Bagnell - The little immigrants the orphans who came to Canada

THE LITTLE IMMIGRANTS

The Orphans
Who Came to Canada

New Edition

Kenneth Bagnell

Copyright Kenneth Bagnell, 2001

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Design: Jennifer Scott

Printer: AGMV Marquis

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data

Bagnell, Kenneth, 1934

The little immigrants : the orphans who came to Canada

New ed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 1-55022-370-5

1. Orphans--Canada--History. 2. Immigrant children--Canada--History. 3. Home children (Canadian immigrants) 4. Canada--Emigration and immigration--History. 5. Great Britain--Emigration and immigration--History. 6. British--Canada--History. I. Title.

1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

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THE LITTLE IMMIGRANTS

by Roy MacLaren

In 1980 Kenneth Bagnell wrote a remarkable book. The Little Immigrants was both a lively and a reliable account of the history of the migration of British children to Canada and elsewhere in the Empire. Child migration, promoted by the pioneering Dr. Barnardo and by a variety of church groups, was in the 1920s discouraged and finally terminated by the British Government, following mounting misgivings about the reported abuse and exploitation of children on the farms and in the workshops of the Empire. As recently as the year 2000, a committee of the British House of Commons attempted to assess the impact on the children of their forced migration as surplus population. In part, they uncovered and recorded, as Kenneth Bagnell had done already, a not very pretty story.

Yet for some little immigrants, possibly a majority, their childhood experiences were no worse and in many instances better than in the loveless and brutal slums of London, Liverpool or Glasgow from whence they came. Some eventually achieved prosperity and distinction in Canada, in turn raising themselves families in which the loving home life that they themselves had seldom or never experienced made possible the contributions of their descendants to the development of Canada. That is the story that Kenneth Bagnell tells so well, making real and moving the experiences of individuals who otherwise are recorded only in government documents as mere statistics. His account of the home children is an important element in our social history, leaving us all in his debt.

The Hon. Roy MacLaren, P.C., served as a federal cabinet minister in the governments of prime ministers Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien and in 1996, was appointed Canadas High Commissioner to Great Britain. He is the author of several books including Canadians Behind Enemy Lines, 19351945.

To the men and women
who were once the children.

Now and then over the past twenty years and more Ive been asked why I chose to write the book now reissued between the covers you hold in your hands. My answer is the same as one a celebrated artist once gave me about why he paints this or that subject: Because it spoke to me. As with a painter so with a writer at least sometimes. I have no personal connection to child emigration; I am not a descendant of anyone who was part of this long, painful chapter of Canadas past. But, in the late sixties, it spoke to me. The subject formed a landscape that appealed deeply its people, its events. I mentioned the idea of doing a book to a friend, a respected journalist and an astute man, but his reply was only mildly encouraging. It would be a worthwhile contribution, he said, but he couldnt see much public appeal. I still remember him as astute but he showed that astute men can be wrong.

The Little Immigrants was a surprising success. It was, as this new book jacket attests, greeted by almost universally favorable reviews. This brought personal pleasure a pleasure I see no harm in. A writer requires encouragement. As John Kenneth Galbraith, a more accomplished writer than I, wrote a few years ago: Any author who tells you that he doesnt pay attention to his reviews is either James Joyce or a consumate and unconvincing liar. In any case, the reviews, and some other facts I refer to shortly, had more important benefit. They assisted the book to various bestseller lists where it remained for roughly a year. Between autumn 1980 and spring 1981, it was reprinted eight times.

I want to say early in this introduction how grateful I am for the generous words of a distinguished Canadian, The Hon. Roy MacLaren, which accompany this new introduction. Mr. MacLaren is himself the author of several books, and after a notable career served with distinction as Canadas High Commissioner to the land in which the child immigrants were born. Im honored by his good opinion of The Little Immigrants.

A book is never all one persons doing. Especially this one. Hundreds of people help a book to life and even more in the case of The Little Immigrants. The most obvious people are the many men and women, from almost every province, most of whom have since died, who spent many hours with me in the late 1970s when I was doing my research, sharing their experiences as child immigrants. Further, the body of literature by scholars on the subject of both child emigration and child development, in which I read widely, and gratefully attest to in the original foreword, informed much of my perspective. Mary Rutherford, who was my researcher on the book, as she has been on many of my later projects, is one of Canadas finest editorial researchers; she was fundamental to any success the book has had. My editors of those years, Douglas Gibson and Jan Walter, then of Macmillan Canada, were taken with the idea and were a strong and supporting presence throughout. Now, over 20 years later, I owe a debt to Beth Bruder and Tony Hawke of Dundurn Press for their gracious approach to me and their decision to release this new edition.