'This Is a Fine Country after a Boy Gets Known and Is Well Liked'. Canada, Land of Opportunity?

Gillian Lamb, University of Oxford

In 2017, the campaign group British Home Children finally succeeded in their aim of winning an apology from the Canadian government for the ‘unjust immigration policy’ that ‘severed’ c. 100,000 British children from their families and ‘indentured them as farm labourers and domestics’ in rural Canada between 1869 and 1939. Campaigners estimate that as many as 1 in 10 of the Canadian population is descended from a former juvenile migrant, yet many are unaware of their ancestry. An apology, it was argued, would educate the Canadian public. Revealing the past miseries and failures of child emigration was essential to understanding its legacies in the present. While such an argument is undoubtedly true, the consequence of this approach has been the emergence of a narrative of 'harm', ‘displacement’ and ‘wounds’ that has come to dominate public discourse. As Marjorie Harper points out, child emigration was once ‘widely celebrated’ and is ‘now demonised’. This paper argues, however, that the experience of child migrants needs to be both unpicked and historicised. The existing historiography has focused on the immediate aftermath of emigration, while this research uses innovative ‘cradle to grave’ analysis to evaluate the paths of c. 800 children between 1850 and 1900 both in Britain and Canada. Drawing on letters and key life course events contextualised with quantitative data, it argues that nineteenth-century emigration represented an opportunity for young men and women that many were eager to pursue. It highlights that many emigrants recognised that Canada represented an escape from a life of poverty and criminality and concludes that imperial life provided a broader range of employment prospects than for those who remained in Britain. In so doing it deepens our understanding of juvenile migration and has important implications for many of the dominant narratives of its legacy in present-day Canada.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 239. Childhood and Settler Colonialism