Book and film
Empty Cradles, Humphreys' account of the formation and early struggles of the Child Migrants Trust, was published by Corgi in 1994.[3] Its sales of over 75,000 copies helped to fund the work of the Trust at a critical time when British government grants had been stopped. Empty Cradles has been dramatised as the 2011 feature film Oranges and Sunshine, a 2010 British-Australian drama film co-production directed by Jim Loach with the leading roles played by Emily Watson as Margaret and Hugo Weaving and David Wenham as two former British child migrants.
Margaret Susan Cheshire, Baroness Ryder of Warsaw, Baroness Cheshire,, commonly known as Sue Ryder, was a British volunteer with Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, and a member of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, who afterwards established charitable organisations, notably the Sue Ryder Foundation.
Since 1945, immigration to the United Kingdom, controlled by British immigration law and to an extent by British nationality law, has been significant, in particular from the Republic of Ireland and from the former British Empire, especially India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, the Caribbean, South Africa, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and Hong Kong. Since the accession of the UK to the European Communities in the 1970s and the creation of the EU in the early 1990s, immigrants relocated from member states of the European Union, exercising one of the European Union's Four Freedoms. In 2021, since Brexit came into effect, previous EU citizenship's right to newly move to and reside in the UK on a permanent basis does not apply anymore. A smaller number have come as asylum seekers seeking protection as refugees under the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention.
Home Children was the child migration scheme founded by Annie MacPherson in 1869, under which more than 100,000 children were sent from the United Kingdom to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa. The programme was largely discontinued in the 1930s but not entirely terminated until the 1970s.
Bindoon is a town 84 kilometres (52 mi) from Perth city on the Great Northern Highway within the Shire of Chittering. The name Bindoon is thought to be Aboriginal in origin and to mean "place where the yams grow". The name has been in use in the area since 1843 when an early settler, William Brockman, named the property he had surveyed as Bindoon. The townsite was gazetted in 1953.
Kingsley Ogilvie Fairbridge was the founder of a child emigration scheme from Britain to its colonies and the Fairbridge Schools. His life work was the founding of the "Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies", which was afterwards incorporated as the "Child Emigration Society" and ultimately the "Fairbridge Society".
Brother Paul Francis Keaney, MBE, ISO was an Irish-born Australian Catholic educator. He was accused of abusing the children under his care.
Monsignor George Michael Crennan AO OBE an Australian Catholic cleric, was known for his service as Director of the Federal Catholic Immigration Office in Australia from 1949 until 1995.
Michael Robotham is an Australian crime fiction writer who has twice won the CWA Gold Dagger award for best novel and twice been shortlisted for the Edgar Award for best novel. His eldest child is Alexandra Hope Robotham, professionally known as Alex Hope, an Australian producer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist.
Child migration or "children in migration or mobility" is the movement of people ages 3–18 within or across political borders, with or without their parents or a legal guardian, to another country or region. They may travel with or without legal travel documents. They may arrive to the destination country as refugees, asylum seekers, or economic migrants.
Forgotten Australians or care leavers are terms referring to the estimated 500,000 children who experienced care in institutions or outside a home setting in Australia during the 20th century. The Australian Senate committee used the term in the title of its report which resulted from its 2003–2004 "Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care", which looked primarily at those affected children who were not covered by the 1997 Bringing Them Home report, which focused on Aboriginal children, and the 2001 report Lost Innocents: Righting the Record which reported on an inquiry into child migrants.
Fairbridge, Western Australia is a former farm school near Pinjarra in Southwest Western Australia. It is now used predominantly for education, school and community camps and tourism purposes. It is also home to Fairbridge College, a curriculum and reengagement secondary school.
Oranges and Sunshine is a 2010 biographical drama film directed by Jim Loach, in his directorial debut, with a screenplay by Rona Munro, based on the 1994 book Empty Cradles by Margaret Humphreys. The film stars Emily Watson, Hugo Weaving and David Wenham.
The Leaving of Liverpool is a 1992 television drama, an Australian–British co-production between the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The series was about the Home Children, the migration scheme which saw over 100,000 British children sent to Commonwealth realms such as Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa.
Home-based care, which includes foster care, is provided to children who are in need of care and protection. Children and young people are provided with alternative accommodation while they are unable to live with their parents. As well as foster care, this can include placements with relatives or kin, and residential care. In most cases, children in home-based care are also on a care and protection order.
The Tait Memorial Trust (TMT) is a charitable foundation first established in the United Kingdom. The TMT was founded by Isla Baring OAM in memory of her father, Sir Frank Tait and his brothers, who played an important part in the establishment of theatre and the performing arts in Australia. Sir Frank, the youngest of the Tait brothers, carried the firm J. C. Williamson's into its most successful years dominated by the Sutherland-Williamson opera company in 1965 which brought Joan Sutherland back to her homeland.
The Long Journey Home is an Australian TV documentary in which former child migrants relate their generally unhappy experiences as inmates of a Fairbridge school establishment at Molong, New South Wales. The script is largely based on an autobiographical book by David Hill, published in 2007. The documentary first went to air on ABC Television in November 2009, with Hill as one of the presenters. It included his report of allegations made by three former residents that the former distinguished governor-general Sir William Slim had sexually assaulted them and other young boys during visits to the Fairbridge farms.
June Yvonne Mendoza, AO, OBE, RP, ROI, HonSWA was an Australian portrait painter, working mainly in oil.
The Windrush scandal was a British political scandal that began in 2018 concerning people who were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and in at least 83 cases wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office. Many of those affected had been born British subjects and had arrived in the UK before 1973, particularly from Caribbean countries, as members of the "Windrush generation".
Amberdale children's home was a council run home in Stapleford in Nottinghamshire, England, where staff committed serious sexual offences against girls and boys in the 1980s. Some staff received significant prison sentences.
Paulette Wilson was a British immigrant rights activist who fought her own deportation to Jamaica and brought media attention to the human rights violations of the Windrush scandal.
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