BOOKS & DIGITAL PICKS
Orphans: A History by Jeremy Seabrook
This month’s family history inspiration
Hurst, 320 pages, £20 The book begins with a wideranging definition of what an orphan is. Its root lies in the Greek orphanos, meaning ‘bereaved’, and there are many ways to be bereaved: to lose one or both parents through illness, natural disasters, war, abandonment, through being given up because of illegitimacy or being taken away from unsuitable parents. Although orphans have been cared for by relatives, Janet Seabrook gives us the voices, old and new, of those who have suffered from neglect and worse at the hand of the state and charitable organisations.
The 1601 Poor Relief Act may have been the most humane contribution to popular welfare until the welfare state, but orphans and poor children in general were exploited for their labour. The situation was at its worst during the 18th century with the advent of the Industrial Revolution and the movement of people into towns; Victorian hypocrisy reared its head and children were taken from their deemed-to-be-unsuitable parents to be sent abroad or put in workhouses. The Poor Law gradually improved, finally replaced by the Children’s Acts of 1948, when children were returned to the parental home wherever possible, and of 1963, which rejected the segregation of deprived children.
Although rich orphans were treated differently because of their wealth, the feelings of loss remained, as illustrated by stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Bertrand Russell and John Lennon. Children were ‘orphaned’ by being sent to serve in other households to learn courtly manners; today wealthier Africans may send their children overseas for safety or for an education.
Throughout the book Seabrook shows the continuity of mistreatment of orphans, at home and abroad. The author ends with an interesting polemic on what it means to be an orphan in an age of globalisation and commercialism, but does not give us an idea of the practicalities of how orphans might be treated in the future. However, if we follow the argument throughout the book, these are not likely to change radically. Janet Sacks is a social historian and author. She writes about the children evacuated abroad during WW2 on
On 7 September 1940 German bombs rained down on London, and continued to do so for the next 56 days and nights. But the horror of invasion had been uppermost in the minds of the populace for years, and plans had been made for the mass evacuation of cities to rural areas as early as 1938. As soon as Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, even before war had been declared, the exodus began. Incredibly, within the first three days more than 1.5 million civilians were moved out of the cities to the relative safety of the countryside. The scheme was called Operation Pied Piper, because most of the evacuees were children.
Among the plans for taking children to safety was one of evacuating them overseas, despite the dangers of maritime voyages during wartime. Parents who could afford it had already made arrangements to send children out of Britain to relatives and friends: by the end of 1941, 6,000 children had been sent without government help to Canada and 5,000 to the USA. Some businesses, such as Hoover and Kodak, even had private schemes to evacuate the children of their British employees to the USA. In addition the British Dominions wanted to show their support to a country under threat, and offers of hospitality through an evacuation programme were made by the governments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa as well as the USA.
On 17 June 1940, a government organisation was set up to take advantage of these offers. The Children’s Overseas Reception Board (CORB) was chaired by Geoffrey Shakespeare, parliamentary under-secretary of state to the Dominions Office. Its official terms of reference, held in The National Archives (TNA), were “to consider offers from overseas to house and care for children, whether accompanied