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Trenholm 1Her Forgotten Export: Great Britain’s Emigrant Children in CanadaDavid Trenholm10007794902 December 2008Dr. Gillian Poulter HIST 3613 X1
 
Trenholm 2Overlooked by many, and perhaps unknown to a great deal of Canadians, are GreatBritain’s “pauper emigrant children”, or Home Children—the tens of thousands of children thatwere sent in droves from the British Isles to her colonies abroad. Beginning in the early 19
th
century, many of these Home Children arrived in Canada to start a new life, either in the urbancentres where population was growing rapidly, or more likely working as labourers in Canada’suntamed West.
1
 Many of these children—aged between two and nineteen years
2
 —left behinddestitute conditions in many impoverished urban areas in Great Britain. The IndustrialRevolution ushered in intense poverty for many rural families that had moved to the major metropolises of Britain; many parents were faced with great difficulty in clothing and feedingtheir children, and bereft of steady employment many of these children found themselvesorphaned and left on the streets to fend for themselves.
3
Having these children transported toBritain’s colonies was considered an acceptable solution, not only for the problem of poverty inEngland’s cities, but also for the struggling population and demand for immigration in Britain’sterritorial possession overseas. Canada, South Africa and Australia were all craving for moreimmigrants for their farms and developing industrial sectors—tens of thousands of disadvantaged children from Britain could help satiate immigration concerns abroad, but it couldalso help sweep the streets of the child-paupers who had made it their home. Naturally, Canadahad no issue welcoming these children, especially when they were ushered into homes beyondUpper Canada and into Rupert’s Land—land that needed farm labourers and agriculturalists totame and expand the colony’s boundaries. Many evangelical and philanthropic Britons dedicated
1
Marjorie Kohli,
The Golden Bridge: Young Immigrants in Canada, 1833-1939
(Toronto: National Heritage Books,2003), 11.
2
Marjorie Kohli,
Young Immigrants to Canada (including home children)
[record on-line] (Waterloo: University of Waterloo, 2000-2002, accessed 24 November 2008); available fromhttp://ist.uwaterloo.ca/~marj/genealogy/children/lists/middlemore.html; Internet.
3
Kohli,
The Golden Bridge,
3.
 
Trenholm 3their working lives to the collection and emigration of these destitute children; unfortunately, duein part to a lack of supervisory oversight and care, many of these children ended up in homes thatoffered very little in the way of familial warmth. Children were often considered tools, farmlabourers—nothing more than indentured servants under the pretext of philanthropic welfare. Anumber of these Home Children, having been taken from terrible conditions in Britain anddistributed in Canada have tragically disappeared from the pages of history. These children werevulnerable to hard labour and difficult working conditions, as well as abuse and exploitation.Perhaps none of this would have happened, however, if poverty and depravity had notoverwhelmed so many families in the metropolises of England.Without question, the Industrial Revolution transformed the face of Britain’s poor.Mechanized industry grew, and with it gave birth to an age of urban factories and manufacturing plants.
4
 The rural ‘cottage’ households of England’s countryside moved to find work within theexpanding metropolises of Great Britain, cities like Liverpool, Glasgow and, of course, London.
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 Such a booming population, naturally, was more than any of these urban centres could support.Men and women, usually with a host of children, had difficulties finding suitable employment. InBritain’s industrialized cities rampant poverty became as contagious, and often as deadly, as theBlack Death. Many families endured in atrocious conditions, unable to scrape enough incometogether to feed their children, let alone house them in any degree of safety or comfort. In themost depraved of situations parents left their children on the street—some purposefully mutilated —to beg and play on the sympathies of the city’s passerby.
6
These children begged or were sold by their parents to support a lifestyle of gin and substance abuse—it may come as no surprisethat many of these children became orphans as their parents were arrested and locked away in
4
Kohli,
The Golden Bridge,
1.
5
Kohli,
The Golden Bridge,
2.
6
Kohli,
The Golden Bridge,
3.
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