Examination of Witnesses (Questions 48
- 59)
WEDNESDAY 20 MAY 1998
MR JOHN
WILLOUGHBY, PROFESSOR
BRIAN TAYLOR,
MR DAVID
LORENTE and MRS
KAY GOLLINGER-LORENTE.
Chairman
48. Could I particularly welcome our witnesses from
Canada and express our thanks to you for being willing to come
over and give evidence. We do appreciate the efforts that you
have gone to to assist us with this inquiry. Can I again apologise
for the fact that I shall have to leave the Chair at around about
12.20 to speak on a debate in the Chamber. I have an adjournment
debate which I cannot avoid speaking in. No discourtesy is meant
to you. Mrs Wise will sit in the Chair and I hope to get back
as soon as the debate is over. I do apologise for that. Could
I ask Mr and Mrs Lorente if you could introduce yourselves first
and then if your colleagues could introduce themselves to the
Committee.
(Mr Lorente) I am
David Lorente. Kay and I, my wife and I, represent Home Children
Canada. We are, in fact, Home Children Canada. We are a pretty
small committee. We are a sub-committee of Heritage Renfrew. Eight
years ago in January 1991 I was asked to give a talk on a subject
of my choice and I chose Home Children. At that meeting when I
announced that I was going to speak on Home Children, because
my father was a Home Child, one of the directors in our group,
who is older than I, looked at me and said "When I was a
child I was not allowed to play with Home Children". My father
died in 1965. He had just started to talk about his own past in
the year or two before he died. It was serendipity, in fact, that
I happened to take him up to near the place where he had been
sent initially. He talked about the shock of the boy from London
being sent to the boondocks as we call them way up in the county.
He saw the cemetery and he saw the train station, that was what
he wanted to see, he did not want to go to the farm because he
was abused there. The Home Children that I have met, about 200
of them showed up at this reunion in January in winter time in
Renfrew, and Renfrew is 60 miles from Ottawa and they came from
200 miles away. At the end of my talk I pointed out that I did
not have any records of my father, his were burnt. 49. Can you
tell us a little bit about why your father went to Canada? What
information do you have?
(Mr Lorente) My
father's story essentially is that he was the son of Italian immigrants.
This I did not know until 1979. He told me that I should be proud
I was Canadian and if anybody asked what my ancestry was it was
Welsh. He was born in Cardiff, Wales, so were all his brothers
and sisters. The family fell on bad times in Cardiff, some of
them went north to Scotland, my grandfather came to London, things
got worse in London and he went to Paris. When he went to Paris
he left his wife and children behind. The mother had a breakdown
and the children were put in a home, three boys and three girls.
My father remembers his mother and his older sister, Annie, coming
to meet him for visitations at Manor Park. This he told me before
he died. I was sent over to Bisley by the army in 1965 whilst
he was dying. I told him I could not take the job and he told
me "I want you to go. I want you to go to Manor Park and
if you have time go to Paris, I have a sister in Paris".
This I found out for the first time. I went to Manor Park and
I went to see his sister. When I came back, he was dying from
a brain tumour, we were told on occasion we might trigger a response
that he would relive a moment from his past. My mother triggered
one and I triggered the other. My mother triggered the moment
he was taken from his mother with his brothers. She said it was
like listening to a phone call where you understood what one person
was saying and you could guess what the other person was saying
and everybody was crying. When I came back I had 36 pictures,
slides, which I had to project on the ceiling because he was too
weak to sit up. He had told me that at the home in Manor Park,
near Ilford, he remembered going down to see his mother and his
sister, Annie, at the gate. She would go to the little wooden
gate and pull the string that rang the bell and he would go down
to meet her. It sounded like a happy occasion so I went there.
The wall was still there in part, the little gate was still there,
the string was still there and the bell was still there, so I
took a picture from the inside, the way he would have seen it.
When I came back that was the first slide I showed him and he
broke into convulsive tears. They had to sedate him and they told
me never to bring that topic up, never to show him any of the
pictures and so I did not. He never saw the picture of his sister
and he died three months later.[25] 50.
Thank you. Mrs Lorente, would you like to say something very briefly
about your organisation.
(Mrs Gollinger-Lorente)
Our organisation consists of the two of us actually. In spite
of that we have responded to over 6,000 requests since we began
work basically about the time that I retired, 1991. These are
often from Home Children themselves, also their descendants, because
of course our Home Children, and we had over 100,000 in Canada,
we had more than any place else, many of them are dead and many
of them died without ever finding out their origins or their records.
Those who are trying to find them now are just as passionate about
it as you can tell we are. Even if descendants feel and know about
this stigma, because most of them do not discover that their parents
or grandparents were Home Children until they inherit their papers
and go through them and become suspicious. Much of that is due
to the fact that we have had a little publicity in Canada over
the last ten years or so, so they are beginning to question and
they know certain clues that we have found through our research
that lead you to know that this may have been a Home Child. Most
of the time when it is a question mark it ends up that indeed
they were Home Children. That is what we are doing, we are trying
to help those people trace their records. 51. Thank you very much.
Mr Willoughby, would you like to introduce yourself and say a
little bit about the Ellen Foundation?
(Mr Willoughby) Yes.
My name is John Willoughby and I come from Charlottetown on Prince
Edward Island. I am the founder and Chairman of the Ellen Foundation.
My background with Home Children is I have been helping Home Children
for approximately 15 or 16 years to facilitate, similar to Mr
and Mrs Lorente. My own background with Home Children is my grandmother
was a Home Child when she came out to Prince Edward Island in
1894. We knew very little of the actual background until some
years later. The situation of being sent out to Canada was one
of there were four children in the family, two boys and two young
girls. My grandmother was four when she came to Prince Edward
Island. Her mother had been very ill, was not expected to live,
in hospital in Birmingham. Consequently her husband, William,
who owned a factory in Birmingham, a small factory but a factory
and they were quite well off, prosperous in relation to the times,
unfortunately William dropped dead while his wife was in the hospital
and a relative, a brother of William, decided it would be a good
idea to send three children, of which my grandmother was one,
out to Canada. Ironically it took 20 something years to probate
the estate of which the brother was the executor. I do not know
whether that had anything to do with the children being sent to
Canada but there are those in our family who are suspicious that
that may have been the case. The good news is some years later
their mother got better and was able to come out to Canada. By
that time she had been adopted by a very nice family and they
tried to get her to go back to England but she would not go, she
remained in Canada where she married and had children and so on.
That is my background as far as my personal involvement is concerned.
The Ellen Foundation came into being when I was doing some work
for a friend and it turned out that Ellen was a little girl sent
out to Canada's PEI at the age of three and lo and behold it turned
out that she was the inspiration for the Anne of Green Gables
novel. She was adopted by the family that are directly related
to the author, Lucy Maude Montgomery and in her memoirs, which
were released in 1992, 50 years after her death, she acknowledged
that was where she got the idea. Ellen came and they wanted a
boy and they got a little girl, and anybody who is familiar with
Anne knows the background to the story. She was very fortunate.
She was adopted by a very nice family that took very good care
of her. Her family tried to find her, as with many Home Children,
and I spent at least four trips to England trying to locate her
in various ways—I will not bother with the details, they
are similar to everyone else—and the same in Canada, but
unfortunately at age three she had no memory of where she came
from, who the sending society was. We tried some of the societies
that we suspect were dealing in our area, checked passenger lists,
all the usual procedures, and we have not been able to identify
Ellen to this very day. Although the character of Anne is probably
the most known fictional character in children's history Ellen
is not even known to her own children, her identity. My colleague
is Professor Brian Taylor.
(Professor Taylor) Good morning. My
name is Brian Taylor, I am a Professor of the history of childhood
at the University of New Brunswick. My interest in this field
of Home Children arose out of my own research interests as an
historian. It has since broadened to a much more personal interest,
not only because of the academic component but also because I
have been able to identify and interview as many of the surviving
Home Children as I have been able to locate. Sadly, because of
the passing of time, that is a very limited number. In fact, so
far I have been able to speak to and interview only about eight.
Necessarily I have confined my attentions to the maritime provinces,
particularly New Brunswick and to a lesser extent Nova Scotia,
simply because of financial constraints and restrictions on travel
that are imposed because of that. That is how I come into the
picture. 52. Thank you very much. You appreciate that clearly this
inquiry is primarily geared to looking at the contemporary concerns,
how we can assist former migrants and their families with the
contemporary problems and issues that they face as a consequence
of their involvement in this scheme. Can I ask all of you, or
certainly both organisations, what responsibility do you believe
the governments today bear for the child migrant scheme? What
do you feel they should do in a sense as a consequence of the
issues that your organisations are addressing?
(Mr Willoughby) If I may address that, Mr
Chairman. We have spent a great deal of time over the past number
of years trying to build a proactive organisation
because in the past in Canada one of the reasons there was little
information, little knowledge, was that unfortunately the story
of Home Children was not before the public, before the Government,
on a relatively constant basis which is the only way that you
are ever going to get the kind of action that is necessary. We
believe, and I hate to use the word "tripartite" which
was used earlier, that in our negotiations and discussions with
the Government of Canada and some of the provincial governments
there is responsibility enough for everybody to go around. Certainly
the Government in the UK has an obligation. Certainly the sending
societies have an obligation. We believe the Government of Canada
has indicated they have now accepted their responsibility and
involvement, and in fact believe that it is a matter for governments
to assist and solve. We have ongoing discussions with them. We
also believe that there is an obligation on ourselves, the descendants
and the Home Children, because unfortunately we have not been
vocal enough, we have not been active enough. Part of that is
due to funding. I am sure Mr Lorente knows how difficult it is
to keep going on his own. We have done the same thing. We are
of the opinion that with a concerted effort this is not an insurmountable
problem at all. 53. When you mention obligations, particularly
in respect of the British Government, what do you feel these are?
(Mr Willoughby)
More as a facilitator. Certainly I was shocked at the reference
to the amount of funding which looking at your car sales would
represent the price of a reasonably priced car on any car dealer's
lot. When I saw the funding of the Child Migrants' Trust it certainly
woke me up in a hurry. I know, as the Chairman, what it takes
to run a Foundation on a continuing basis. I know they get money
from other sources but certainly in our negotiations with the
Canadian Government our goals are much, much higher than that
and we have already had some considerable success in that regard. 54.
Professor Taylor, would you like to add anything?
(Professor Taylor) No,
thank you. 55. Mr Lorente, do you wish to add to that answer?
(Mr Lorente) We
submitted with our brief 29 recommendations and I think the very
first two are the ones that I will speak to at this moment. All
I have heard this morning is Child Migrants' Trust, Child Migrants'
Trust, and they do a commendable job. I have met Margaret Humphreys.
I phoned up and said if she was coming to Canada we would have
supper with her. I drove 250 miles one-way to have supper with
Margaret Humphreys. She is doing a wonderful job and she has done
credit to the £190,000 that she has been given and the 45,000
that I believe is committed for next year. But when a Home Child
wants records they are looking for their personal records, they
are not looking for birth, they are not looking for funeral records,
which are the two things that she provides, they are looking for
their agency records. These are available in most cases. Where
records have been destroyed they are generally on cardex but the
records are generally available. We have been very, very successful
in all the cases that we have handled because if you have a small
knowledge of the demographics of where these people operate, the
agencies involved, if you know a little bit about the networks,
for instance Barnado's sent people over in 1882, they sent people
over and the Quarriers sent people over before the middle 1880s,
Jimmy Jarvis, the famous little lad that Barnado's found, was
sent over with another agency, if you know a little bit about
the network and you know where the forms are and where the placements
were you can generally advise them. We also have the forms that
are provided by one or two agencies and we provide these to the
people. My point is if the funding is going to work it should
go out to the Child Migrants' Trust, they are doing a great job,
but their emphasis is Australia, Canada is out of the picture,
there has been no mention of South Africa. I know that people
in Canada can get records. I know this from experience, from thousands
of experiences. I think the money should go to agencies. Barnado's
have 50,000 records. They have got half the number of the records
that we have in Canada. They should have money. It should go to
child care and it should be emphasised that this is for this particular
purpose. I think it is very important that the Anglican Church
get money. I understand they have been given £10,000 by the
National Library recently for this particular purpose. The Catholic
Church sent over close to 30,000 people, the same number as Barnado's.
They certainly deserve some type of financial assistance.
(Mrs Gollinger-Lorente) There was a
little question when the gentleman was speaking for the Government
earlier as to whether these agencies should be given funding or
something if they have their own resources and so on. It seems
to be fairly well established that they were acting as a result
of government policies and they were acting really on behalf of
the government. It does seem to me their responsibility is not
quite as great perhaps as those who established the policies.
I agree with what my husband has said. If they insist that the
agencies should produce the records and that is the best source
of them, which is what I think the gentleman said, then they should
help quite substantially in helping those agencies to produce
a database or whatever to make the records more accessible. Our
Home Children certainly have not had much luck. I was a little
bit disturbed to hear that there were very few inquiries. These
poor children did not know where to enquire. We are still dealing
with people today all the time who write to us to tell them where
to go and what to do. It is not easy for people who have been
sent at a very young age to try to deal with any bureaucracy even
in Canada, let alone across the ocean.
(Mr Lorente) Records exist in two places.
They exist over here and they exist over there. They exist in
the dominion or the colony where the child has been sent. There
has to be a double thrust: a foundation and an office or an official
should be set up in each of the colonies because, as Kay points
out, it is threatening if they have to deal with another country
so they generally come to us. I do not mind writing to people.
We have not dealt with the Government back home but we have written
to Prime Minister Jean Chretien and to our heritage minister.
These people have written open letters to our reunions. They know
exactly what we do. There is a senator who knows about it. Princess
Diana wrote an open letter to us. She made a mistake, by the way,
in addressing it which a lot of people make. They call them Home
Children in Canada or Child Migrants in Australia. Home Children
in Canada are very often called Barnado's children because there
was less stigma attached to a Barnado's child. We have people
who sometimes create problems for us when they say "I was
a Barnado's child, I was sent to Belleville" and if they
were sent to Belleville they were not a Barnado's child, or to
Knowlton or wherever.
Dr Brand
56. I am really interested in your response because
I am not sure in my mind who should actually be responsible for
the organising of the help, whether that should be the agencies
you talk about or whether it should be a one-stop shop that is
an intermediary between the agencies and the person making the
inquiry.
(Mr Lorente) It
has been my experience that some agencies are slow in coming on
side. We have excellent co-operation with Barnado's, they have
done a wonderful job, we have liaised with the Quarriers and the
Roman Catholic Church has done a great deal. We are now, as of
last year, very closely co-operating with the Anglican Church.
In all cases these people have sent people over to Canada to our
reunions. We invite overseas speakers to come at their own expense
because Home Children Canada cannot afford it. They have come
and Barnado's have come every year. We move our reunions. We organise
the reunions as well. We move these around the country because
people wrote to us and said "we cannot come to you, we are
too old, can you come to us?" We hope to go to Vancouver
and eventually the maritime provinces.
(Mrs Gollinger-Lorente) Regarding the
one-stop shop, I think that would be ideal really but I agreed
with the gentleman who spoke at the beginning from the Government
that it might delay the accessibility to records, that interim
when they are trying to put things together. That could be a problem,
especially for our situation where the Home Children are very
elderly, they are in their eighties or nineties. I would not be
averse to it, we have thought of that from the beginning, that
it is too bad that things are not organised somewhere centrally.
(Mr Lorente) We have asked agencies
to get involved. I wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal
Hume asking if the church would get involved and right now, with
a troika with Barnado's, they are working on this type of thing.
A lot of agencies have microfilms and the documents need not be
taken from the place, you could get somebody to go in and photograph
them. There are microfilms in the National Archives which I cannot
access. I went in one day and found a filing aid that said "Film
strips on juvenile migration accessible". I thought that
is a strange title. I went over to the lady at the desk and I
said "could I have the filing aid for the inaccessible microfilms?"
and she said "yes" and she handed it to me. So we have
microfilms that are available in Canada but they are not available
because of a 100 year closure. In my father's case I will have
to wait until 2019 because that was the last entry, but I cannot
wait. 57. I was very pleased to hear, Chairman, that the experience
in Canada of placing agencies is now a very positive one. Are
there particular agencies that have not been helpful? I would
be interested to hear what the maritime provinces' experience
is of that.
(Mr Willoughby)
We find that our approach is somewhat different. Our encounters
with placing agencies have been less than helpful. We run into
the business of providing you send the applications in in the
proper way they will respond and I know what Mr Lorente said is
absolutely correct and he does an admirable job. Our problem is
that at the moment we have 6,000 requests to find. That came about
as a result of a test programme we ran to see if we could identify
Home Children in Canada. Within a three or four month period with
a very, very modest programme we had received over 6,000 requests
for information and help. Obviously we simply do not have access
to the funding and a lot of the times we simply do not know the
agencies. There is no place in Canada except for the passenger
lists, if you can find a name on the passenger list, which requires
a great deal of research. Nevertheless, we feel very strongly
that it is too fragmented. To go back to the sending agencies
is okay, there is nothing wrong with it, but it takes too long,
sometimes it takes 12- 14 months. I can tell you of a lady in
Australia who has been trying for 12 years and she came to us
in desperation to see if we could help in Canada. People in the
United States are writing to us. People in England are writing
to us to see if we can find relatives in Canada. It is not a one-way
street. Siblings were split up at the docks, some were sent to
Australia, some were sent to Canada, some where sent to New Zealand.
We recently reunited a family, two sisters sent to Australia,
two to Canada, two remained in Birmingham, and all their relatives.
Fortunately, through work, we were able to bring those together.
It is too much time. For instance, take the Canadian Home Children
experience. We do not know whether it is 120,000 or 110,000 or
150,000 but certainly the records show that it is over 100,000
which represents more than two-thirds of the Home Children that
were sent out to various countries. When you add to that the siblings
that were split up and sent out to the countries on their own
it becomes quite a large number of people. The demographers that
we have talked to estimate that the living relatives in England
are in excess of 10 million people. Ten million relatives are
alive and living in the United Kingdom. It is a massive job to
bring all those numbers together in one sense but if through co-operation,
whatever the agency may be, if somehow we can walk into the records
office and get a birth certificate or a marriage certificate or
a death certificate of anybody in England and after 25 years you
can get access to cabinet documents, I find it very strange that
our representatives went into a society here recently and asked
to see a ledger that was over 125 years—because we were
told that the time period was 125 years and this was 128 years—and
there was a hullabaloo about allowing access to the ledger for
the three years and they decided they could not show us the register
because there were people in the register after the 125 years
so consequently the whole register was barred. When you get into
that sort of nonsense it becomes impossible. We have taken a pact,
with the Canadian Government, that we want a Canadian solution.
We want our records available to our people by whatever means.
We are prepared to co-operate with anybody and I am sure the
Canadian Government, from our discussions with them, are prepared
to co-operate with anybody. In fact, we have been making overtures
to the present Government. The main thing is we have to have a
central location. We are in the process of setting up a permanent
centre on Prince Edward Island that will be called the Canadian
Centre for Home Children. We have had the very generous presentation
by the Canadian Government to our organisation recently of a property
that will be ours for the foreseeable future. We hope to set it
up in such a way—Incidentally it is 300 yards from Anne
of Green Gables' house where they have 300,000 to 500,000 tourist
visitors a year. We expect that in three or four years' time we
will not have to be turning to Government or anybody else, we
expect to be fully self-sufficient in our own location doing our
own thing. That is the approach that we are taking. We want to
do it with the encouragement of Home Children, we have volunteers
working in England, some of which are here today, we have volunteers
working in Australia, we network with the people we help. That
is the way we have decided to approach the problem. We can help
solve our own problem.
(In the absence of the Chairman, Audrey Wise was
called to the Chair)
Mr Gunnell
58. Specifically on the Canadian Government's help,
they have given you a property and that property is one that you
will be able to use in the way that you have suggested but do
they give any specific financial assistance to either of you as
organisations?
(Mr Willoughby)
We have received some interim financing both from the Province
of Prince Edward Island and the Government of Canada. We are in
final discussions with the Department of Immigration and the Department
of Heritage. Their officials are meeting on a regular basis. We
have direct access to the minister's office. We have been assured
that a solution will be forthcoming to the problems and we will
be receiving funding to proceed with the plan that we intend to
implement which will be done in every case. If we have access,
and it is easy access, our job becomes relatively easy. If there
are obstructions and difficulties then it becomes more difficult.
The job is going to be done I can assure you of that. We intend
to incorporate the Canadian Centre for Home Children in the United
Kingdom probably some time in June with the assistance of the
Government of Canada. 59. Clearly it is a very positive relationship
as far as your organisation is concerned. Is that also true for
yourselves?
(Mr Lorente) No,
we are a sub-committee of Heritage Renfrew. Heritage Renfrew operates
on a budget of $1,600 a year, £700. We are all volunteers.
Kay and I are the Home Children Committee and we absorb virtually
all the costs of travel and everything else. Donations that are
sent to us are reserved for special projects like the erection
of plaques. We had the first two historical plaques erected in
Canada to the memory of Home Children, one in our own town and
a provincial plaque is going up in Ontario. We also have branches
and volunteers, one in Quebec and one on the Pacific Coast, and
they are both in the process of trying to erect plaques as well.
We want to get one on pier 21 down in Halifax which will be re-opening
in two years. We do it ourselves.
25 Note by witness: It was almost 30 years before I
understood why Dad broke into tears about an incident he had previously
seemed happy about. I understand why when I read that agencies
in Britain wanted the break with family to be so complete that
they normally permitted visiting only at and through the gate.
My father was not an orphan. He had two loving parents and five
siblings. He never saw them again.
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