by Alexandra Herman A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs in ...

157 Pages·2013·2.07 MB·English

THE ART OF THE CHRISTIAN PASTORATE:
SHEPHERDING THE BARNARDO HOME CHILDREN TO CANADA, 1867-1905

by

Alexandra Herman

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Affairs
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts
in
Sociology

Carleton University
Ottawa, Ontario

© 2013
Alexandra Herman
ABSTRACT:
This study investigates the techniques deployed by Dr. Thomas J. Barnardo in his child-
saving initiatives in Britain and his systemized mass child migration scheme to Canada.
This study explores the pastoral relations between Barnardo and the children he admitted
into his charity between 1867 until his death in 1905. This study analyzes the Christian
pastorate power-knowledge nexus and the pastoral role occupied by Dr. Barnardo during
his child-saving work. Most of the documentary materials upon which the analysis
proceeds was obtained through my grandmother, who is a direct descendant of a British
Home Child.

This study examines how Barnardo identified children from pauper parents and questions
what specificities were invoked in an emigration programme that focused on pauper
Anglo-British families. It explores how religious concerns were made compatible
through the model of pastoral power. This study also looks at the gendered
performativity of Home Children through collections of their personal stories and social
worker records.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to a number of people for their support and
advisement during my research. Firstly, I would like to thank Dr. George Pollard, my
supervisor and mentor, for his understanding, wisdom, patience, enthusiasm and for
pushing me farther than I thought I could go. I would also like to thank the many staff
and graduate students in the Sociology Department at Carleton University who have also
helped me during my time here. I am indebted to Paula Whissell, Graduate
Administrator in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, for her unwavering
support and encouragement. I am also grateful to my committee members Dr. Aaron
Doyle and Dr. Connie Kristiansen who offered guidance and support.
Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends for sticking by me through
this long process, always offering love and support. To Matt, my partner, for always
being there to listen and my parents for their continued encouragement throughout my
academic career. I would especially like to thank my grandmother, Bessie Herman, for
her numerous contributions in advocating on behalf of British Home Children.

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This thesis is dedicated to my great-grandmother, Violet Beard, a British Home Child
who sailed to Canada on August, 5th 1912 on the S.S. Corsican.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS:
Abstract ii
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents v
List of Illustrations vi
List of Appendices vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Establishing the Barnardo Programme, 1860s-1930s: 11
The Emergence of Barnardo Home Children
Chapter 2: Revealing Truth through the Genealogical Analysis of Counter 41
Discourses and Subjugated Knowledges
Chapter 3: A Feminist Genealogical Analysis of Canada’s Home Children: 59
Practices of Government and Practices of Self
Conclusion: Negotiating the Past 119
Appendices 137
Bibliography and Works Cited 142

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS:

Illustration 1 Before and After ‘Carte-de-visite’, 1915 31
Illustration 2 Before coming to a Barnardo Home, 1870 33
Illustration 3 Barnardo composite photograph ‘Mumps’, 1890 38

vi
LIST OF APPENDICES:

Appendix A Barnardo’s Admittance Photo, 1920 137
Appendix B Richmond senior relives life as a Barnardo child, 1999 138
Appendix C Directions for Lads on Leaving for Situations, 1890 139

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INTRODUCTION

“Well-planned and wisely conducted child-emigration, especially to Canada,
contains within its bosom the truest solution of some of the mother-country’s
most perplexing problems, and the supply of our Colonies’ most urgent needs…
First, it relieves the overcrowded centres of city life and the congested labour-markets
at home, while, at the same time, it lessens in a remarkable manner the burdens of
taxation. Second, it supplies what the Colonies are most in want of – an increase of the
English-speaking population… Third, it confers upon the children themselves
unspeakable blessings… The change at the young and formative period of their lives…
gives to each child whose character is good, and who is successfully absorbed into the
colonial population, such an immediate prospect of an independent existence upon a
higher plane as could hardly have been imagined as within its reach.”

(Barnardo and Marchant, 2007: 154 [1907], quoting Dr. Barnardo)

The Government of Canada designated 2010 the “Year of the British Home
Child” (Canada Post, 2010); by doing so it recognized the mass child migration
phenomenon that brought thousands of children to Canada. Under child migration
schemes enacted by the United Kingdom, an estimated 100,000 British children were
brought to Canada from 1869 until the late 1940s, often to work as domestic servants and
farm labourers (British Home Child Day News Release, 2010; Bagnell, 2001 [1980];
Parr, 1994 [1980]). The ancestral roots of these children are significant to Canadian
nation-building; twelve percent of the Canadian population, today, can be traced as a
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descendant of a Home Child1 who was sent to Canada between 1869 and 1948 (cf.
Canada Post, 2010; Corbett, 2002 [1997]). The largest segment of this migrating child
population was known as Barnardo Home Children (cf. Corbett, 2002 [1997]; Wagner,
1979). An estimated 30,000 Home Children from the Barnardo organization emigrated
from Britain to Canada (Kohli, 2003).
This study arose from my interest in understanding the history of British Home
Children and the mass emigration schemes which brought them to Canada. These
interests emerged from my ancestral connection to British Home Children as my great-
grandmother, her twin sister, and younger brother had all emigrated from Britain to
Canada under the British child emigration scheme during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. My great-grandmother never openly discussed her roots as a British
Home Child. It was years later after she had passed away that my grandmother, her
daughter, began uncovering a hidden past and connecting vague details she had held onto
about her mother. It was through the help of Barnardo’s After-Care Centre and Home
Children advocacy connections that my grandmother was able to obtain official records.
The official records disclosed the past of my great-grandmother, her twin sister and their
younger brother as they had all emigrated from Britain to Canada under the MacPherson2
agency on August 5, 1912. Their older brother had come to Canada earlier in 1908

1 This particular segment of child emigrants “were given the collective label of ‘Home Children’... it is the
various institutions where the children were placed before they were sent to Canada, that are the ‘Homes’
being referred to here” (Morrison, 2006: 1).
2 Annie Macpherson had an immense influence on Thomas Barnardo and his philanthropic endeavours in
child migration to Canada. It was “as early as 1825 [when] the concept of emigrating homeless children
from Britain into Canada was advanced by Honourable Peter Robinson and the Rev. Thomas Socket, both
of whom suggested that destitute children be emigrated to Canada as agricultural labourers” (Corbett, 2002:
23 [1997]). In 1837 the emigration of British children to Canada was terminated for a brief period
(Corbett, 2002 [1997]). By the late 1840s, Lord Shaftsbury encouraged the child emigration movement
through his Ragged School movement when he “asked for state aid to meet the cost of sending Ragged
School pupils to work on sheep stations in Australia” (Fletcher, 2005: 23).
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through the Macpherson agency as well. This study developed out of my interest in
understanding the contextual milieu invested in such an emigration scheme that brought
my great-grandmother and her siblings to Canada.
Philanthropist and evangelical missionary Dr. Thomas J. Barnardo took great
interest in children living in destitute areas of urban Britain, opening his first ‘Home’ for
destitute boys in 1870 and officially opening his Girls’ Village Homes in 1876 (cf.
Wagner, 1979; Bready, 1932 [1930]). Barnardo contributed to the movement of child-
saving between 1867 until his death in 1905 by founding his ‘Homes’ for destitute
children and establishing a mass child migration scheme of his own during the 1880s (cf.
Swain and Hillel, 2010; Barnardo and Marchant, 2007 [1907]; Wagner, 1979). British
‘pauper children’ under the care of Barnardo between 1870 and 1905 were perceived as
being ‘saved’ from the destitute industrialised cities of Britain (Parr, 1994 [1980]). The
aim of the emigration scheme was often presented as an opportunity for pauper children
to become ‘productive’ and ‘valuable’ citizens in Canada (cf. Barnardo and Marchant,
2007 [1907]; Fletcher, 2005; Parr, 1994 [1980]; Bready, 1932 [1930]).
Chapter one, “Establishing the Barnardo Programme, 1860s-1930s,” provides an
introduction into the contextual significance of British child-saving studies during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To begin analyzing how Barnardo Home
Children were made ‘targets to be governed’ (Dean, 1999) this study first looks at socio-
historical studies concerning Barnardo and his emergence in ‘child-saving.’ Studies
surrounding British Home Children include themes of problematizing and isolating
‘pauper children,’ the vulnerability and innocence of the British migrant child (Swain and
Hillel, 2010) and the mechanisms and processes used to govern this population, including
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