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When General Charles Gordon lived at Gravesend in the 1860s, he turned himself into a child rescuer. This book contributes to understandings of both contemporary child welfare practices and the complex dynamics of empire. It analyses the construction and transmission of nineteenth-century British child rescue ideology. The book aims to explain the mentality which allowed the child removal policy to flourish. The disseminated publications by four influential English child rescue organisations: Dr. Barnardo's (DBH), the National Children's Homes (NCH), the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society (WSS) and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), are discussed. The gospel of child rescue was a discursive creation, the impact of which would be felt for generations to come. The body of the child was placed within a familiar environment, rendered threatening by the new social, religious and moral meanings ascribed to it. Ontario's 1888 Children's Protection Act required local authorities to assume maintenance costs of wards and facilitated the use of foster care. Changing trends in publishing have created an opportunity for the survivors of out-of-home care to tell their stories. The book shows how the vulnerable body of the child at risk came to be reconstituted as central to the survival of nation, race and empire. The shocking testimony that official enquiries into the treatment of children in out-of-home 'care' held in Britain, Ireland, Australia and Canada imply that there was no guarantee that the rescued child would be protected from further harm.
stories I am drawing on, nearly half (twenty-one) were given up for adoption to their local authority or a children’s home.1 Of these babies, fourteen were male, seven female.2 Yet in the event very few were actually adopted. The vast majority remained in children’s homes throughout their childhood and early adolescence, with a number fostered for a period of time. Why was this? Until late 1947 Dr Barnardo’s Homes, Britain’s largest children’s charity, refused to contemplate adoption. The spring 1946 issue of its magazine Night and Day explains its opposition: ‘would
child rescue organisations, founded in the second half of the nineteenth century: Dr Barnardo’s ( DBH ), the National Children’s Homes ( NCH ), the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society ( WSS ) and the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children ( NSPCC ). Rather than entering into the long-running debate as to whether they were primarily humanitarian agencies or agents of social control, or
The body of the child was placed within a familiar environment, rendered threatening by the new social, religious and moral meanings ascribed to it. In transposing the threat from the personal to the national, the literature rendered support for the child rescue movement a patriotic act. Rescue was thus constituted a 'wise and patriotic, as well as a benevolent act', providing the individual with 'self-respect' and the nation with a 'prosperous and productive' workforce in the future. Child rescuers developed a taxonomy of space in which geography determined destiny. The relationship drawn between the nation and the child enabled child rescuers to articulate a new concept of children's rights, creating a direct claim to citizenship which bypassed the property rights of the parent. The work begun by Dr Barnardo, Thomas Bowman Stephenson, Edward de Montjoie Rudolf and Benjamin Waugh was now recognised as essential for national survival.
. 16 On photography see Seth Koven, ‘ Dr Barnardo’s “artistic fictions”: photography, sexuality, and the ragged child in Victorian London ’, Radical History Review , 69 ( 1997 ), 6–45; A. McHoul, ‘ Taking the children: some reflections at a distance on the camera and Dr Barnardo ’, Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media and
This book recounts the little-known history of the mixed-race children born to black American servicemen and white British women during the Second World War. Of the three million American soldiers stationed in Britain from 1942 to 1945, about 8 per cent (240,000) were African-American; the latter’s relationships with British women resulted in the birth of an estimated 2,000 babies. The African-American press named these children ‘brown babies’; the British called them ‘half-castes’. Black GIs, in this segregated army, were forbidden to marry their white girlfriends. Up to half of the mothers of these babies, faced with the stigma of illegitimacy and a mixed-race child, gave their children up for adoption. The outcome for these children tended to be long-term residency in children’s homes, sometimes followed by fostering and occasionally adoption, but adoption societies frequently would not take on ‘coloured’ children, who were thought to be ‘too hard to place’. There has been minimal study of these children and the difficulties they faced, such as racism in a (then) very white Britain, lack of family or a clear identity. Accessibly written and illustrated with numerous photographs, this book presents the stories of over forty of these children. While some of the accounts of early childhood are heart-breaking, there are also many uplifting narratives of finding American fathers and gaining a sense of self and of heritage.
importunities of beggars, the charities that failed to investigate how deserving were the recipients of their largesse. But philanthropy itself was in danger of forgetting or ignoring these admonitions. Political economists, W. R. Greg perhaps the most vocal, but he was echoed by many others, insisted on the harm that misplaced philanthropy could do, on the danger it posed to the national economy and to national character. The target in the nineteenth century was what was embedded in the practices of the voluntary organisations that made up the world of philanthropy. Dr
schemes during this period. 1 The largest and best known is Dr Barnardo’s, which accounted for about one third of British child migrants. Others included Maria Rye, Marchmont, Macpherson Homes, Fegan’s Homes, Quarrier Homes, the Children’s Aid Society, Liverpool Sheltering Home, National Children’s Homes, Child Emigration Society (Fairbridge), Salvation Army
, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Chalmers, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Carlyle, George Bernard Shaw and William Beveridge. This book is more about them and about the novelists, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, John Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf and others, who dissected philanthropy than it is about those who were called philanthropists. I am interested in who the label was attached to and why – and to that extent in what they did or gave. But this is not the book for those who want to find out more about Angela Burdett-Coutts or George Peabody or Dr Barnardo, or about those
good plain cook is the agonising demand of the British matron’, declared Dr Barnardo. ‘We will show you how we try to meet it.’ 56 Indeed, the frequent descriptions of the tasks the children performed in the homes were used to encourage supporters to consider offering them employment. ‘We should like to remind mothers of families how handy it is sometimes and what a rest it would be to them sometimes