*2010* ~ Year of the British Home Child in Canada

A new 57-cent stamp offers a very limited sense of the trade in children that Canada encouraged and condoned for 70 years

On Wednesday, Canada Post will issue a commemorative stamp to honour the 100,000 orphaned and abandoned children shipped from Britain to Canada as indentured labourers from 1869 to 1939. The stamp portrays the SS Sardinian, a steam-driven, 400-foot passenger ship used to ferry children from Liverpool to Montreal, and two photographs: the first, a farm boy turning sod – perhaps in the 1920s – with a horse-drawn plow; the second, a boy in a heavy winter coat standing beside a suitcase marked “Hamilton.” The symbolic importance of the second photo is that the picture was once framed – suggesting that this young pauper had become a cherished member of a Canadian family.

This 57-cent stamp gives a very limited sense of the trade in children that Canada encouraged and condoned for 70 years. However dispossessed, the child labourers provided Canada with a next-generation work force, as servant interns, for free. All were required to work for room and board until they turned 18. Although most were in their early teens, many were much younger and some were mere infants – discarded by impoverished mothers in the most wretched slums of Charles Dickens’s most melancholy England.

For its part, Britain has officially apologized to surviving “home children” around the world for whatever abuses they experienced and, more relevant, for not taking proper care of its own most wretched children. In his apology earlier this year, then-prime minister Gordon Brown said: “We are sorry that the voices of these children were not heard, that their cries for help were not heeded.”

Australia has apologized, too – although with less reason. Taken together, the home children represented a massive philanthropic enterprise by the churches and the charitable organizations of the Empire. It cost £15 to ship a child abroad, plus provisions (in many cases, three changes of clothes, a brush, a comb, a Bible and a copy of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress). The children could have been maintained at home (meeting the minimal legal conditions prescribed by England’s Poor Laws) for £12.

Promote the Year of the British Home Child. Download and print the poster:

British Home Child poster
PDF, size: 3.6 MB
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For additional information or to request hard copies of the poster, contact the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration by:

Mail:

2010: Year of the British Home Child in Canada
365 Laurier Avenue West, 19th floor
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 1L1

E-mail: BHC-PIB@cic.gc.ca

Telephone (toll-free):

1-888-77MULTI / 1-888-776-8584

Legacies will live on because the only way people will remember the past, is by sharing it with future generations.

Designed & Prepared by:         Gail Diane Collins, St Catharines, Ontario, Canada

Sewn by:                                  Sylvia VanGeest, 'Seams Like Yesterday', Grimsby, Ontario

Quilted by:                               Carol Cunningham, 'The Quilt Batt',  Beamsville, Ontario