• Welcome to this forum . We are a worldwide group with a common interest in Birmingham and its history. While here, please follow a few simple rules. We ask that you respect other members, thank those who have helped you and please keep your contributions on-topic with the thread.

    We do hope you enjoy your visit. BHF Admin Team

Middlemore Children’s Emigration Homes

October 1949 Paul Cadbury and the breakdown in family life...Children suitable for emigration.
Contrast to John Throgmorton Middlemore.

Paul Cadbury produced articles for the Eugenics Review.

8A9ABDAD-50FF-4A2E-8A44-6463FD746EAE.jpeg
 
A picture from the Birmingham Daily Gazette of March 1938.

Something that I noticed in Apple Photos, the faces are picked out as shown below the main picture. I may help if someone is trying to identify the lads.

A8A9BF75-4BE3-4CBF-BDCB-59778FB9AE63.jpeg

0EFD3B37-63D2-4DEE-ADFB-FBECB89DC321.jpeg
 
Some issues of the Toronto Daily Mail has been added to the British Newspapers Archive (beteeen 1880 and 1899).
A Canadian perspective on child emigration.
 
February 1886 the Aston Board of Guardians propose to send 10 children for emigration to Canada from the Workhouse. Ten pounds is authorised for each child, and discussion with JT Middlemore, who would have much pleasure in taking the children if they were healthy in body and mind, and cleanly in their habits.

No details of how or why they were chosen.

FDF403E4-ADCD-47C8-97E5-4CC1DF961616.jpeg
Later the children were taken to Court and agreed to go...
BA883166-1CCD-4D61-A338-ADCEE8A7889F.jpeg
 
Last edited:
This is from the Edgbastonian Magazine, September 1883
‘A benevolent Edgbaston gentleman who has solved one of the difficult social problems of modern times – the reclamation of the children of the criminal and most degraded classes of our large towns. His institution has enabled Mr. Middlemore to rescue from the gutter, or more frequently from the haunts of vice, dishonesty, debauchery, filth, and ignorance, no fewer than eight hundred incipient criminals’

Screenshot 2020-10-10 at 20.54.25.png
 
The Harborne Herald and Edgbaston Times, June 1891 carries the report below. I believe their report is mistaken.

The correct number was 70 children who were sent to Canada, From The Middlemore Experience by Roberts-Pichette.

54AB9E4B-60AB-4E9C-9D60-00EF21F7EC1E.jpeg

BD0127D0-3434-4ADB-BDB2-7E6506C1629C.jpeg
 
For a reference to a lad who was sent to Canada in 1903, and subsequently ran away see this thread…
 
I have read Patricia Skidmore's books as well as several other books. The British Home Children group I belong to has put together this list of books http://britishhomechild.com/british-home-child-books/

As far as I can see the link mentions the book “Great Canadian Expectations: The Middlemore Experience,” written by Patricia Roberts-Pichette. A book written to show Middlemore in the best way possible.

Also “Marjorie, To afraid to Cry: A Home Child Experience,” by Patricia Skidmore which shows the Homes in a different light.

Perhaps, as it was written in 2018, it does not mention a book “Awful Kind: The Story of the Middlemore Children of Prince Edward Island” by Sara Underwood. This book concentrates on children sent from Middlemore to Prince Edward Island.

On a recent thread Aston Lad kindly reproduced a screenshot of a redacted Middlemore record from 1903. (Post 6) where there is a confusion as to how the child’s father met his death.


In her book Sara mentions George Davies (10) who with his brother (7) were sent to Canada in 1910. The records are found on the same reel, A-2015, in the Library and Archives Canada Middlemore Collection. His father assisted with the passage. George wrote a memoir in the early 1970s for his family.

“Another distasteful thing. Every Saturday morning, we had to line up for a cup of Senna leaves and Epsom salts. A lot of us found this a hard drink to swallow. Some couldn’t and would vomit it all up. But matron was standing at the end of the line with a cane and if one didn’t down it they got a crack or two over the shoulders, and they were forced to drink it down, whether it stayed down or not. And one wasn’t allowed to spit out saliva which forms in the mouth afterwards. We were never allowed to drink water but sometimes we could get some from the kitchen staff when no one was looking….”
 
Strangely enough, I worked at St Luke's in an education department based in the building without knowing its history. The Middlemore Emigrating Home for Waifs and Strays. I wondered at the weirdness of the lay out of the offices. Mine was up the stairs from the main door in a small room with a fireplace. Obviously the receiving officer's room. And then a big open place space, the dormitories. So imagine my shock when I found out that my Husband's Great-aunt and Great-uncle were 'emigrated' to Nova Scotia aged 8 and 6.
The Canadians have a fabulous database. Lori Oschewski is in charge of the British Home Children site and is a mine of information. British Home children - neither Waifs nor Strays - were often badly treated. st Lukes Middlemore memorial.jpg
 
At Birmingham Literary Festival the poet Liz Berry read from her novel in verse 'The Home Child' which is a fictionalised version of her great aunt Eliza Showell's emigration to Nova Scotia in 1912. It was researched in Birmingham Archives and in Canada. Liz's reading was accompanied by the fiddle playing of Ruth Angell.
IMG_2795.jpeg
 
My husband's great aunt and great uncle were sent to Nova Scotia 'for their own good'. Jimmy, who became a persistent runaway, drowned trying to cross a river to reach a port to take him home. Surprisingly, I worked out of the St Luke's/Middlemore home building. I had always wondered why it was so odd. My office was in a small room with a defunct fireplace and barred window. The other offices were in a huge open space with a small windowed room overlooking. It was only after I had researched these two poor children that I realised that the open space was a dormitory and my office was that of the 'overseer' for want of a better word. That their father was in prison and their stepmother didn't want them hence them being sent/deported away. Middlemore thought he was doing the right thing as did various groups such as Barnardos and Catholic Church groups but were they doing the right thing?
 
24 Feb 2010 the then Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the UK Government to all former child migrants and their families. ('The Lost Children' Balsall Heath Local History Society, edited by Valerie Pitt and Rowena Lyon)

The scale of the forced emigration was immense: 5000+ children from Birmingham to Canada 1873-1948 from Middlemore Homes. 100,000 children from Britain were sent from 1860 to 1960. This does not include older teenagers who volunteered sponsored by such bodies as the British Women's Emigration Society.

Valerie Pitt had photoboards outside last night's reading.
The migration story is well known in Canada where 10% of the population are said to be descended from a home child.
 
As Prof, Carl Chinn said,Prof Chinn said: "The children were taken away from the back streets of Birmingham because they were seen as 'street arabs' or 'gutter children'. In that period lots of middle class people looked down on the poor and there was a lot of poverty. Some of them were fortunate in Canada they went to good homes and did well. Others were used as cheap labour and were very unhappy."

I can't help but feel that the Middlemore emigration scheme was an easy way to rid Birmingham [but not just Birmingham] of a social problem instead of dealing with it but that would have cost more.

A man who worked for me some years ago was a Middlemore boy. Sent to a remote Canadian farm where he was exploited as cheap labour. He hated it! As soon as he was old enough, he saved up & returned to Birmingham.

In 2010 then Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the nation to the 150,000 British children forced to migrate to the colonies.

Mr Brown said: “To all those former child migrants and their families; to those here with us today and those across the world – to each and every one – I say today we are truly sorry. We are sorry they were allowed to be sent away when at their most vulnerable.

“We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back."
I couldn't have put it better myself.
 
its hard to believe that so many children were still being sent away as late as the 1960s...i can only hope that they found happiness in the end...so sad

lyn
Lyn, Liz Berry's 'Home Child' deserves to be read for its language and imagination. It is a fictional work, because while Eliza Showell had a long life she remained in domestic service in the same area of Cape Breton, never married or had a family of her own. She was the youngest of her family when she was sent to Canada age 12. Eliza never returned to Britain or saw her brothers again. She died in a Seniors home in 1978 and her employers paid for a small gravestone.

But many working class people in Birmingham and The Black Country have unrecorded lives. Liz Berry uses her imagination to bring some light and love into Eliza's life, but the facts are sparse. Our compassion wants us to imagine some happiness. Derek
 
Back
Top