|
Royal links of charity that ‘sent children to abuse’
By Sean O’neill
A blacklist of institutions in Australia unfit to house British child migrants was torn up by the government under pressure from one of the royal family’s favourite charities, documents submitted to a public inquiry reveal. The Fairbridge Society, which is now part of the Prince’s Trust, ran isolated farm schools at which children suffered physical and sexual abuse and threatened ministers with “a first-class row” if they tried to curb child migration to the colonies in the 1950s. The government backed down and allowed Fairbridge, which was financially supported by the royals, received regular royal visits and had the Queen’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, as its president, to send hundreds more children to Australia. The story of how the charity used its privileged position to lobby ministers is chronicled in papers disclosed to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA), which is examining the treatment of child migrants in the postwar period. This week’s first public hearings of the IICSA, which are taking place two-and-a-half years after it was established, have heard harrowing tales of harsh childhoods in which brutal punishment regimes and depraved sexual assaults were common. Elderly men and women have told how they were abused at state and religious orphanages in Britain before being selected for migration or volunteering to go to Australia to escape. Many were from poor families struggling after the war or were children whose unmarried mothers had no income to care for them. They were handed over to councils, religious orders and seemingly respectable charities. Thousands were sent abroad without their parents ever being informed. One man, who asked for anonymity, said that he had been beaten and abused by Catholic nuns and priests in Britain before he was sent to Australia aged 12 in 1953 and suffered further abuse at the hands of the Christian Brothers. He said: “I’m 75 now but I think about these things every day. The beatings were pretty horrific and for me it will never go away.” Marcelle O’Brien, who was four when she was sent to a Fairbridge farm in 1946, was reunited with her mother decades later. The 80-year-old had hugged her and said: “I know who you are. The bastards took you from me.” In 1956 concern about child migrants led Britain to send a fact-finding mission, led by John Ross, a senior civil servant, to inspect 26 institutions in Australia. He produced a critical report with a secret addendum that condemned several homes, including two run by Fairbridge. Ross proposed that future migration should take place only after direct approval from the home secretary. A blacklist was compiled with the Fairbridge farm schools at Molong and Pinjarra categorised as “not fit to receive more migrants”. Officials said that the schools required a “complete metamorphosis” to reach acceptable standards but were wary of Fairbridge’s political influence. That summer officials refused to allow Fairbridge to send a group of 16 children to Australia. In one memo, an official at the Commonwealth Relations Office said that the secretary of Fairbridge had warned that “a sudden suspension of child migration would lead to pressure on the secretary of state”. A colleague added that stopping migration “would almost certainly have parliamentary repercussions since Fairbridge has the means of making itself heard in both houses of parliament”. The memo continues: “The president of the Fairbridge Society [the Duke of Gloucester] is known to take an interest in its affairs, and it is on the cards that his intervention would be sought if a ‘standstill’ were suddenly to be imposed and imposed in the first instance against the Fairbridge Society.” By November 1956 the blacklist had been binned and the Cabinet had decided to seek the “voluntary co-operation of the societies in modernising their arrangements”. Migration resumed and between 1956 and 1965 a further 468 children were sent to Fairbridge. David Hill, who was sent there in 1959, told the inquiry: “Fairbridge exercised political pressure and the government quietly tore up the blacklist and allowed hundreds more children, including me, to go to institutions it had already condemned as unfit.” A Prince’s Trust spokesman said: “In 2011, the UK youth charity Fairbridge (which had long ceased to have any involvement in the child migration programmes) became part of The Prince’s Trust. We fully support this important inquiry and are supplying all the information which has been requested.” In June 1934 the Prince of Wales launched a fundraising appeal for the Fairbridge farm schools by donating £1,000 and proclaiming the benefits of child migration to the Dominions. The schools, he said, gave orphans and poor children opportunities, helped to reduce unemployment at home and would help to populate the colonies with “stock from the home of the pioneers”. According to a report in The Times, the prince quoted the words of Kingsley Fairbridge, the founder of the society, saying: “This is not a charity, it is an Imperial investment.” The Queen Mother visited the Pinjarra farm school near Perth in 1928 when she was the Duchess of York and again in the 1960s. In 1948 the Queen, as Princess Elizabeth, donated £2,000 to Fairbridge from her wedding gifts from readers of the Imperial Review. Her uncle, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, became president of Fairbridge in London after serving as governor-general of Australia. Child migration to Australia ended in 1970 and the last Fairbridge farm school, at Molong, closed in 1974. Fairbridge merged with the Prince’s Trust in 2011 and runs courses for people aged 16 to 25.
|
.
Any original material on these pages is copyright © BishopAccountability.org 2004. Reproduce freely with attribution.