UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945-1970

Front matter

UK Child Migration Pr to Australia, 1945-1970 i A Study in Policy Failure

Gordon Lynch a

Series Editors George Rousseau University of Oxford Oxford, UK

Contents

‘A Serious Injustice to the Individual’: British Child Migration to Australia as Policy Failure

‘The Risk Involved is Inappreciable... and the Gain Exceptional’: Child Migration to Australia and Empire Settlement Policy, 1913-1939

The Inter-war Expansion of Child Migration to Australia Policy Consolidation and the Implications of Institutional Diversity

Chapter 1

‘A Serious Injustice to the Individual’: British Child Migration to Australia as Policy Failure

Recommendation 61. The emigration of deprived children should be subject to the condition that the receiving Government makes arrangements for their welfare and supervision comparable to those recommended in this report (para. 515).

—Curtis Committee report, 1946

Counsel to the Inquiry: Is there anything that you feel I have not covered in your evidence that you wanted to say?

Witness All: I just—growing up, when I went to Bindoon, you sent me to a bloody slave camp... That’s all I could call bloody Bindoon, a bloody slave camp. That’s what it was. They just sexually abused you, they did what they want to you, they never believed you... What’s the worst handicap they ve given me? Not allowing me to read and write, learn... And separating me from my mother, when we were asking time and time again, and I class that—my education and keeping my family away is worse than the sexual abuse, what they did, what they did to us. It was just unbelievable... They just had full control of you and nobody believed you, you know. And they made you go to confession. I said, “I don’t want to go”, and they make you go, you know. Yeah. —Witness A11, Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Hearings on Child Migration Programmes, March 2017

© The Author(s) 2021

G. Lynch, UK Child Migration to Australia, 1945-1970, Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69728-0_1

Over the past 20 years, a number of countries across Europe, North America and Australasia have seen the rise of public inquiries and reports into cases of historic institutional child abuse.’ This can, in part, be understood as an expression of relatively recent social trends, including greater public discussion of the nature and effects of child sexual abuse as well as the growing social influence of concepts of trauma and of moral restitution for past institutional failings.” Behind these more recent developments stands a longer and often hidden history of suffering caused through psychological, physical and sexual harm in childhood that has left lasting marks on individuals’ emotions, relationships and bodies.*

In many of the cases from the past century towards which a critical historical gaze has now been turned, such suffering did not occur because of an absence of policy or legal prohibition. Surveys undertaken by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse in Australia documented 4444 individuals who had claimed to have been sexually abused in Roman Catholic organisations as well as 1085 complainants of sexual abuse concerning Anglican organisations since 1950.* This abuse was often the subject of institutional responses that l See, for example, (eds) Johanna Sköld & Shurlee Swain, Apologies and the Legacy of Abuse of Children in “Care” (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Johanna Sköld ‘Historical abuse—a contemporary issue: compiling inquiries into abuse and neglect of children in out-of-home care worldwide’, Journal of Scandinavian Studies in Criminology and Crime Prevention, 2013, 14(1), 5-23; Robin Sen, Andrew Kendrick, Ian Milligan and Moyra Hawthorn, ‘Lessons learnt? Abuse in residential child care in Scotland’, Child and Family Social Work, 13, 2008, 411-22; Matthew Colton, ‘Factors associated with abuse in residential child care institutions’, Children and Society, 16(1), 2002, 33-44.

? See, for example, Jennifer Crane, Child Protection in England, 1960-2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018); Kate Gleeson, “The Hero’s Journey: Gender and the Politics of Justice for Child Sexual Abuse’ in Gleeson K and Lumby C (eds) The Age of Consent? Young People, Sexual Abuse and Agency (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2019), pp. 31-48; Didier Fassin & Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); John Torpey, Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: On Reparation Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).

3See, for example, Robert Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

*Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Analysis of Claims of Sexual Abuse Made With Respect to Catholic Church Institutions in Australia (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 2017), para 42; Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, Analysis of Complaints of Child Sexual Abuse Received by Anglican Church Dioceses in Australia (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 2017), para 41.

prioritised protection for organisations’ public standing over criminal justice for child victims despite legal measures across Australian States prohibiting sexual assault and rape of children.*® Similarly, in Ireland, the Ryan Commission concluded that existing legislation and guidelines concerning the corporal punishment of children were routinely broken across all of the residential institutions that it investigated, leading to violence against children that was arbitrary, spontaneous and excessive by standards of the time and which had a lasting effect on those exposed to it. Rather than occurring through the absence of legal protections or policy standards, children suffered in these cases in spite of policy and legal frameworks intended to prevent it. The policy aspiration to protect children’s well-being, reinforced by wider discourses around children’s flourishing as both a public and private good, was for varying reasons too often undercut by other aims or loyalties, and impeded by institutional cultures, structures and systems.

This book is a study of another such case of policy failure in post-war children’s out-of-home care. The nature of ‘failure’ in policy contexts is, as recent studies have argued, at least to some degree in the eye of the beholder and depends on the criteria being used.’ There were various ways in which organisations involved in child migration felt it to be a failure at the time. The numbers of children sent from the United Kingdom to Australia never matched either the ambition of, or financial investment from, the Australian Commonwealth Government and, by the early 1960s, assisted child migration was allowed to fade into obscurity in its immigration programmes. Others, as we shall see in coming chapters, thought of failure in this context primarily in educational terms and expressed concern

> Hayley Boxall, Adam Tomison & Shann Hulme, Historical Review of Sexual Offence and Child Sexual Abuse Legislation in Australia: 1788-2013 (Sydney: Commonwealth of Australia, 2014).

6 Final Report of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse (Dublin: Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse, 2009), vol. 4, paras 6.09-6.17.

7On the wider interest in policy failure in current literature in public policy, including the value of fine-grained case studies for developing wider explanatory frameworks for policy failure, see, for example, Allan McConnell, ‘What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze’, Public Policy and Administration, 30(3-4), 221-42; Cathal FitzGerald, Eoin O’Malley and Deiric Ó Broin, ‘Policy success/policy failure: a framework for understanding policy choices’, Administration, 67(2), 2019, 1-24. On assessments of policy failure being shaped by the interpretative frame through which policy outcomes are viewed see, for example, Mark Bovens and Paul ‘t Hart, ‘Revisiting the study of policy failures’, Journal of European Public Policy, 23(5), 2016, 653-66.

that some receiving institutions were failing to provide a wide enough range of training suited to the needs of the individual child. As one administrator of the Fairbridge Society put it in 1945, the assumption that children need only be trained as farm labourers or domestic workers was ‘a serious injustice to the individual’.

The particular form of failure with which this book is concerned, however, is in the gap between the standards for children’s out-of-home care set out in the 1946 Curtis report which came to define child-care policies in the emerging welfare state and the conditions in Australia which many British child migrants experienced. Such a gap between policy aspiration and practice was far from unknown in the United Kingdom. The emphasis on the use of adoption and foster care over placement in residential institutions in the Curtis report and 1948 Children Act was still being unevenly implemented across Britain well into the 1960s, with services also, in many cases, being delivered and monitored by untrained child-care workers. However, assisted child migration was, in several important respects, a different case to children receiving out-of-home care in the United Kingdom. As the Curtis Committee recognised, sending a child thousands of miles away from other family members and beyond the jurisdiction of British authorities entailed a special responsibility for ensuring both appropriate standards of selection and overseas care for child migrants. To imagine that emigration would give a child a better life was much harder, from this perspective, if it involved sending children to types of residential institution that the Curtis Committee felt unable to endorse in the United Kingdom. Whilst civil servants and ministers at the Home Office—which became the lead government department for children’s out-of-home care in 1947—understood and supported this policy perspective on child migration, it proved ultimately ineffective in ensuring that this policy was applied. By 1956, the gap between these Curtis standards and the realities on the ground for British child migrants in Australia had become all too clear to British policy-makers and within a few years, civil servants were privately hoping that the schemes would wither and die for lack of children being made available for emigration rather than face serious

8See J.A.G. Griffith, Central Departments and Local Authorities (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966); Bob Holman, Child Care Revisited: the Children’s Departments, 1948-1971 (London: Institute of Childcare and Social Education UK, 1998); Gordon Lynch, ‘Pathways to the 1946 Curtis report and the post-war reconstruction of children’s out-of-home care’, Contemporary British History, 34(1), 2019, 22-43.

confrontation with Australian authorities and the voluntary societies still supporting this work. Far from being an anachronistic critique of child migration programmes by today’s standards, this book therefore seeks to provide a case study of how a post-war policy framework intended to safeguard children’s emotional and social development failed in practice to achieve this. In short, it is an attempt to make sense of how ‘Al 1’ and many others like him experienced childhood trauma through British child migration schemes in a policy context in which much better had been hoped for them.?

The experience of ‘Al 1’ was far from unique. Child migrants’ experiences could vary significantly, with some viewing them positively or seeing their experiences as both a mix of positive and harmful.!° However, the past 20 years has led to much greater documentation of forms of suffering experienced through child migration programmes. The recently concluded review of the abuse of child migrants undertaken by the Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry is the ninth investigation to have taken place that has, in some way, touched on this.™ Child migrants have themselves published

° On the wider interest in policy failure in current literature in public policy, including the value of fine-grained case studies for developing wider explanatory frameworks for policy failure, see, for example, Allan McConnell, ‘What is policy failure? A primer to help navigate the maze’, Public Policy and Administration, 30(3-4), 221-42; Cathal FitzGerald, Eoin O’Malley and Deiric Ó Broin, ‘Policy success/policy failure: a framework for understanding policy choices’, Administration, 67(2), 2019, 1-24. Whilst it is correct to argue that what is seen as a policy ‘failure’ is shaped by the interpretative frame through which policy outcomes are viewed (see Mark Bovens and Paul ‘t Hart, ‘Revisiting the study of policy failures’, Journal of European Public Policy, 23(5), 2016, 653-66), it is reasonable to claim that postwar child migration constituted a failure of UK Government policy in its own terms given that one of the Government’s policy goals was to safeguard children’s well-being through standards advocated in the Curtis report.

10 See, for example, oral history interviews described in Ellen Boucher, Empire’s Children: Child Emigration, Welfare and the Decline of the British World, 1869-1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 1-5, 18; Evidence from witness FWS, Scottish Child Abuse Inquiry, Transcript of Day 179.

See Legislative Assembly, Western Australia, Select Committee into Child Migration, Interim Report, (Perth: State Government of Western Australia, 1996); UK Parliament Health Committee, Third Report, The Welfare of Former British Child Migrants (London: HMSO, 1998); Preliminary Report on Neerkol for the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions (Brisbane: Commission of Inquiry, 1998) Report of the Commission of Inquiry into Abuse of Children in Queensland Institutions (Brisbane: Commission of Inquiry, 1999) also known as the Forde Report; Australian Senate Community Affairs Committee, Lost Innocents: Righting the Record, Report on Child Migration (Canberra: Australian Commonwealth Government, 2001); Historical memoirs of their experiences as well as wider accounts of the history of particular schemes,” alongside books by journalists and others with significant involvement in this field.!? Oral histories have also been recorded, notably through a major project undertaken by the National Library of Australia, which explore former child migrants’ memories of their lives before migration and in Australian institutions, their adjustment from institutions into adult life and their reflections on the history of child migration in a period of public apologies.'* These have provided various accounts of physical and sexual abuse, the pain of separation from families left in the United Kingdom or from siblings also migrated to Australia, the psychological effects of life in impersonal institutions and the longer-term effects of childhoods spent in some institutions that prioritised use of children’s labour over their education. As Margaret Humphreys, the founder of the Child Migrants’ Trust has put it, a number of child migrants faced multiple traumas in the wider context of a sense of fundamental loss of home and identity bound up with their migration from Britain.’®

These experiences took place in a post-war policy environment in which renewed attention was being given to the administration and standards of children’s out-of-home care. The establishment of the Curtis and Clyde

Institutional Abuse Inquiry, Report of the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (Belfast: HIA, 2017); Australian Royal Commission, Case studies 5 (on Salvation Army institutions in Queensland and New South Wales), 11 (on Christian Brothers institutions in Western Australia) and 26 (on St Joseph’s Orphanage, Neerkol) (Canberra: Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse); Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Child Migration Programmes Investigation Report (London: IICSA, 2018). For a useful summary of the wider context of critical understandings of child migration programmes in Australia, see Andrew Murray & Marilyn Rock, ‘Child migration schemes to Australia: a dark and hidden chapter of Australia’s history revealed’, Australian Journal of Social Issues, 38(2), 2003, 149-67.

12 See, for example, David Plowman, Our Home in the Bush: Tales of Tardun (Como, WA: Tardun Old Boys Association, 1994); David Hill, The Forgotten Children: Fairbridge Farm School and Its Betrayal of Australia’s Child Migrants (Sydney: Random House, 2008); John Hawkins, The Bush Orphanage (Docklands, VIC: JoJo Publishing, 2009); Peter Harding, Apology Accepted: A 1950s Kid from Fairbridge (no location: Big Thumb Publishing, 2014).

13 Philip Bean & Joy Melville, Lost Children of the Empire (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989); Margaret Humphreys, Empty Cradles (London: Doubleday, 1994); Alan Gill, Orphans of the Empire: The Shocking Story of Child Migration to Australia (Sydney: Random House, 1998).

'4Former Child Migrants and Forgotten Australians Oral History Project, National Library of Australia, completed 2012. See also oral histories available at ML: MLOH 539.

Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, Child Migration Programmes Investigation, Day 8 transcript, pp. 38-40.

Committees in 1945 to review systems and approaches to children’s out-of-home care in England and Wales, and in Scotland, respectively, had emerged out of a growing recognition within and outside government that the fragmented systems of governance and oversight currently in place were inefficient and unsafe.'® With the experience of children’s wartime evacuation fresh in the national consciousness, and the rise of popularised ‘child psychology’ continuing to focus attention on children’s emotional lives and individual development,” the Curtis report became a means not only of setting in train clearer lines of administration for children’s out-of-home care in the emerging post-war welfare state, but a marker of standards to be expected for the future. Children’s care was to move decisively from older institutional models of containment to a new era of more personalised care, attentive to the child’s need to develop through play and increasing autonomy, in an environment that resembled as closely as possible the ‘normal family home’. Although far from being a central concern in its final report, the Curtis Committee recognised that assisted child migration was likely to resume soon. Whilst not completely opposing this, it recommended that this be restricted to a very limited range of children for whom it would genuinely represent the best option for their individual future and that it only be undertaken on the basis of the standards commended in the Committee’s report for children’s out-of-home care more generally. This was the policy agenda that the Home Office, as the lead department for children’s out-of-home care was to take up and that was meant to frame post-war child migration policy.

In attempting to explain the gap between post-war policy aspirations for children’s out-of-home care and the lived experience of many British child migrants,'® this book focuses primarily on knowledge, assumptions and decisions within the parts of the UK Government most involved in the administration of this work: the Dominions Office (which became the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1947), the Home Office and the UK High Commission in Canberra. These governmental bodies operated in the context of wider trans-national administrative networks which involved

16 See, for example, Lynch, ‘Pathways to the Curtis report’.

17 John Welshman, ‘Evacuation, hygiene, and social policy: the Our Towns report of 1943’, The Historical Journal, 42(3), 1999, 781-807; Mathew Thomson, Lost Freedom: The Landscape of the Child and the British Post-War Settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

18 On the uneven implementation of standards encouraged by the Curtis report in England and Wales, see, for example, Lynch, ‘Pathways to the Curtis report’.

UK voluntary organisations and local authorities who provided children for migration, eight ‘recognised’ sending bodies (all of whom were voluntary organisations), °? UK-based immigration officials at Australia House in London and the Australian Commonwealth Government, Australian State Governments (particularly their child welfare and immigration departments) and voluntary organisations in Australia who received child migrants and acted as their custodians.

The decision to focus this analysis primarily on the UK Government is not intended to imply that the sources of policy failure in this context lay only with British policy-makers. The complex, multi-agency oversight of post-war child migration to Australia was an anomaly in the context of the emerging welfare state in which greater clarity and integration in the administration of children’s out-of-home care were being prioritised. Such complexity increased the potential for the delivery of assisted child migration to be compromised by competing policy priorities (including different policy goals for assisted migration and for children’s care), by failures in information-gathering and sharing and by caution in over-stepping departmental remits or causing overt confrontation with other organisational stakeholders. Failures to protect the welfare of British child migrants therefore occurred across many of the organisations involved in this work as well as in the policy and administrative systems through which they interacted with each other. In the case of the voluntary societies involved, I have shown elsewhere how their particular meso-level structures and cultures also contributed to failures to protect the welfare of child migrants.” These included distinctively religious factors, including different forms of governance structure within religious organisations, religious conceptions of the child and the ways in which actions that proved harmful to children were obscured through different forms of religious legitimation.

1 The eight ‘approved’ organisations which received funding from the Dominions Office/ Commonwealth Relations Office for the assisted migration of unaccompanied children to Australia were the Australian Catholic Immigration Committee, the Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement, the Church of Scotland Committee on Social Service, Dr Barnardo’s Homes, the Fairbridge Society, the National Children’s Home, the Northcote Children’s Trust and the Salvation Army.

20 Gordon Lynch, ‘The Church of England Advisory Council of Empire Settlement and post-war child migration to Australia’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 2020, 74:1, 798-826; Gordon Lynch, ‘Catholic child migration schemes from the United Kingdom to Australia: systemic failures and religious legitimation’, 2020, 44:3, 273-94.

Whilst this book provides insights into wider systemic failures in these post-war child migration programmes, and within particular voluntary societies, its primary aim is therefore to develop a better understanding of policy failure in government systems. By providing a close reading of policy decision-making and administrative processes within the relevant departments of the UK Government, it seeks to clarify the specific factors which caused the gap between policy-makers’ awareness of appropriate standards and the capacity of the machinery of government to ensure that these standards were applied. The focus of the coming chapters is therefore on archival material which provides evidence of key periods of decision-making and the operation of administrative systems for these child migration programmes from the early 1920s until the early 1960s, by which time unaccompanied child migration to Australia was substantially in decline. The coming chapters do not seek to provide a detailed account of former child migrants’ own experiences of those early lives. That work has already been undertaken very substantially by the books, oral histories and inquiries referred to above. Rather this book has been written to provide the most extensive analysis yet undertaken to understand the policy context and systems in the United Kingdom through which their childhood experiences took place.

As the coming chapters will show, before child migration to Australia resumed in the summer of 1947, there was already a substantial understanding within the Dominions Office of both actual failures and potential risks associated with this work. Despite this, funding was provided by the UK Government to voluntary organisations for around 3200 unaccompanied child migrants sent to Australia in the post-war period. Child migration resumed and continued in the post-war period not because it was assumed to be without problems in the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office. Rather the post-war schemes operated in the midst of continuing negotiations about what conditions for child migrants were actually like, what standards could reasonably be expected and how problems might be mitigated bearing in mind the complex web of organisational relationships through which interventions needed to be implemented. Through this process, British policy-makers increasingly saw child migration as, at best, a tolerable system, perpetuated by precedent, rather than something strongly desirable. Organisational investments in this work and desire to avoid conflict with influential stakeholders meant that these programmes ultimately came to an end not through central government intervention but the declining numbers of children put forward for migration.

Child migrants were therefore placed at risk not simply through over-complex systems of administration and governance, but because of specific institutional cultures, interests and decisions. In the case of the UK Government, this centred around policy-makers’ sense of what was desirable for child migrants balanced against their perceptions of what was practical given the actual or imagined limits of their power and the need to maintain working relationships with other governmental and voluntary organisations. As the coming chapters will demonstrate, such causes of policy failure lie not simply in rational choices about policy priorities or macro-level political and economic factors, but in the meso-level structures of, and relations between, specific government departments and micro-level factors such as policy-makers’ perceptions of affinity, trust and expertise.

In examining this case of policy failure, the book also seeks to contribute to the growing academic literature on the history of the early post-war welfare state. Whilst operating in a period of the consolidation of state power over the provision of children’s out-of-home care, the history of post-war child migration to Australia further illustrates how the emerging welfare state operated not simply as a system of centralised control, but as a ‘mixed economy’ between state and voluntary organisations.” The case of post-war child migration to Australia, which involved interactions between local and national governments in both the United Kingdom and Australia, as well as between a range of voluntary and professional organisations, provides a rich example of this ‘mixed economy’ in action. Supported by state funding, and operating at least notionally within systems of state oversight, these child migration programmes were delivered

2l See Geoffrey Finlayson, ‘A moving frontier: voluntarism and the state in British social welfare, 1911-1949’, Twentieth Century British History, 1(2), 1990, 183-206; Jane Lewis, ‘Family provision of health and welfare in the mixed economy of care in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, Social History of Medicine, 8(1), 1995, 1-16; Julie Grier, ‘A spirit of “friendly rivalry”? Voluntary societies and the formation of post-war child welfare legislation in Britain’, in (eds) Jon Lawrence and Pat Starkey, Child Welfare and Social Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: International Perspectives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp. 234-55; Katharine Bradley, Poverty, Philanthropy and the State: Charities and the Working-Classes in London, 1918-79 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); (eds) Matthew Hilton and James McKay, The Ages of Voluntarism: How We Got to the Big Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

1 ‘ASERIOUS INJUSTICE TO THE INDIVIDUAL’: BRITISH... ll primarily by voluntary organisations and involved at least five times as many children sent from the care of voluntary organisations than from local authorities. This system was not one of a straightforward divergence of provision by the state and voluntary sectors, however, but of complex and evolving interactions between them. Far from constituting an example of the growing power of the centralised welfare state, these child migration programmes provide evidence of policy-makers’ perceptions of the limits of their power.” They also demonstrate that whilst broad principles of ‘child psychology’ were becoming increasingly influential in post-war public policy on children’s out-of-home care, that influence was not uniformly strong and could be diluted by other organisational pressures.”

More specifically, this study adds to knowledge of the role of civil servants in these processes. Although high-level decisions about assisted migration policy and the administration of children’s out-of-home care were ultimately made by politicians, the day-to-day operation of the child migration schemes was over-seen and managed by civil servants in Britain and Australia. Politicians only usually became involved in more detailed policy discussions when they either involved serious concerns about child migrants’ welfare, substantial policy changes or parliamentary questions and debates. In practice, this meant that the evolution of policy on British child migration often took place through intra- or inter-departmental discussions between civil servants. By offering a fine-grained analysis of these policy interactions, this study in particular adds greater detail to the broader analysis of the working of the Home Office Children’s Department provided by previous studies.”

This book also seeks to contribute to the wider literature on the history of British child migration schemes. It provides the most extensive account yet published of the United Kingdom and Australian Commonwealth

22 A similar argument has been developed in Julie Grier, ‘Voluntary rights’.

23 This book therefore seeks to develop a more complex understanding of the relationship between child psychology and the post-war welfare state than that provided by Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self (London: Routledge, 1989). Although not directly discussed in this book, this history should also be understood as running in parallel to the development of ‘problem families’ policies, in which individuals such as Somerville Hastings, Mary Rosling and John Ross were also involved (see, e.g., John Welshman, ‘In search of the “problem family”: public health and social work in England and Wales, 1940-70’, Social History of Medicine, 9(3), 1996, 447-65; Michael Lambert, “Problem families” and the Post-War Welfare State in the North-West of England, 1943-74, PhD thesis, Lancaster University, awarded 30/03/2017.

24 See, for example, Griffiths, Central Government; Holman, Child-care Revisited.

Government’s involvement in post-war child migration to Australia, adding to existing historiography on British child migration that has focused on migration to Canada,’ Southern Rhodesia,” the work of particular voluntary organisations,” or more specific aspects or periods of policy and

75 On British child migration schemes to Canada, see Joy Parr, Labouring Children: British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1869-1924, 2nd edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994); Roy Parker, Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867-1917 (Bristol: Policy Press, 2010); Gillian Wagner, Children of the Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1982); (ed) Phyllis Harrison, The Home Children: Their Personal Stories (Winnipeg: Gordon Shillingford, 1979); Patrick Dunae, ‘Gender, generations and social class: the Fairbridge Society and British Child Migration to Canada, 1930-1960’, in (eds) Jon Lawrence and Pat Starkey, Child Welfare and Social Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: International Perspectives (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), pp. 82-100, and Marion Diamond, Emigration and Empire: The Life of Maria S. Rye (New York: Garland, 1999). A number of references to the Prince of Wales farm school in British Columbia are also made in oral evidence about the work of the Fairbridge Society provided by Stephen Constantine to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (see Child Migration Programmes case study, Transcript of Day 12, 12 July 2017).

6 Katja Uusihakala, ‘Rescuing children, reforming the Empire: British child migration to colonial Southern Rhodesia’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 2014, 22(3), 273-87; and Ellen Boucher, ‘The limits of potential: race, welfare and the interwar extension of child migration to Southern Rhodesia’, Journal of British Studies, 48(4), 914-34. Comparatively little has been written about post-war child migration to New Zealand, although on this see oral evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse by Gordon Lynch on the work of the Royal Over-Seas League (see Child Migration Programmes case study, Transcript of Day 11, 11 July 2017). Retrospective views of this scheme by former British child migrants to New Zealand were also presented in evidence submitted by the British Child Migrants Society (NZ) to the House of Commons Health Committee (see Health Committee, Third Report, The Welfare of Former British Child Migrants, Volume LI: Minutes of Evidence and Appendices (London: HMSO, 1997-98).