It was a ghastly sight even for a veteran doctor who thought he’d seen it all after forty years on the job. As a young medical intern, Dr. Allan Cameron had witnessed grisly sights and encountered the worst of human behaviour while caring for patients in the slums of his hometown of Glasgow, Scotland. Yet on the bleak day in November 1895 when he visited an isolated farmhouse in Grey County, Ontario, the scene that greeted him there left him reeling. 

Called on to look into the circumstances of a suspicious death at the home of a woman named Helen F. Findlay, Dr. Cameron made his way upstairs. There, in a back bedroom that reeked of suffering and death, he found the emaciated body of a fifteen-year-old boy. George Everitt Green, an English-born “Barnardo Home boy,” had been working as an indentured labourer at the Findlay farm for for just five months. 

Green’s corpse, which lay on a badly soiled mattress and a couple of rough boards that had served as his bed, was covered in bruises and open sores. It seemed all too clear that the lad had been starved and severely abused. Incredibly, as we shall see, not everyone agreed with the doctor’s assessment of the situation. There was no shortage of contrary opinions voiced by uncaring media observers, politicians, and labour leaders who knew nothing of the true circumstances of Green’s death yet criticized the boy for his physical limitations and demanded to know why he’ had ever been allowed into the country.

How Canadians reacted to the story of Green’s tragic fate spoke volumes about the widespread ignorance about the plight of the “British home children”—the orphans and abused and abandoned children who were coming to this country from “homes” run by philanthropists in the United Kingdom (UK). What happened to Green was an extreme example of the pain that many of these youngsters endured. However, it was only a matter of degree. Virtually all the home children suffered to one degree or another as a result of their forced relocation.

In the seven decades between 1869 and 1939, more than 100,000 home children  were shipped to Canada. As social historian Joy Parr notes, “Two recurring preoccupations drew propertied Britons to assisted juvenile emigration and apprenticeship: the concern for public safety and the religious concern for the salvation of individual working-class children. Child emigration was to be both a safety-valve for internal disorder and a path to salvation . . . for Victorians, public policy and the Christian mission were seldom easily separated.”

After being swept up from the streets of London, Liverpool, Glasgow, and other cities in the UK, many of the so-called homeless “gutter children” were rescued from grim, uncertain lives. However, just as many were snatched away from impoverished or down-on-their-luck parents who had little or no ability to recover custody of their offspring even when their circumstances changed. Contrary to what Canadians commonly believed, then and now, the majority of home children who came to Canada were not orphans. They had been abandoned by their parents, were “illegitimate,” or came from broken homes.

All indications are that more often than not, the boys and girls who were home children had no desire to leave the British Isles. Nor did they have a choice about emigrating. Eleven-year-old Phyllis Dorey, who was sent away in 1915, recalled: “They just said, ‘You’re going to Canada,’ and that was it. If you don’t have a mother or father, who [were] you going to ask? You [were] just a child.

Tens of thousands of the home children were too young to understand or consent to what was happening to them—or why. They were as frightened as they were excited about the grand adventure of crossing the Atlantic on a ship. However, every one of these youngsters did so clinging to the hope that in Canada they might somehow find happiness, love, and opportunities for a better life. As often as not, the sad reality was that their experiences weren’t what was hoped for or expected by the people who transported the children here or by the Canadians who “adopted” them. It’s fair to say that, too often, the children’s experiences were bittersweet. For those children who were mistreated, their experiences were simply bitter. Most home children were sent to Canada to work in a new country that needed workers. And work they did, for they had no choice. 

Those children who refused to work, who were lax in their duties, or who rebelled were often beaten, starved, or simply cast adrift. Some were even murdered. Others ended up in unmarked pauper graves — if they didn’t run away first. One young Welsh youngster recounted what happened when he fled the farm where he’d been put to work: “The farmer came . . . looking for me and he pounded me at the side of the road and threw me into the front seat of the car. My Welsh temper was boiling. All I could see when I looked at him was his silly, domineering face. And I closed my fist and I hit him  . . . he stopped the car and he knocked me out.”

As this and a multitude of similarly vivid accounts attest, the supervision of placements of home children was woefully inadequate . . . .