Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

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She gradually discovered, to her horror, and the horror of the British and Australian public in general, that as many as 150,000 children had been sent (without parent or guardian) from British children’s homes, starting in the 1920s, to a “new life” in Canada, Australia, Rhodesia or New Zealand. For some there were positive opportunities but for many there were slavery-like conditions on farms and in domestic service. In the mid 1980s Margaret Humphreys was your average social worker living about three miles away from where I’m typing this review, in West Bridgford, Nottingham.

My father, still traumatised after having survived four years in a concentration camp, worked nights in the local colliery. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the British empire, right up until 1970. After church we would look for pennies on the ground, and I remember a priest that would try to talk us into following him if we wanted to get a quarter each.

At a time when empty cradles were contributing woefully to empty spaces, it was necessary to look for external sources of supply. For numerous children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Western Australia and elsewhere. Though we may feel powerless as we read or watch, there is in fact something tangible that we can do to help. Others suffered deep wounds from the mental and physical abuse they faced from the hands of their caregivers. Almost all of the children, from orphanages or children’s homes, had parents who did not realise what was happening.

As recently as the early 1990s, when Humphreys was in the heart of her work, the British and Australian governments were busy either denying wrongdoing entirely or pointing fingers at each other. One friend of mine who had been adopted got Margaret Humphries to trace her parents - that's a whole other story, but it did have a quasi-happy ending. In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker and mother of two, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. This is the true account of Margaret Humphreys, who uncovered and investigated the deportation of up to 150,000 children from Britain to other parts of the "Empire".Margaret Humphreys is the Director and founder of the Child Migrants Trust, supported by Nottinghamshire County Council. Yes this terrible scar not only on History but upon the lives of those who were affected will forever hold …. Margaret's work lead to the exposure of this little known scheme and helped many people reunite with the families they left behind years earlier. Some of these stories end in further disappointment as Humphries and her team reassemble the pieces of a child migrant’s past only to find reunion is no longer a possibility.

This book was an amazing insight into a long and ill conceived period of social engineering presided over by several governments and many powerful institutions and probably the most absorbing and informative books I have read in a long time. There is possibly still a lot of work going on to help the children who are now men and women coming into their twighlight years of life. As her husband so rightly points out, Margaret was indeed the right person in the right place at the right time and with an astonishing family. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. The criminally cruel migrant scheme which removed thousands of British children from everything familiar, including, in some cases, family members who wanted them and were told that they'd died, and plunked them down in foreign countries, is now more known.I was absolutely shocked to read that this could have taken place, that the UK could have been involved in something so appalling. For three decades (1940s - 1967), thousands of English and Irish children were taken from their homes and shipped to Commonwealth countries (namely NZ, Canada, Rhodesia and Australia) to populate the colonies and provide (slave) labour to farms. And then suddenly there is a programme on the television and he somehow finds the courage or the anger, or whatever it takes, to come and say, ‘I’m giving you this, I’ve carried it for long enough.

Margaret Humphreys, a British Social worker literally fell into a hornets nest when she discovered the Child Migration Scheme. I have for many years known I had an older brother taken from my mother in the 1950's and witnessed her hurt and fear about the shame she was to carry with her about this till the day she died.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. When reading the blurb, I committed the mistake of assuming there was good reason behind such decisions and that these actions were probably born of a desire to evacuate citizens from London during The Blitz.