‘If We Were Untrammelled by Precedent…’: Pursuing Gradual Reform in Child Migration, 1954–1961

Abstract

This chapter examines how British child migration policy became caught up in the political sensitivities of post-war assisted migration. By 1950, officials in the Commonwealth Relations Office were becoming increasingly doubtful about the strategic and economic value of assisted migration, but also concerned about adverse political reaction in Australia to any scaling back of this work. An agreement was reached between the Commonwealth Relations and Home Office in 1954 to continue child migration on the basis of encouraging gradual reform of standards in Australia. In 1956, a UK Government Fact-Finding Mission in 1956 recommended more urgent controls over child migration, but this was rejected by an inter-departmental review in view of these wider political sensitivities. Despite introducing more limited monitoring, British policy-makers struggled to reconcile their knowledge of failings in some Australian institutions with the political challenge of trying to address these in the absence of co-operation from the Australian Government.

With the Moss report endorsing the expansion of child migration, and the threat of tighter regulation through s.33 regulations dissipating, there were good grounds for voluntary organisations supporting child migration to feel more confident about the future. The rate of assisted child migration in the early 1950s had recovered to levels approaching those of the autumn of 1947, partly because of recruitment work done by Australian representatives of the Federal Catholic Immigration Committee, Fr Nicol and Fr Stinson, and partly because of a particularly high number of child migrants sent to Australia by the Fairbridge Society in 1950.¹ In 1954, there was no indication that the UK Government was likely to make any policy intervention that would hinder the continuation of child migration work, and the Fairbridge Society felt sufficiently confident to ask for an increase in the Government’s contribution to maintenance payments for child migrants so that it could build up sufficient capital to open new farm schools.² Although not particularly dramatic in scale, the Commonwealth Relations Office also estimated that the positive recommendations in the Moss report might lead to between 200 and 300 more assisted child migrants being sent to Australia in 1954/1955 compared to other recent years.³

However, despite these positive signs for child migration at a policy level, there were increasing signs that child migration was not operating in practice as well as some of its supporters would have hoped. In the summer of 1954, the Commonwealth Department of Immigration asked Noel Lamidey to convey its frustration to the Commonwealth Relations Office at the rate of children being sent from the United Kingdom. At a meeting at the Commonwealth Relations Office Lamidey was recorded as saying that ‘the Commonwealth Government, who had sunk £400,000 in institutions for immigrant children, were dissatisfied with both the quantity and the quality of the children they were now getting’.⁴

This frustration had arisen in part in relation to the cohort of children sent by Catholic organisations in 1947, many of whom were judged not to be progressing well. This was, arguably, unsurprisingly given the very sparse information that had been sent with them about their previous backgrounds, educational standards or medical histories and the unwarranted assumption that transfer from large residential institutions in one country to another would be not disruptive for them.⁵ Despite 1882 child migrants arriving in Australia from the United Kingdom from autumn 1947 until the end of 1953, this fell considerably short of the numbers which the Commonwealth Department of Immigration believed could be sent, with Tasman Heyes claiming that it would not be unreasonable to expect Australia to receive 10% of the 125,000 children identified by the Curtis report as living outside a ‘normal family home’. As a minimum, Lamidey told the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1954, Australia should be receiving ‘a steady 600 child immigrants a year’, something that had never been achieved since assisted migration to Australia had resumed in 1947.⁶

There had also been some notable failures in recruitment for individual residential institutions to which the Australian Commonwealth and State Governments had made substantial capital grants. The Dhurringile Rural Training Farm had been opened for child migrants by the Presbyterian Church in Victoria through a grant of A£23,562 from the Commonwealth and State Governments to cover two-thirds of the total building and refurbishment costs.⁷ Recruitment to Dhurringile through the Church of Scotland Committee on Social Service proved slow, however, leading to the Commonwealth Government’s successful efforts, discussed in the previous chapter, to pressure the UK Government into allowing the Over-Seas League to be recognised as a recruiting body for Dhurringile as well. Despite the League being allowed to undertake this work, however, available spaces at Dhurringile were never close to being filled.

An even more notable failure had occurred in relation to Nazareth House, at East Camberwell in Melbourne, which had received an A£90,000 capital grant to build a new wing alongside its existing accommodation for elderly residents to house and educate child migrants. This building work created space for 150 girls from the United Kingdom, but initial recruitment efforts by Fr Stinson to recruit girls specifically for East Camberwell in the spring and summer of 1953 had led to only 20 arrivals there by August 1953. Stinson later reported to the Commonwealth Department of Immigration that he had only managed to secure nominations for this many girls from the Sisters of Nazareth by threatening the order’s Superior General in Hammersmith that this capital grant would have to be paid if the order did not make arrangements for more girls in their care in the United Kingdom to be emigrated there.⁸ The Commonwealth Government’s dissatisfaction with this outcome arose not only from the scale of investment that had been made in East Camberwell, but also from the fact that this investment seems to have been made on the basis of specific assurances that sufficient numbers of child migrants would indeed be available.⁹ In the wake of disappointing recruitment for East Camberwell, Tasman Heyes wrote to the Federal Catholic Immigration Committee to say that current levels of Catholic child migration meant that the priority was now for filling existing vacancies in Catholic residential institutions rather than funding any further new building work.¹⁰ Such circumstances, Heyes emphasised, showed the need for ‘very close investigation’ of future funding requests. By spring 1954, the Commonwealth Relations Office estimated that of the 2000 places created to receive British child migrants in Australian residential institutions, probably just under a third remained unfilled.¹¹

In response to what they perceived as the disappointing flow of children from the United Kingdom, and the problems of voluntary organisations in even maintaining existing rates of child migration, the Australian Commonwealth Government resumed attempts in spring 1954 to get the Home Office to encourage local authorities to send more of the children in their care.¹² Whilst there were a small number of exceptions, the comparative lack of involvement of local authorities in child migration programmes was stark. The Home Office’s own statistical reporting showed that local authorities had, at the end of November 1952, responsibility for the care of 64,682 children in foster care as well as in residential homes run by themselves or by voluntary organisations. In the preceding 12 months, however, only 20 children had left local authority care through emigration.¹³ The picture was little different the following year with 65,309 children in local authority care at the end of November 1953, but only 41 children having left their care by emigration in the previous year.¹⁴ In total, the Home Office calculated that from the start of 1950 until June 1954, only 177 children had been sent from the care of local authorities.¹⁵ During this period, only three local authorities had allowed more than half a dozen children in their care to be sent overseas: Surrey County Council had given up 8 children, London County Council 14 and Cornwall County Council 28. Cornwall seemed to be an exceptional case because of its Children’s Officer, Dorothy Watkin’s previous association with the Fairbridge Society.¹⁶ These very small numbers of children were all the more striking given that the total number of children in local authority care had increased by 18% between 1949 and 1953.¹⁷

There was little enthusiasm for the Commonwealth Government’s request in the Home Office. As had been the case with the Moss report, the Home Office Children’s Department did not consider it appropriate for it to advocate the emigration of children in care as a matter of public policy and doubted that there would be much further interest in child migration amongst local authorities either.¹⁸ At the same time, the Home Office had no wish to appear obstructive to the Commonwealth Government’s request and agreed to arrange a meeting between local authorities and immigration officials at Australia House on the basis that it would be much better for Australian officials to hear any objections to child migration directly from local authorities themselves rather than the Home Office or Commonwealth Relations Office having to act as the bearer of unwanted news. Clear lines of policy demarcation between the Home Office and Commonwealth Relations Office were also reinforced, with the former recognising that matters of emigration policy ultimately resided with the Commonwealth Relations Office, and the Commonwealth Relations Office agreeing that it could not by-pass the Home Office by trying to contact local authorities directly to encourage child migration.

With arrangements delayed by the replacement of Noel Lamidey as Chief Migration Officer at Australia House, this meeting between representatives of the County Council’s Association and the Council of Voluntary Organisations for Child Emigration (with staff from Australia House acting as observers) eventually took place in June 1955.¹⁹ Little agreement arose from this. Representatives from the local authorities made it clear that they thought it was eminently unsuitable to consider the 40% of children in their care who were boarded out as possible candidates for emigration. Of the remaining 60% who were in residential care, most were either only in residential care on a temporary basis or had special needs which made them unsuitable for emigration. The remainder of physically and mentally able children in long-term residential care were, the local authorities argued, still needed in Britain given that the economy was running at near full employment. Furthermore, they noted that Moss’s report had observed the need for more child migrants in residential institutions in Australia to be boarded out, and that even the receiving institutions based on grouped cottage homes were more institutionalised and less well-staffed than was increasingly the case in scattered homes in Britain. Responding on behalf of the migration societies, Mr Vaughan from the Fairbridge Society argued that emigration could protect children from exploitative relatives, had been supported by both the Curtis Committee and 1948 Children Act, and that his organisation was aware of cases where local authorities had failed to provide suitable interventions with problem families. An agreement was reached to circulate more information about the migration societies’ work but, as a note on the Commonwealth Relations Office record of the meeting observed, whilst it might lead to local authorities having some greater understanding of migration societies’ working methods, ‘it will take a great deal to break down [their] prejudices about child migration’.²⁰ In practice, there was little or no change in the willingness of many local authority Children’s Officers to change their views on this issue, and between March 1955 and March 1959, only 73 more children left the care of local authorities through emigration.²¹

From the mid-1950s, child migration to Australia began to dwindle as a result of the resistance of many local authorities, the difficulty of voluntary organisations in providing a continuing supply of children from their own care, and the decision by some sending organisations—particularly the Catholic Child Welfare Council—largely to withdraw from this work. Alongside this gradual decline, however, the most intensive post-war policy discussions about this work took place within the UK Government as the competing pressures of assisted migration and child-care policies became increasingly clear.

Towards Policy Compromise: The Syers and Garner Inter-departmental Committees on Migration Policy

One of the significant factors to drive policy discussions of child migration through the 1950s was the cyclical process of reviewing the Empire Settlement Act, built into the Act’s original requirement that it was subject to renewal every 15 years.²² With the Act’s first renewal agreed in 1937, discussion began in the Commonwealth Relations Office in 1950 as to what its policy should be towards the renewal of both the Australian Assisted Passage Scheme (due to expire in March 1951) and the Empire Settlement Act (due to expire in May 1952). The Australian scheme was, at that point, the only major assisted migration agreement to have been made under the terms of the Act since the end of the war, and made up around 95% of spending authorised by the Act.²³

With questions about the renewal of the Australian scheme and the Act itself seen as closely connected, there was some scepticism within the Commonwealth Relations Office about renewing either. A memorandum prepared by Richard Sedgwick, the Assistant Under-Secretary in the Commonwealth Relations Office with responsibility for political and constitutional affairs, argued that there were a number of factors suggesting their renewal was unnecessary.²⁴ The economic and demographic factors which had made assisted migration an appealing policy in the pre-war era were no longer present for an ageing British society nearing full employment which needed to retain its younger, working citizens. Assisted migration had primarily been taken up by industrial workers who would end up working in secondary industries in Australia rather than supporting primary production of food for export to the United Kingdom. Increased public spending in Britain on education and child welfare would also be wasted if its beneficiaries left the country before contributing back to the economy through their working lives. There was also little merit in the argument that assisted migration was needed to sustain the ‘British element’ of the population of Commonwealth countries. Canada and South Africa—whose British population was fast becoming a minority—were unable to establish assisted migration schemes with the United Kingdom for political reasons, and Australia and New Zealand—with whom such schemes had been set up—were already predominantly British. Perversely, then, the encouragement of British emigration to Australia and New Zealand through assisted migration thus directed British emigrants to Commonwealth countries where there was little strategic or political need for British citizens and away from countries where such need existed.

Whilst Segdwick argued that there were no economic or immediate strategic grounds to justify the renewal of the Australian scheme or the Empire Settlement Act itself, he noted that political sensitivities around their closure would be far harder to manage. The UK High Commission had already warned that even simply placing a cap on the number of assisted passages to Australia would elicit ‘acute political controversy’ in Australia, be interpreted as a cooling of relations between the United Kingdom and Australia, and be used by the Australian Labor Party as grounds for attacking the new Liberal-Country Party coalition Government, led by Robert Menzies, for mis-managing Anglo-Australian relations.²⁵ There was also some sentimental attachment to the idea of imperial migration in the House of Commons and the House of Lords which could cause political problems at home as well. Such adverse political reaction could be managed however, Sedgwick argued, by presenting the expiry of the scheme and the Act in the context of wider measures to show that emigration to the Commonwealth was still supported by the British Government. The exception to these closures was the comparatively small amount spent on supporting the assisted migration of children, juveniles and single women through the work of voluntary organisations, about which Sedgwick observed ‘the odium incurred by the withdrawal of our support would be out of all proportion to the saving’. The assisted migration of children did not have the same adverse economic implications as the emigration of people of working age, and the continuation of funding for such work by the Treasury could be presented as ‘a token of our goodwill to Commonwealth migration’, perhaps helping to make cuts to the assisted migration for adults more palatable.

Sedgwick ’s argument was supported by the Deputy Under-Secretary, Cecil Syers, and Labour’s Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Lord Holden, who was less enthusiastic about continuing to fund the migration work of voluntary organisations.²⁶ Leonard Walsh Atkins, head of the Commonwealth Relations Office General Department, was, however, unconvinced that giving up the potential levers over emigration provided by the Act was wise. Walsh Atkins pointed out that Australia’s political investment in immigration—with the Commonwealth Minister of Immigration recently suggesting that they might over-pay for a British warship to compensate the UK Government for continued spending on assisted migration—meant that the political fall-out from any policy change would be considerable.²⁷ Furthermore, he noted, although majority white and non-white countries were now being incorporated into the shared body of the Commonwealth, there was a continuing need to preserve the strongest links with the old ‘white Dominions’. ‘We know what the hard core of [the Commonwealth] is’, he commented, ‘and also I think the necessity of keeping it hard’. A similar argument was also made by Walter Garnett, who agreed that whilst there was no pressing economic case for assisted migration, there was a strategic need to recognise that ‘the United Kingdom must depend upon the strength of the Commonwealth, that a better distribution of the white population of the Commonwealth is an essential factor in building up its strength, and that State-aided migration assists this redistribution’.²⁸

Alongside these disagreements, a clear consensus was reached in the Commonwealth Relations Office that the sensitivity of any such policy decisions meant that it would be helpful for them to be aired fully in an inter-departmental committee, chaired by Syers, which could bring forward formal proposals. Sedgwick also argued that the increasing intransigence of the Home Office in laying down ‘a priori and dogmatic principles and conditions’ in relation to child migration, following the 1948 Children Act, was having ‘the effect of ruling out schemes regarded by the receiving Government as entirely satisfactory’, and that ‘if this goes on we shall be likely to come into collision both with the Australian State and Federal Governments and also with the churches and voluntary organisations affected’.²⁹ The inter-departmental committee, he suggested, could be a useful forum for ‘thrashing out this matter’. The committee should, he added in another note, explore ‘what steps should be taken to ensure a more satisfactory control over child migration than we have in the past possessed without involving the present intolerable and irritating delays in arriving at decisions on schemes’.³⁰

The committee’s confidential report was formally submitted for Government consideration on 12th December 1950.³¹ The committee agreed to the Commonwealth Government’s request not to make any changes to the existing assisted passage scheme until sensitive discussions between Australia and other countries over the creation of similar schemes had been concluded. An extension to this scheme to March 1952 was therefore recommended to provide time for further negotiations. It did not, however, reach a unanimous view on the renewal of the Empire Settlement Act, with representatives from the Commonwealth Relations Office, Home Office and the Treasury opposing its extension, representatives from the Ministry of Labour and National Service and the Ministry of Transport supporting its continuation. Arguments made in favour of retaining the Act included its symbolic and practical value in maintaining a sense of shared bonds between Commonwealth countries, its strategic value for the Australian Commonwealth Government and the economic value of assisted migration to the British shipping industry. Arguments against included the economic and demographic arguments previously made by Sedgwick, the failure of governments other than in Australia to make use of the Act, and the growing economic prosperity of former Dominions through rising commodity prices which made them more able to bear the entire cost of assisted migration.

Despite disagreeing over the future of the Act, the Committee did, however, give its unanimous approval to the continuation of assisted child migration. With Prestige representing the Home Office on the Committee, the report concluded that as long as conditions in receiving institutions were satisfactory, child migrants were able to participate fully in Australian communities and they were provided with education and training suitable to their abilities, then assisted child migration have much to commend it. Reflecting Sedgwick’s earlier point, the Committee also noted that ‘continued participation by the United Kingdom Government in schemes of child migration would do something to counteract the unfavourable impression in Australia of a decision not to continue the Assisted Passage Agreement or Empire Settlement Acts’.³² Whilst the Committee recommended in principle that assisted child migration be continued, regardless of whether the Empire Settlement Act was renewed or not, it also noted Moss’s pending visit to Australia and stated that a final decision of future policy should be made when there had been time to consider his report. Even if the Australian assisted passage scheme and the Empire Settlement Act were allowed to lapse, and no new funding agreements for child migration authorised, both the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office argued that the UK Government would be under a moral obligation to continue maintenance payments for existing child migrants until they reached school-leaving age.

In the absence of any determined move to end either the Australian assisted passage scheme or the Empire Settlement Act—and despite some strong disagreement within the Cabinet³³—both were continued beyond 1952. The Australian scheme was extended for another two years until 1954, and the Empire Settlement Act renewed until 1957. The short extension of the Australian scheme, and lack of any clear view on how to proceed with its longer-term renewal, led to the creation of another inter-departmental committee on migration expenditure in 1954, chaired by Sir Saville Garner, the Deputy Under-Secretary for Commonwealth Relations.³⁴ Its report rehearsed the same broad arguments—although in less detail—than the report of the inter-departmental committee on migration policy four years previously.³⁵ The committee found no strong economic case for the United Kingdom Government to continue funding assisted migration, and the principle of treating Australia as an ‘equal partner’ with the United Kingdom in the Commonwealth suggested that there was no strong grounds for Australia to expect a financial contribution to assisted migration from Britain when the primary economic benefits of such a scheme fell to Australia. However, as with the 1950 inter-departmental report, whilst the economic arguments for continuing to contribute to an assisted migration scheme to Australia were weak, the report noted that the ‘political case is overwhelming’.³⁶

In 1953, the UK Government has proposed to continue to reduce its contribution to this scheme from £500,000 to £150,000 per annum on grounds of wider economic pressures. This had already elicited a strong response from the Commonwealth Government which noted that any continued pulling back from substantial financial contributions would be regarded as ‘not in keeping with the real spirit of partnership which has existed hitherto’. In addition to an immediate adverse reaction in Australia to any attempt to end this scheme altogether, the Garner committee report noted that more serious longer-term risks would be a weakening of social and cultural bonds with Australia as the proportion of non-British immigrants to Australia increased. Lasting damage would also most likely be caused to the political relationship between the two countries which might cause ‘intangible results in a far wider sphere’. At this point, the ‘wider sphere’ for which Anglo-Australian relations were significant included not just Australia’s importance as a British trading partner, but the Commonwealth Government’s willingness to allow nuclear testing to take place on its soil in the context of Britain’s efforts to develop its independent nuclear weapons programme.³⁷ With complaints already reportedly being made in Australia that the United Kingdom did not regard Australia as a proper partner and even as ‘expendable’, the termination of the UK Government’s financial contribution to assisted migration would have a symbolic significance far greater than its practical effects, leaving Australia more susceptible to American influence and a weaker strategic partner for Britain in the Far East.³⁸ Although the report’s recommendation that the UK Government’s financial contribution to the Australian assisted migration scheme remained capped at £150,000 would not be popular in Australia, it would be a sufficient gesture to take the matter ‘out of politics’ for the time being, and by renewing this arrangement until 1957, it was hoped that by then political opinion in Australia might be more sympathetic to British funding being withdrawn altogether.

As in 1950, the case for continuing assisted child migration seemed far more straightforward when judged primarily through the prism of the politics and economics of Commonwealth migration. Well-selected child migrants had, since the war years, been seen as a particularly attractive class of immigrant in Australian Commonwealth policy, reflected in the financial investment made by Commonwealth and State Governments into the creation of new vacancies in receiving institutions. With the UK Government’s annual contribution to assisted child migration to Australia and the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College in Southern Rhodesia totalling £43,600 at the time of the 1954 report,³⁹ such schemes had the political virtue of appealing to Australian political opinion and the economic virtue of being comparatively cheap in relation to the costs of assisted adult and family migration.

Having turned to a policy of trying to influence standards of care for child migrants in Australia by persuasion rather than regulation, the Home Office used the 1954 report as another mechanism to press for further, incremental change.⁴⁰ The Children’s Department was cautious—as it had been in relation to the Moss report—of being seen to have anything other than an impartial view of children migration given the statutory responsibility of the Home Secretary to arbitrate on individual children’s cases under s.17 of the 1948 Children Act.⁴¹ However, the negative reaction to the Moss report from child-care professionals, as well as the evident unwillingness of local authorities to give over children for emigration for whom they had a statutory duty of care under the 1948 Act, gave the Children’s Department stronger grounds for arguing that the future prospects for child migration were likely to be negligible without further reform.

Whilst having to assert its position more generally in the inter-departmental committee’s meetings, the section of the committee’s final report dealing with child migration was substantially shaped by input on the Home Office on the growing consensus about good practice in child-care following the Curtis report.⁴² This understanding of good practice was, it argued, not only increasingly prevalent in the United Kingdom but, with the publication of John Bowlby’s report on Maternal Care and Mental Health for the World Health Organisation, a standard that was increasingly recognised internationally as well.⁴³ Whilst the voluntary sector accepted these ideas in principle, some voluntary organisations had struggled to achieve these in practice because of a lack of trained staff. As a consequence, whilst demand for children for adoption was greater than the supply of available children, some organisations, such as the Roman Catholic Church, were still retaining children in residential institutions because insufficient foster placements with Catholic families had been found—a matter which the report noted the Home Secretary had recently raised with Bernard Griffin, the Archbishop of Westminster. The marked trend, it was argued however, was for children to be placed in the care of local authorities—partly because of the expansion of their services and partly because of declining contributions to voluntary societies. As a consequence, between 1949 to 1953, the number of children in local authority care had risen from 55,525 to 65,309, whilst the number in the care of voluntary societies had fallen from 28,760 to 20,461.⁴⁴ With local authorities generally unwilling to send children in their care to residential institutions in Australia, and the Home Office objecting to the idea that children in residential institutions in the United Kingdom could easily be moved to comparable institutions in Australia given that it was precisely such children who relied on the fragile networks of care they had with local communities and other relatives in Britain, child migration seemed to have little future unless standards were reformed.

Whilst the Home Office’s contribution to the report appeared to be setting the scene for a much stronger policy intervention on standards, once again punches were largely pulled. It was unrealistic, the report suggested, to expect voluntary organisations in the United Kingdom ‘to accept forthwith that their methods are based on obsolete conceptions and have failed to move with the times’.⁴⁵ Training staff in these organisations in new approaches to child-care would take time, and the UK Government had a moral obligation to continue to pay the maintenance of child migrants already sent overseas regardless of whether the Empire Settlement Act was renewed in 1957 or not. Continued financial support of child migration also gave the UK Government a stake in the process by which it could attempt to influence standards overseas—something which had not, for example, been possible with regard to child migration to New Zealand. Sudden withdrawal of financial support for voluntary societies would also run against the principle that the voluntary sector still had an important role to play in children’s out-of-home care, not only because their services reduced economic pressures on the State, but because of the good work done through their ‘undoubted… public spirit and good will’. Political factors within the Commonwealth Relations Office also inclined its civil servants to be careful in discussions of the Fairbridge Society—with both the Secretary of State, Viscount Swinton, and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Douglas Dodds-Parker (whose wife, Aileen, was later to become the Society’s chair), known to support its work.⁴⁶ Any suggestion from the Home Office that the Fairbridge Society needed to move towards placing its child migrants with families, just the same as other voluntary societies, was thus met with the view that this would need to be taken up as part of a gradual consultation process with voluntary societies over the next few years.⁴⁷

As a consequence of the weighing up of these different factors, the approach advocated by the report was that assisted child migration should continue to be funded, regardless of any decision over the renewal of the Empire Settlement Act, for a period of up to five years after 1957. The intervening period was to be used for on-going consultation with voluntary organisations and Australian authorities to try to ensure that during that period they moved further towards a policy of placing child migrants to Australia in family homes. As an incentive to voluntary organisations, the report recommended that Fairbridge’s request for increased maintenance funding from the UK Government should be approved if both it were genuinely to be used on children’s maintenance rather than for capital building projects (given the number of vacancies already unfilled in receiving institutions) and any organisation seeking this increase agreed to develop new plans for placing their child migrants in family homes.

Financial constraints meant that the Treasury was not prepared to accept the report’s recommendation that funding for new child migrants be agreed beyond 1957 and thus required that the longer-term future of assisted child migration be reviewed again in 1956 alongside wider discussion of assisted migration to Australia and the possible renewal of the Empire Settlement Act.⁴⁸ Whilst the Treasury hoped that this 1956 review would be able to propose a clear long-term policy on assisted migration, based on careful demographic analysis, civil servants in the Commonwealth Relations Office took the view that assisted migration to Australia would remain for the foreseeable future an intractably political issue.⁴⁹ The fact that the announcement of the general policy recommended by the inter-departmental committee elicited no strong political or public criticism in Australia—despite the UK Government’s contribution to the assisted passage scheme still being capped at £150,000 per annum—suggested that its careful balancing of these political concerns had, for the time being, been successful.⁵⁰ However, any future withdrawal of United Kingdom funding in this area was seen as something that would require very careful political handling, involving starting an immediate ‘softening up’ campaign with Australian officials to prepare them for such a recommendation in the 1956 review.⁵¹ Political management at home was still needed as well, with Viscount Swinton forced to defend the Government’s approach to assisted migration in a debate in the House of Lords in November 1954 on a motion which had urged for a rapid acceleration of emigration to Australia in the face of the growing threat of communism, exemplified by the recent creation of the communist State of North Vietnam.⁵²

Although its recommendations on funding new child migrants after 1957 were not fully implemented, the 1954 Garner report nevertheless marked a growing accommodation between the Commonwealth Relations Office and the Home Office.⁵³ The Commonwealth Relations Office had broadly accepted that further reform in provision for British child migrants in Australia would be needed, although Viscount Swinton prevaricated on this point in the House of Lords’ debate. In a fairly typical display of Parliamentary management of voluntary organisations’ sensibilities, Swinton had argued that whilst it was probably right that children fared better in a family home than an institution, he doubted whether ‘a hard and fast rule can be laid down’ and praised the cottage mothers of Fairbridge who were ‘as good to their foster-children as any real mother could be’.⁵⁴ Whilst the Home Office took the view that child migration need to be run more consistently according to good standards of child-care practice, its Children’s Department accepted that such reform could only realistically be achieved through a gradualist approach.⁵⁵ In the context of the political sensitivities around any perceived weakening commitment on the part of the UK Government to continued funding for assisted migration to Australia, a working agreement appeared to have been reached between these two government departments about seeking to improve standards whilst avoiding sudden policy interventions which might antagonise the opinions of voluntary organisations and Australian officials.

Compromise Under Pressure: The Overseas Migration Board

In January 1955, the UK High Commissioner in Canberra, Sir Stephen Holmes, wrote to Saville Garner acknowledging the outcomes from the inter-departmental committee’s recommendations.⁵⁶ Holmes expressed particularly interest in the report’s discussion of child migration. Whilst Holmes noted that he had ‘never been particularly happy about child migration’, he was somewhat alarmed at the prospect of the reaction of ‘very public spirited and benevolent people here, as of course in the United Kingdom, … when it has to be explained to them that in the official view the whole system which they have so generously supported with their time and money is considered so out of date that it must be brought to an end’. Ending the practice of institutional care for child migrants in Australia would raise complex issues, he noted, not only about how such a system based around foster placements would work and be monitored, but also leave open the question of how voluntary organisations would use the physical infrastructure of buildings and land which they have developed for this work. Holmes’s concern about these issues was brought into sharper focus by his regular contact with people involved in the Fairbridge committee for New South Wales, in which he feared he would soon be challenged again about the UK Government’s policy intentions. Whilst Holmes’s view might accurately have anticipated the views of some supporters of particular voluntary organisations, there was also some indication of a loss of institutional memory in his response. Walter Garnett had retired as the Deputy High Commissioner in Canberra in 1951. Holmes’s concern showed little awareness of the fact that the recommendations of the Curtis report had already been known to voluntary societies and the Commonwealth Department of Immigration for several years now and the importance of boarding children out had also been discussed in the report by John Moss.

Replying to Holmes the following month, Garner recognised that some further reforms of child migration were inevitable, and noted that discussion of this policy was now being referred on to the Oversea Migration Board. With the Board’s support it would be possible, Garner hoped, to begin conversations with the voluntary organisations about their approaches to child-care when their annual funding agreements came up for renewal that spring.⁵⁷ Immigration officials at Australia House were already aware of the drift of Government thinking about need for gradual reform of child migration, and Garner noted that the forthcoming meeting which had been arranged between Australia House, the Council of Voluntary Organisations for Child Emigration and representatives of local authorities, would doubtless further reinforce this message about current thinking about child-care practice in Britain. As Garner noted, though, attention would have to be given to the particular circumstances of each individual voluntary society, adding sardonically that ‘we do, of course, recognise that the Fairbridge Society is in this matter nearest to the angels, if indeed not already among them’.

With rates of post-war emigration rising to levels not seen since 1929, the Oversea Migration Board had been established in February 1953 as a body convened by the Commonwealth Relations Office to provide advice to its Secretary of State on schemes of emigration from the United Kingdom to other Commonwealth countries. This reflected similar work done by its predecessor bodies in the inter-war period, the Oversea Settlement Committee and the Oversea Settlement Board.⁵⁸ Whilst the obvious forum for continued discussion of a matter of assisted migration policy, the Oversea Migration Board was not the easiest mechanism through which to take forward the spirit of gradual reform endorsed by the inter-departmental committee report. Unlike the Home Office Advisory Council on Child-Care, whose membership consisted mainly of representatives of interested statutory, professional and voluntary organisations, the Oversea Migration Board had a majority of members who were MPs and less malleable than civil servants in the Commonwealth Relations Office might wish. Another member, Sir Colin Anderson, Director of the Orient Line shipping service, had a direct commercial interest in public funding being continued for migrant travel to Australia. Attempts in 1954 by the Commonwealth Relations Office to prevent the Board discussing the sensitive issue of the future of the Australia assisted passage scheme had been thwarted when one of its Parliamentary members threatened to raise a question in the House of Commons if the Board were not allowed to do so.⁵⁹ In the event, its first report, published in July 1954,⁶⁰ did not take a radically different view to that which was recommended by the Garner report later that autumn and suggested that there were strong strategic and political reasons for the UK Government continuing to contribute financially to this scheme for the time being. Unlike the Garner committee, however, there was no indication in the Board’s first report that such a financial commitment might reasonably be ended in the coming years.

The task of developing policy specifically on child migration through the Board was also made more complex by the fact that it took a far more positive view of current provision in child migration than the inter-departmental committee had. Members of the Board who were particularly sympathetic to this work included not only Douglas Dodds-Parker, but also by the Countess of Bessborough,⁶¹ the wife of the chairman of the Church of England Council for Empire Settlement and the economist, Roy Harrod.⁶² The Board’s first report noted that the Moss report had indicated that ‘the societies maintain a high standard in their homes and institutions in Australia and produce remarkably successful results’.⁶³ Its members also met with Moss, who suggested that very rapid expansion in child migration was impractical, but that he remained convinced that ‘child migration was the best form of migration’.⁶⁴ It was also aware, from a meeting of its members with the Commonwealth Minister for Immigration, Harold Holt, that it was still the opinion of his Government that children made ‘very satisfactory immigrants’.⁶⁵ There was, it argued, potential to expand this good work if more financial resources could be provided to develop the work of organisations such as the Fairbridge Society and the Church of England Council for Empire Settlement and if, as Moss had suggested, local authorities were more willing to give over more children in their care. This expansion could be made possible, the Board suggested, by increasing the UK Government’s maintenance payments to child migrants and by offering grants-in-aid to support the administrative costs for small organisations (something for which the Earl of Bessborough had been unsuccessfully pressing civil servants and ministers on behalf of the Church of England Council for a number of years).⁶⁶ Indeed, the Board took it upon itself to invite voluntary societies to submit costed proposals for increased funding which it could consider for recommendation to the Secretary of State. No reference was made by the Board to any discrepancy between child migration and wider standards of child-care in the United Kingdom, and the only reference the Board’s first report made about the Home Office was in the context of recommending that the Home Office might consider how opportunities for child migrants overseas might best be advertised to local authorities.

Following the circulation and approval of the inter-departmental committee report in the late autumn of 1954, the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office submitted a joint paper to the Oversea Migration Board which attempted to steer its discussion of child migration more in terms of how child migrants’ care overseas compared to expected standards in the United Kingdom.⁶⁷ An underlying aim, more implicit in the document, was to encourage the Board to support an inquiry into conditions of care for child migrants overseas which it would not insist on undertaking by itself.⁶⁸ Rehearsing arguments already made in the inter-departmental committee report, the submission noted that whilst it would not be possible to place child migrants directly from the United Kingdom to foster homes in Australia, there was no reason why a wider system of boarding out for British child migrants should not operate once children had been initially received in residential institutions overseas. Given the improving material conditions of many families, and the absence of ‘surplus’ children in the United Kingdom, it was unlikely, it noted, that substantial numbers of children would be made available for emigration in the future, even if appropriate reforms were made in Australia. To assist future policy in this area, the two departments suggested that the Oversea Migration Board might want to reflect on any advice it might wish to give to the UK Government with regard to child migrants’ selection in the United Kingdom and the arrangements for their overseas reception and care.

The Board subsequently discussed both this submission and a survey of sending organisations which confirmed that most were struggling to recruit children for emigration.⁶⁹ Some scepticism was expressed about the submission from the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office. The Countess of Bessborough argued that approved residential homes in Australia were of ‘as high standard as anything to be found in the U.K.’ Sir Colin Anderson noted that the exacting standards of the Curtis report would make even the Fairbridge cottage home system unacceptable and that the problem lay more with the insular attitudes of local authorities. Roy Harrod added that he fundamentally disagreed with the Curtis report’s conclusions on child migration and observed that this seemed to be a topic to which the Curtis Committee had not given very thorough consideration. To take this discussion forward, the Board agreed that it would be a helpful meet with representatives of local authorities and the Association of Social Workers. In part this was intended as an information-gathering exercise, but the Board was also sympathetic to the suggestion by one of its Parliamentary members, Harmar Nicholls, that ‘as the only body to make a detailed study of child migration in recent years’, the Board should also press its views on these representatives in an effort to get them to adopt a more positive view of child migration. That the Board should believe that its work constituted the most thorough recent review of child migration reflected either how little knowledge it had of other recent policy discussions of this subject, such as the report by the Women’s Group on Public Welfare, or how much its members over-estimated their expertise in this field.

When the Board subsequently met representatives from local authorities the following June (by which time Hamar Nicholls had resigned from it after taking up another Government appointment), there was little evidence of them being persuaded by the Board’s views on child migration.⁷⁰ Officials from London County Council explained that they had only allowed for the emigration of 12 boys from their care in recent years because their Children’s Committee was generally unenthusiastic about this option. Apart from those under court orders, the Council were only legally able to keep children in their care through the permission of their parents or guardian and emigration could only be considered in cases where there was no prospect at all of children being returned to their families. Even then the Council would only consider emigration for very young children, or children old enough to know their minds and who actively raised the possibility of emigration. Given difficulties in finding suitable Catholic foster homes, the Council was considering the possibility of allowing some very young Catholic children to go to residential institutions in Australia, but would only do so after one of their welfare officers had visited them first-hand. The Children’s Officer from Essex County Council, Miss Gwyneth Wansbrough-Jones,⁷¹ was even more robust, giving a strong account of why her Council had little interest in emigration as an option. Of the 1600 children in her Council’s care, she noted, 950 were already boarded out, and fewer than 50 were not in close contact with one or both of their parents. Of the 339 children admitted to her Council’s care in the first quarter of 1955, up to 284 would only be in care for a short time, and of the 36 most likely to be in longer-term care, half would probably be taken back by relatives at some point in the future. The rest were either too young to emigrate or had already been boarded out. The importance of keeping open the possibility of re-uniting a child with his or her family, and the good prospects for finding suitable foster homes for those with no family contacts, meant that there were few, if any, children for whom emigration would be an appropriate option. When pressed by Sir Colin Anderson as to whether the prospect of a better life, in material terms, overseas might prove more beneficial to a child than living close to their parents, Wansbrough-Jones replied that ‘even the most ideal material conditions might leave the child deprived to some extent of affection and security’. She also received some support for her views on the importance of maintaining children’s parental contacts from another Board member, the Conservative MP, William Aitken. Any lack of enthusiasm for child migration was, the local authority representatives argued, not because they were unaware of the emigration services provided by the approved voluntary societies but because they believed that options for children in their care were good enough so as not to need to consider them.

Following this meeting, the Commonwealth Relations Office continued to press the Board to focus its attention on future recommended standards for child migration work.⁷² Writing to the Board’s members, its then chair, Douglas Dodds-Parker, commented that whilst there was clearly ‘misunderstanding on both sides’ between local authorities and voluntary societies, the Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations would welcome their views on whether any future funding arrangements for the voluntary societies’ work should be linked to their ‘willingness to discuss certain modifications in their system, such as an increase in boarding-out arrangements’. At its next meeting, Board members were unwilling to accept any immediate conditions being put on future funding arrangements for child migration.⁷³ Roy Harrod argued that the Curtis Committee lacked sufficient evidence on which to base its view of child migration and that it could well be that emigration ‘might be of great psychological benefit to a deprived child’. Building on his intervention, the Board generally agreed that there was insufficient information available on which to make any recommendations about voluntary societies’ future practice. Finally reaching the decision towards which the Commonwealth Relations Office had been gently steering it, the Board recommended that a small fact-finding mission be established, including a representative from the Board, from a local authority and possibly from the Home Office and UK High Commission, which could produce ‘an authoritative report on conditions in homes run by the approved societies, which would be acceptable to local authorities and welfare workers in this country’. Whilst the Board recognised Wansbrough-Jones’s point about the limited availability of suitable children, a belief still appears to have persisted amongst its members that local authorities and social workers would be more amenable to supporting child migration if they were better informed about the standards of care actually provided overseas.⁷⁴ This recommendation was approved by Alec Douglas-Home, who had succeeded Viscount Swinton as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations earlier in the year. It was planned that the mission would undertake its work in the early spring of 1956 and produce a report in time for it to inform any recommendations that the Board wished to make about child migration in its second report which had been scheduled for publication in the early autumn of 1956. The Board’s second report would then, in turn, be a point of reference for policy discussions during the autumn about the question of whether the Empire Settlement Act and assisted migration programme to Australia should be renewed in 1957.⁷⁵

Throughout this process, the Home Office Children’s Department had been on the distribution list for the Board’s agendas, minutes and tabled papers, and maintained a watching brief on the discussions of child migration.⁷⁶ Whilst generally content to observe the developing discussion, a number of notes were recorded by Children’s Department officials critical of evidence presented to the Board by Canon Flint about the child migration work of the Catholic Child Welfare Council. Mr C.P. Hill, who had replaced Prestige as the Assistant Secretary with primary responsibility for child emigration, commented that Canon Flint’s contributions were ‘not likely to be very helpful so far as child care is concerned’.⁷⁷ In the copy of minutes of a meeting that Flint had with the Board in which he had claimed that the Catholic Council sought as a matter of policy ‘to see that their children were settled as soon as possible into Australian families’, one sceptical Children’s Department official had underlined his comment and placed an exclamation mark next to it in the margins.⁷⁸ Its staff were also critical of the Board’s attempts ‘to dispute child care policy’ and satisfied with the evidence by the representatives of local authorities which ‘comfortably supports, and indeed goes further than, the views expressed by the Home Office to the Garner committee’. The Children’s Department expected the proposed fact-finding mission would achieve little, given its limited focus on standards of child-care in Australia, but was happy to leave it to the Commonwealth Relations Office to lead on the organisation of this.⁷⁹ In correspondence with the Scottish Home Department about the mission’s imminent trip to Australia a more positive spin was put on its work. It would, Hill wrote, provide an opportunity for a closer review of the standards of care overseas than that done by Moss. It would also, he suggested, be a means for setting up agreed standards with Australian authorities which could then be introduced as s.33 regulations given that ‘it is clearly impracticable to lay down requirements by regulation about what is to happen in Australia unless the Australian authorities are prepared to co-operate’.⁸⁰ This reflected Hill’s wider view that the Children’s Department still knew very little of how child migration was operating in practice—a view which may have reflected some growing scepticism in the Home Office as to whether Moss really was the most rigorous rapporteur on conditions of care overseas.⁸¹

Policy Crisis: The 1956 Fact-Finding Mission

The Children’s Department’s low expectations of the impact of the fact-finding mission’s report proved to be well wide of the mark. Far from being another anodyne review, the public and private views of the fact-finding mission were to place great strain not just on relations between the Home Office and Commonwealth Relations Office, but created the most serious tensions over child migration between the United Kingdom and Australian Commonwealth Governments since the resumption of assisted migration in 1947.

When proposing the final membership of the fact-finding mission,⁸² the Commonwealth Relations Office also failed to anticipate the problems that its work would cause. John Ross, now recently retired from the Home Office, was appointed to chair the mission and was obviously known to have supported the gradualist approach to reform on which the Children’s Department and Commonwealth Relations Office had previously agreed. For the Commonwealth Relations Office having Ross as chair also had the attraction of making it harder for the Home Office to refuse to endorse the mission’s findings, as they had done with the Moss report, thus ensuring that the mission’s report would have greater authority as a basis for future policy discussions about child migration.⁸³ Although well-known to be sceptical of the value of child migration, Gwyneth Wansbrough-Jones was appointed as a second member of the mission, on the assumption that direct experience of conditions in Australia might modify her views and that these would also carry greater weight with other local authority Children’s Officers.⁸⁴ With no MP able to make the extended visit to Australia, the chosen ‘enthusiast’ for child migration was Walter Garnett, who was still resident in Australia and brought back from retirement to serve on the mission to provide some context and ‘balance’ to any criticisms that the other two members might wish to make.⁸⁵ Such a combined membership appeared well-chosen to enable the mission to draw up proposals for reform which members of the Oversea Migration Board would have to accept as the basis for any renewal of funding from 1957 onwards. Anticipating that any decisions about future child migration policy would also be likely to upset either child-care specialists or those supportive of voluntary societies’ migration work, the Commonwealth Relations Office’s selection of members of the mission seemed carefully calibrated to be able to present its work as balanced and impartial to these competing interest groups.⁸⁶

Little has survived in the archives about the process through which the members of the mission reached an agreed position on what they observed in the 26 receiving institutions that they visited across Australia.⁸⁷ Although their institutional visits rarely lasted more than half a day and did not reveal underlying problems in some institutions, it was clear that John Ross was disturbed by what he found and that Walter Garnett’s ‘modifying’ influence on the child-care specialists in the mission ended up being less than the Commonwealth Relations Office had anticipated. Even so, the UK High Commissioner, Stephen Holmes, wrote in a letter to Saville Garner, ‘if Garnett had not been on the Mission, and if I [Holmes ] had not had two longish talks with Ross, I have no doubt that the report would be a great deal more critical of Australian institutions and practice than it is’.⁸⁸ The mission’s report, received by the Commonwealth Relations Office at the end of March 1956, was produced on the assumption that it would be publicly available.⁸⁹ In addition to this, however, Ross also forwarded on a series of confidential addenda which provided more detailed summaries of the visits that the mission had made to each individual institution.⁹⁰

What became clear from the confidential addenda was that Ross now rejected the generally positive picture of Australian institutions provided by John Moss, which Ross had previously been willing to trust when he had decided to suspend the draft s.33 regulations. At some places, such as the Burwood and Normanhurst homes run by Dr Barnardo’s and the Methodist Home at Burwood, standards were in line with the smaller residential units encouraged by the Curtis and their suburban location made it possible for the child migrants to build up contacts in the local community. In a small number of cases, such as the Murray Dwyer Roman Catholic orphanage in New South Wales, more institutionalised or geographically isolated homes were seen as making considerable efforts to support children and encourage their autonomy.⁹¹ At most, however, the mission found serious failings in either standards of education and training for children,⁹² the suitability of staff (including institutional managers),⁹³ poor preparation of children for life after their residential institution,⁹⁴ spartan and inadequate accommodation,⁹⁵ and children experiencing disruptive transfers within or between institutions on reaching a particular age.⁹⁶ Concerns were also raised about the standards of selection methods and transfer of case records for individual children by some sending organisations,⁹⁷ with some children reported to be confused about why they had been sent to Australia. Criticism about poor provision of case records appears to have related particularly to the work of the Church of England Council for Empire Settlement, the Church of Scotland Committee on Social Service, the Over-Seas League, the Sisters of Nazareth and the Catholic Child Welfare Council. Only a small minority of cases were found of children being boarded out, with managers of some receiving institutions declaring themselves actively opposed to such a policy.⁹⁸ The repeated effect of seeing the effects of children growing up in highly institutionalised environments appears to have unsettled the mission’s members just as much as that experience had disturbed members of the Curtis Committee a decade before.⁹⁹ Many of the worst cases of institutionalisation were noted in residential homes run by Catholic religious orders—homes which John Moss had previously told the Oversea Migration Board should be praised for the ‘excellence of their methods’.¹⁰⁰ In sum, the confidential addenda suggested that only around a third of those institutions visited by the mission gave confidence that children would not be disadvantaged by being sent to them.¹⁰¹

The public report which the mission submitted to the Commonwealth Relations Office did not name individual institutions—although in some cases sufficient detail was given about institutional practices to make it possible to guess which institution was being referred to. However, it did not hold back from making substantive criticisms based on the observations made in the confidential addenda. Selection of children for emigration was said to be unsatisfactory with too many children sent overseas with inadequate records about their backgrounds, despite Moss’s clear recommendation on this. Little appreciation was sometimes shown in Australia that children with difficult early experiences might find the upheaval of emigration a further strain rather than a positive opportunity. Cases were noted in which siblings were emigrated but sent to institutions too far apart for them to be able to maintain contact. Claims that child migrants settled down quickly and well into their new residential homes appeared too optimistic. Care was taken in not criticising staff too strongly, though it was noted that not all were suited to this work and that there appeared to be no specialist child-care training available in Australia comparable to that developed in the United Kingdom after the interim Curtis report. Specific examples of harmful institutionalisation were noted (drawing on anonymised examples from Castledare and St John Bosco Boys Town). Although the report somewhat underplayed the number of such institutions that it saw, its comment that progressive ideas had been observed in ‘three or four’ medium sized institutions implied that good practice was not as pervasive as it might hope. Whilst training and education were good in some cases, the practice of one institution (anonymised from the visit to Molong) of requiring most boys to undertake farm training and girls training in domestic work was seen as inappropriately limiting. The geographical isolation of many institutions was also seen as a significant impediment to children’s ability to develop greater independence and assimilate successfully into Australian communities, although this was mitigated to some extent in those institutions which allowed child migrants to attend local schools.

Although often critical in tone about standards that it had found in receiving institutions, the report’s greatest impact came in its recommendations. The mission recognised—in line with the Garner committee report—that policies of boarding out could only gradually be introduced for child migrants. However, the report suggested that if child migrants needed to be sent to residential institutions in the future they should be small, residential units in or near urban areas, which could serve as reception centres prior to children being fostered with local families. The list of institutions approved for receiving child migrants should be reviewed to take into account institutions’ adequacy of staffing, provision for assimilating children into local communities (including use of holiday family placements), and their standards of accommodation. In future, the mission recommended, the emigration of all unaccompanied children from the United Kingdom should be subject to the consent of the Secretary of State—not just those sent from the care of local authorities.

In his covering letter submitting the report to the Commonwealth Relations Office, Ross also noted that he had considered making the recommendations in the report even stronger. The proposed review of institutions’ approvals could, he suggested, reasonably categorise institutions into those which would or would not be allowed to receive more child migrants, institutional approvals could be made subject to periodic review every three years and no new approvals could be given to large residential institutions or institutions that were geographically isolated from sizeable local communities.¹⁰² More specifically, Ross suggested, those institutions which should be considered unsuitable to receive any more children were the Riverview Training Farm, the Dhurringile Rural Training Farm, St John Bosco Boys’ Town, Methodist Children’s Home Magill, and St Joseph’s Farm School, Bindoon.

The strength of these recommendations had not been anticipated by any of the Government departments involved nor by the Oversea Migration Board. In sum, they represented proposals for a significant tightening of control of all forms of assisted child migration by the UK Government. Strikingly, given prior discussions of available powers under s.33 of the 1948 Children Act, these recommendations did not suggest that s.33 regulations now be introduced, presumably because Ross recognised that there was insufficient commitment to expected standards in Australia for these to be effective. Instead, the fact-finding mission was recommending a major review of approvals for residential institutions in Australia which, given the criteria they proposed should be used for this, would in practice mean that several of these institutions would have their current approval withdrawn. The proposal that the requirement for Secretary of State consent now be extended to all children sent overseas from the care of voluntary organisations also constituted a stronger control than those which had been proposed in the s.33 regulations drafted in the Home Office. The fact that John Ross had previously ruled out such an extension of Secretary of State powers when the content of s.33 regulations had previously been under discussion suggested that he had been sufficiently troubled by what he saw in Australia to have become convinced that this stronger measure was now needed.

As soon as the draft report was received by the Commonwealth Relations Office in London, it was seen as having gone much further into recommendations on future policy than had been expected and plans for its wider circulation within Government and to members of the Oversea Migration Board were initially delayed. Viscount Swinton and Douglas Dodds-Parker had both been replaced during 1955 as Secretary of State and Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State by Alec Douglas-Home and Commander Allan Noble respectively. Both were soon involved in consultations with civil servants about how best to proceed, with Noble particularly involved through his associated role as chair of the Oversea Migration Board. Although the report’s policy recommendations were not, in themselves, ruled out of hand, its strong intervention was recognised as likely to cause exactly the kind of controversy in Australia and amongst supporters of assisted child migration in the United Kingdom which the gradualist approach to reform had sought to avoid. The fact that the work of the Fairbridge Society could clearly be seen in some of the anonymised criticisms made in the report also gave rise to some concern about the political reaction this might cause, as did the fact that the report implicitly criticised the rigour of approval inspections previously conducted by Australian officials.¹⁰³ Supporters of voluntary societies in Australia were expected to be upset by its findings and the criticism of conditions of care which fell under the legal guardianship of the Commonwealth Minister for Immigration could also be seen as crossing a line in terms of what the UK Government could reasonably comment on.¹⁰⁴

Although there was disagreement within the Commonwealth Relations Office about whether or not the mission had exceeded its brief,¹⁰⁵ it was seen as having put the Commonwealth Relations Office in an extremely difficult position. Public knowledge of the mission’s work—including press coverage in Australia which suggested that the future of assisted child migration was dependent on its findings—meant that it was not an option simply not to publish it.¹⁰⁶ The submission of the confidential addenda created an additional problem in making the Commonwealth Relations Office aware of significant failings in specific institutions which would give grounds for not sending more child migrants to them, but where the confidential communication of this material made it difficult to explain publicly the grounds on which any refusal for further migration to specific institutions might be based. Furthermore, it was anticipated that its strong recommendations would re-open conflict with the Home Office as to whether the proposed extension of Secretary of State powers should be supported or not.¹⁰⁷

The Oversea Migration Board was predictably unhappy with the report’s contents, arguing that the mission’s members had approached their subject with rigid pre-conceptions which ‘they had refused to alter in the face of evidence on the spot’.¹⁰⁸ The possibility that the views of the mission’s members—including Walter Garnett who had long supported the child migration schemes—might have been shaped by concern at what they had seen first-hand was not considered, nor was the fact that the Board’s members themselves had no direct experience of conditions in receiving institutions in Australia. Some on the Board, including Sir Colin Anderson,¹⁰⁹ asked for it not to be published at all. Lady Bessborough also pressed, unsuccessfully, to see an annotated copy of the mission’s report which identified specific institutions and voluntary societies which were being criticised.¹¹⁰ The report’s recommendation that Secretary of State consent might be required in all cases of child migration was also leaked to Douglas Dodds-Parker, who privately lobbied the Home Secretary, Gwilym Lloyd-George, on behalf of the Fairbridge Society saying that he hoped that ‘a Conservative Government will encourage voluntary (emphasis original) child welfare organisations’.¹¹¹ If such requirements for consent were extended, Dodds-Parker argued, someone sympathetic to the voluntary societies should be in post at the Home Office to ensure that child migration work was not disrupted through consultations about individual cases with local authority Children’s Officers.

Despite the Board’s unhappiness with the report, the issue of its publication proved comparatively straightforward to resolve, with its public release delayed so that it would be possible for the Board to comment critically on it in its second report that would be published around the same time.¹¹² Ian Maclennan, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for the Commonwealth Relations Office’s Political Division, observed that this approach also had the advantage of allowing their department to note disagreements between the two reports without seeking to align itself immediately with either of their views.¹¹³

The confidential addenda submitted by Ross presented a more complex problem. In early June, Cyril Costley-White wrote from the Commonwealth Relations Office to Richard Whittick, who had replaced C.P. Hill as the Assistant Secretary responsible for child migration in the Home Office, to seek his advice about the addenda.¹¹⁴ Whilst, Costley-White noted, his department had decided not to share the confidential addenda with the Commonwealth Government, the voluntary organisations or the Oversea Migration Board, they did however contain highly critical information about Dhurringile and Riverview to which five further child migrants were about to be sent. This information would normally be grounds for suspending emigration to those institutions. But if such a suspension to those specific institutions were put in place, voluntary organisations would naturally ask on what grounds that decision had been made, raising the question as to whether a wider, temporary suspension of all assisted child migration on the grounds of ‘administrative delay’ might be one way of avoiding this bind. The position was made more complicated by the fact that the Commonwealth Relations Office had never previously refused to give approval for any individual children being sent to Australia through the assisted passage scheme.¹¹⁵

Knowledge of the confidential addenda also posed a problem for the Home Office who also had to judge how to use this unreleased information when considering approval requests for children to be emigrated from local authority care under s.17 of the 1948 Act. To try to find a way forward, Whittick spoke with Ross to try to understand why he had focused only on five specific institutions for ‘black-listing’ in the cover letter accompanying his submission of the mission’s report when the confidential addenda suggested that a larger number of receiving institutions were unsuitable.¹¹⁶ Ross’s response indicated that, however controversial the reception of the mission’s report might be, he still considered its contents to be a compromise rather than a very frank expression of his views. ‘Practical politics’ had prevented other institutions (notably the Fairbridge Farm Schools) from being included on the ‘black-list’ proposed by Ross, and Ross noted that if the mission had been more forthright in its views then ‘the battle would be lost from the start’. Given ‘Australian susceptibilities’ (including both those of the Australian Government and the Catholic Church), Ross thought that it was better on balance to continue to send children to institutions that he had strongly criticised until a formal review of all receiving institutions could be set in place after the mission’s report had been published. The suggestion that the confidential addenda be circulated more widely to make clear the grounds of refusals of emigration to particular institutions was one against which Ross objected very strongly.¹¹⁷ The solution on which both departments settled was to put into place an informal suspension of any further approvals until the autumn, justified to any enquiries by voluntary societies as being caused by ‘administrative delay’. Some compromise had to be accepted even on this, though, as the Fairbridge Society successfully pressed the Commonwealth Relations Office to agree to fund the emigration of 16 children to Pinjarra and Molong that summer, with the threat that any delays might lead to questions being raised in Parliament.¹¹⁸

It was soon recognised, however, that whilst delaying publication of the mission’s report might mollify members of the Board, it would not deal with all of its public and political consequences. Godfrey Shannon, Assistant Under-Secretary for the General Division in the Commonwealth Relations Office had taken over the management of this process from Maclennan and noted that divergent opinions in reports published from the Board and the mission would not necessarily be seen as equally authoritative.¹¹⁹ The Board had no members with expertise in child-care and, unlike members of the mission, had not directly observed conditions in Australian institutions themselves. It was almost inevitable, Shannon anticipated, that questions would be asked on the basis of the mission’s findings as to whether the UK Government considered current arrangements for the child migration work it was funding to be suitable. To mitigate this challenge, Shannon suggested, it would be advisable for the Australian Commonwealth Government to initiate some kind of review before publication of the mission’s report to demonstrate that these questions were already receiving serious further attention and to tie Australian authorities into supporting any necessary changes.¹²⁰ Such an initiative would only be meaningful, Shannon noted, if engaged with seriously by the Australian authorities and they did not seek a review which simply gave ‘a smug finding that all is well and that the mission’s criticisms are unjustified’. Shannon later noted that this might suggest a further delay to publication of the mission’s report might be advisable, both to give Australian authorities time to initiate such a review and to avoid the report causing unhelpful tensions prior to important imminent economic discussions between the United Kingdom and Australian Governments.¹²¹ It would also, another senior official agreed, give the Australians time ‘to get their house in order’.¹²² Such a delay, it was also realised, could have the political advantage of allowing publication during the Parliamentary recess in August so that questions about the mission’s work could not immediately be raised in Parliament.¹²³

Whilst the Commonwealth Department of Immigration agreed, after further urging, to initiate such a review, Shannon’s plan received strong private criticism from Whittick who tried to pressure Shannon into accepting that the Australian review would include a member of the Home Office Children’s Inspectorate.¹²⁴ Without such representation on the review, Whittick argued, it would lack appropriate expertise in standards of child-care in the United Kingdom and there was a risk that if the Australian review exonerated all of the criticised institutions, the Commonwealth Relations Office would have to choose between accepting the less expert Australian view or the views of the experts that the Commonwealth Relations Office had itself selected to undertake the fact-finding mission. Citing the urgency of setting up the review —given the need to get it underway before publication of the mission’s report—and the delay that would be caused by negotiating the involvement of a Home Office official, Shannon refused. Whilst Whittick accepted that no more could be done to influence a matter that fell simply within the Commonwealth Relations Office’s responsibility, he also found little support from Edward Gwynn,¹²⁵ who had replaced Ross as the Assistant Under-Secretary in charge of the Children’s Department. Whittick, Gwynn noted, had made the doubtful assumption that Home Office involvement in the Australian review would produce a clear consensus between the United Kingdom and Australian officials when, in reality, it would probably embroil the Home Office in an even more contentious argument with Australian officials than the mission’s report would already cause. Seeing little benefit to that course of action, Gwynn decided that the Home Office’s responsibilities to the Australian review would best be limited to the offer of the Home Office providing ‘general advice’ to the Australian authorities about child-care standards with the Australians being left to take their own responsibility about how to use this advice. The Commonwealth Relations Office also took a similar line to Gwynn, refusing Australian pressure to make a member of the UK High Commission a formal member of their review team, on the basis that such involvement could become an unhelpful source of tension in the future.¹²⁶ Instead, the Official Secretary to the UK High Commissioner, Anthony Rouse, was attached to the Australian review as an observer.

Whittick ’s concerns proved prescient.¹²⁷ Tasman Heyes agreed to the Commonwealth Department of Immigration undertaking a review only on the basis that his department would be able to see in advance the confidential addenda on the five institutions that Ross had identified for particular censure. Having been pressed to prioritise reviews of these particular institutions by the Commonwealth Relations Office, the Department of Immigration declined to visit the Methodist Magill Home (as it was not proposed that any more child migrants would be received there) or the Riverview Training Farm (on the basis that child migrants sent there were very close to school-leaving age and only normally lived there for three months before being sent into work placements). Of the remaining three institutions, St John Bosco Boys’ Town was judged by the Australian review team to provide adequate care for children who had previously lived in Catholic residential homes in the United Kingdom, and Bindoon and Dhurringile were judged only to need relatively superficial improvements to their accommodation which it was claimed could comfortably be completed within three months. As the mission had apparently only raised serious concerns about 3 institutions out of the 26 it had visited, which the Australian review team felt were either ungrounded or easily rectified, the Australian Commonwealth Government took the view that there were no reasonable grounds for any further delays to the normal resumption of the child migrant programme.

The credibility of the Australian position was, however, weakened by a further set of confidential notes about the inspection visits undertaken by the review that were compiled by Rouse and sent from the UK High Commission back to the Commonwealth Relations Office. Far from endorsing the Australian review’s conclusions, as the Australian Government claimed, Rouse broadly endorsed the mission’s criticisms and added further examples of the poor management and oversight of the institutions. As the Australian review had extended its visits to a wider range of institutions, Rouse was also able to comment on other institutions not immediately included in the ‘black-list’. He endorsed the missions’ comments on receiving institutions, both positive and critical, noting that the head of the Western Australia State child welfare department, Mr McColl, was ‘hardly on speaking terms’ with the Principal of Clontarf Boys’ Town, Br Doyle, since McColl ‘had reprimanded him for beating one of the boys unnecessarily severely’.¹²⁸

Although the correspondence about the Australian review (including Rouse’s notes) were received by the Commonwealth Relations Office in late September, they were not passed on to the Home Office Children’s Department until early November. The correspondence elicited a strong response from a number of staff, including Whittick and the head of its Children’s Inspectorate, Miss A.M. Scorrer. They noted that the Australian Government’s understanding of child-care was clearly far removed from their own, that there was little hope that Australian authorities would be receptive to pressure to change from the Home Office and that there were no grounds for accepting the Australian conclusion that child migration should resume without any further constraints or delay.¹²⁹

Again, though, Edward Gwynn ruled out any action from the Children’s Department that might attract too much controversy. In a meeting with Shannon, Gwynn commented that the Home Office were not comfortable sending children to institutions like Molong or Castledare about which the mission and Rouse had made negative comments, and suggested that the Commonwealth Relations Office might want to try to delay any further approvals until the new assisted passage agreements had been finalised.¹³⁰ Shannon took the view that further delays were not ‘politically practicable’ and Gwynn conceded that, ‘political considerations, which were the province of C.R.O., might well override merits’ and that the Home Office would not press its concerns any further. Instead, the Children’s Department privately implemented a policy, for the time being at least, of not giving consents under s.17 of the 1948 for children to be sent from local authority care to particular receiving institutions about which it had concerns. From the perspective of the Commonwealth Relations Office, the understanding taken from this meeting was that that Home Office would ‘prefer not to be embarrassed by being consulted [on the emigration of more children] and are prepared not to object to our disposing of the applications on our responsibility’.¹³¹

Whilst the Australian review was taking place, the process of reviewing assisted migration to Australia was, once again, set in motion. The report of the fact-finding mission, and the second report of the Oversea Migration Board, were published on the same day in mid-August, whilst Ross was away on a long, pre-arranged trip to Scandinavia.¹³² The Board’s report reviewed its discussion of child migration policy since its first report in 1954, noting reasons presented to it as to why numbers of children emigrated from the care of local authorities were so low. Whilst recognising the changing social conditions that reduced the wider demand for child migration, the report nevertheless took the view that child-care policies that were ‘too dogmatic’ and based on ‘rigid principles’ should not be allowed to dissuade local authorities from making use of such schemes. Noting its decision to recommend a fact-finding mission be undertaken to reassure local authorities and provide evidence to support the case for increased funding for voluntary societies involved in this work, the report went on to note that the Board were not in ‘complete agreement’ with a number of its assumptions.

Privately, the Board maintained the view that conditions in Australia were acceptable, that the problem lay not with those conditions but with the fixed opinions that the members of the mission had brought to their work, and that they wished to be able to express their ‘extreme disfavour’ with the mission’s report when it was published.¹³³ In public, its criticisms were only slightly more muted. The Board’s report criticised the mission for not considering whether child migrants successfully settled into work after leaving their residential institutions, for insisting on standards of care in Australia that were not always achieved in the United Kingdom and for not believing assurances made by receiving institutions that children settled down quickly into their new lives overseas. Whilst accepting a number of the mission’s more specific recommendations about standards of care, the Board objected to the idea that receiving institutions should be in or near urban areas, arguing that children could assimilate into local rural communities and that getting used to isolation was important if a child were to become a farm worker in the future. The Board—in line with the views of the Australian Commonwealth Government¹³⁴—rejected the mission’s recommendation that Secretary of State consent be required for all cases of child migration, arguing that reviews of all individual cases by government officials would cause delays which would make recruitment of children even harder.

Whilst accepting some areas for improvement in this work, the Board therefore took the view that the voluntary societies undertaking child migration work still had its confidence and that UK Government funding for this work should be renewed when current arrangements expired in 1957. Although the publication of the Board’s and mission’s report on the same day had the desired effect of distracting initial press attention away from the mission’s report,¹³⁵ the mission’s views had the opposite effect on local authorities’ views than that hoped by the Board when it originally recommended that a fact-finding mission be set up. Rather than reassuring local authorities that conditions for child migrants in Australia were much better than they had previously recognised, the report reinforced most Children’s Officers’ views that there were no good grounds for significantly increasing the number of children being sent to Australia.¹³⁶ Such was the perceived harm done by the mission’s report to the prospects of expanding child migration that the Conservative MP, Archer Baldwin, wrote to the new Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Cuthbert Alport, in the summer of 1957, to say that he had been asked by the Fairbridge Society to raise a Parliamentary question to Alport asking what the Commonwealth Relations Office could do to counter this.¹³⁷ Baldwin, who was also at that point a member of the Oversea Migration Board, used one of its meetings to raise the same concerns, with Alport, as chair, suggesting that it might be useful to send one or two members of the Board to Australia to undertake another tour of institutions which could provide a more positive report.¹³⁸ With support from Tasman Heyes, Alport sought the opinion of his civil servants on this idea, including a suggestion from him that one of the members of this inspection team should be Lady Bessborough. Led by Shannon, their response was that the mission’s report had made less of an impact on public opinion than had been expected, that another review so soon after the mission risked causing further irritation and conflict with the Commonwealth Government and that it would not be advisable to have someone closely associated with a child migration organisation such as Lady Bessborough to undertake this work. Alport accepted this advice, and whilst still wanting to present it to the Board as something still under active consideration, the suggested inspection visit by Board members never took place.

Compromise Restored: The 1956 Inter-departmental Committee on Migration Policy and Beyond

Alongside preparations for publication of the Board’s and mission’s reports, and with discussions about the mission’s report with the voluntary societies underway, a new inter-departmental committee had already been set up to make recommendations about the possible renewal of the Empire Settlement Act and the Australian assisted migration programme.¹³⁹ Including representatives from five government departments, the committee was chaired by Godfrey Shannon, with Costley-White representing the Commonwealth Relations Office and Whittick, the Home Office.¹⁴⁰ With its text finalised by early September¹⁴¹—before news had been received of the outcome of the Australian-led review—the confidential report reinforced the broad policy direction of the 1954 Garner committee. Whilst there was support for the UK Government continuing to encourage emigration to other Commonwealth countries, there was still no great enthusiasm for continuing to contribute financially to the Australian assisted migration programme. The committee recommended that the assisted migration programme continue with the existing capped contribution of up to £150,000 per annum from the UK Government, but with this renewal not being actively initiated by the UK Government and only put into place if the Australian Commonwealth Government requested it.¹⁴² Such a request from the Australian Government was understood to be almost inevitable, however, as Tasman Heyes had already informed the UK High Commission that any withdrawal of this funding ‘would make a very bad impression on the Australian Government and public’ and that many people in Australia, including Heyes himself, did not think that the United Kingdom took a sufficient interest in their country.¹⁴³

The same weighing up of strategic interests and economic costs¹⁴⁴ informed the committee’s recommendation that the Empire Settlement Act should be renewed again, on the basis that failure to do so would be interpreted as an active policy shift by the UK Government against Commonwealth emigration with all that would entail for political opposition at home and overseas strategic relations.¹⁴⁵

Although child migration represented only a small fraction of Commonwealth emigration,¹⁴⁶ the tensions that had arisen over the fact-finding mission’s report meant that the committee gave almost as much attention to future child migration policy in its report as to all the other policy issues it discussed combined.¹⁴⁷ Its central working premise was the pragmatic acceptance that, whilst the need for assisted child migration was at best limited, the interests vested in this work made a complete withdrawal of support from the UK Government impractical. The report commented that:

If we had been untrammelled by precedent, we might not recommend the establishment of a system of subsidised child emigration, or the existing methods of operating it. But we have to deal with a well established system which has existed with Government support both in Australia and in the United Kingdom for over 30 years, has influential support from churches and prominent laymen in both countries, and, by most accounts, has benefitted the children who have made use of it. Methods and amenities may, and probably do, need to be overhauled and to be brought up to date; but, as long as there is a demand, we think (emphasis original) that the system can be allowed to continue. Our conclusion on this point is, however, subject to public reaction to the Fact-Finding Mission’s report. If there were a strong public demand that the system should be ended, there would be no compelling Governmental reason for allowing it to continue. The wishes of people in Australia and of the voluntary organisations in the United Kingdom might have to give way to public opinion here.¹⁴⁸

Although the report noted that there was little strategic value in ending child migration, unless public opinion demanded it, such programmes should only operate on the basis of the interests of the individual child rather than the demand for young immigrants from receiving countries. Appropriate selection of children for emigration was clearly crucial for ensuring this, but the committee did not support the mission’s recommendation that such selections for all child migrants be made subject to Secretary of State consent. The mission’s proposal on this clearly lacked support even from the Home Office, who argued that they had insufficient administrative resources to deal with the increased casework that this would require and would prefer such cases be dealt with by the courts if some additional level of oversight were needed. The committee’s view, however, was that such additional scrutiny, under the authority of the Secretary of State, had significant drawbacks and little obvious benefit. It would require fresh legislation (with the likely Parliamentary challenges this would involve) and would be the focus of strong opposition both from voluntary organisations (and ‘their influential supporters’) and the Oversea Migration Board. Furthermore, the Shannon committee took the view that the number of unsuitable children being sent overseas was probably now lower than it had been in the past and that the kind of additional oversight proposed by the mission might not succeed in identifying these remaining cases anyway (an argument which implicitly questioned the apparent safeguard of Secretary of State’s consent for children sent from local authority care).

The report endorsed the fact-finding mission’s call for a fresh review to be undertaken of the approvals of individual receiving institutions, but proposed that the current review that had been started by the Australian Commonwealth Government would be a sufficient means of achieving this. Recognising, as the Garner committee had done, that further reforms were needed to make receiving homes in Australia less ‘institutional’, the report noted that the introduction of s.33 regulations would probably be of limited value in achieving this without the support of Australian authorities for required standards and their introduction would, again, only serve to antagonise the voluntary societies involved.

In conclusion, the report proposed that the best approach would be to try to ensure Australian agreement both on basic principles of child-care standards and on the need for government officials to ensure that these were adhered to by voluntary organisations. Alongside this, rather than introducing formal s.33 regulations, it was proposed that the Commonwealth Relations Office would use the renewal of funding agreements with voluntary organisations in 1957 as an opportunity to secure their agreement to Home Office inspections of their working practices in the United Kingdom and to them providing information about the standards of care provided for their child migrants overseas. For the Home Office, this solution had the attraction of bringing voluntary organisations’ child migration activities under its inspectorate on comparable terms to its existing inspections of other forms of child-care by local authorities and voluntary societies in England and Wales. Such an arrangement would also create the conditions in which voluntary organisations would feel obligated to co-operate with informal inspections whilst allowing the Home Office to avoid the burden and limitations of introducing and enforcing s.33 regulations. In short, after the disruption caused by the fact-finding mission, the Shannon committee report re-instated the previous gradualist approach to reform for child migration rather than moving towards the more dramatic intervention recommended by the mission. The policy impact of the mission’s direct observation of conditions in Australian institutions had now all but faded.

Despite the outcome of the Australian review demonstrating that there was little prospect of Australian authorities either being willing to enforce suitable standards, the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office agreed to continue this gradualist approach. With the Cabinet agreeing to the proposed renewal of what was now to be the Commonwealth Settlement Act at a meeting in late October,¹⁴⁹ Conservative whips contacted the Commonwealth Relations Office to ask that it meet with voluntary organisations before the introduction of the legislation in December. It was anticipated that the introduction of this Bill would elicit Parliamentary questions about future child migration policy, and the whips wanted to ensure that the voluntary organisations had been fully briefed about the new measures in advance of this.¹⁵⁰ Lord John Hope, who had replaced Allan Noble as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, chaired the meeting and set out the proposed new arrangements linked to the 1957 funding renewals.¹⁵¹ Whilst seeking to strike a collaborative tone, emphasising that the Government wished to continue to work in a constructive partnership with the voluntary organisations, Hope also implied that if the organisations were not prepared to sign up to the new ‘voluntary’ agreements then the Government might find itself under irresistible pressure to introduce formal regulations and hinted that broadening requirements for Secretary of State consent might not be quite as impractical as the voluntary organisations had claimed. Once again, the threat of regulation seemed a more useful tool for Government officials than the actual introduction of regulations themselves. Whilst successfully objecting to a Home Office proposal that its officials be allowed to observe selection interviews with prospective child migrants and their parents, the voluntary organisations duly agreed to Home Office inspections of their records in the United Kingdom and to ensure information was provided about standards of care overseas.¹⁵² The proforma documents drawn up by the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office on the range of information to be required from voluntary societies did not explicitly prescribe expected standards in the same way that the draft s.33 regulations had done.¹⁵³ However, by requesting information about voluntary societies’ selection methods, pre-emigration preparation of children, arrangements for escorts, transfer of records overseas, and the training, staffing, after-care and arrangements for boarding out for child migrants once overseas, the implication was that voluntary societies would now be more actively monitored to check their compliance with standards that had already been discussed with them for a number of years.

Whilst this increased monitoring of voluntary societies’ work appeared to be an approach that would further nudge voluntary societies towards reform of their child migration work, its effects in reality were at best mixed. It had been assumed in the Shannon report that the review of all approvals of receiving institutions prior to the renewal of funding agreements would be undertaken by a direct inspection of each institution by Commonwealth and State officials, accompanied by an observer from the UK High Commission.¹⁵⁴ In reality, however, the Commonwealth Department of Immigration insisted that these approvals should be based on short reports produced only by State officials,¹⁵⁵ replicating the same process for providing information on receiving institutions that the fact-finding mission had shown to have failed in a number of cases. The Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office also generally preferred to use this review process to encourage voluntary organisations to improve conditions in receiving institutions in Australia rather than refusing outright to renew their approval, with Whittick showing little inclination to engage in this process in any detail.¹⁵⁶ Having received the fresh reports from the Commonwealth Department of Immigration, there was still some discomfort in the Commonwealth Relations Office at the prospect of children being sent to unsatisfactory institutions. It did raise specific concerns about five institutions which had been criticised by the mission: Riverview, Dhurringile, Castledare, Bindoon and St John Bosco Boys’ Town, although the head of its General Department discouraged suspension of approval from St John Bosco Boys’ Town, as he judged it ‘not… bad enough to warrant a quarrel with the Catholics’.¹⁵⁷ Recognising that the point of making new funding agreements was a moment of greater leverage over voluntary societies, the UK High Commission was asked to approach the Commonwealth Department of Immigration to establish whether it felt it would be possible to press the relevant voluntary organisations for improvements on these five specific institutions before the agreements were signed.¹⁵⁸ In reply, the UK High Commission confirmed that the Australian authorities saw no need to do this. The Commonwealth Department of Immigration did agree to check on whether staffing levels at Castledare were any more adequate than those observed by the mission, with approval later agreed for Castledare on the basis of small staff increases.¹⁵⁹ However, it otherwise re-stated its view from the previous summer that, given that minor physical improvements required at Bindoon and Dhurringile had now been made, there was no reason for approval of any of these other institutions to be suspended.¹⁶⁰ Ultimately, although the approvals of a small number of institutions were allowed to lapse because there were no plans to recruit more British child migrants to them, no approvals were actively refused by the UK Government and sending organisations in the United Kingdom were simply encouraged to work with their partners in Australia to improve conditions in particular institutions instead.¹⁶¹ The problem of trying to influence conditions in receiving institutions in Australia—short of full suspension of approvals—once again proved intractable.

Inspection s of voluntary societies’ operations proved somewhat more productive. A visit to the offices of the Church of England Council for Commonwealth and Empire Settlement by Home Office inspectors raised a number of concerns.¹⁶² The Council’s administrator, Enid Jones, was found to have been undertaking the Council’s child migration work virtually by herself and without any effective oversight. Full case histories had not been produced for children being sent to Australia under the Council’s auspices, the Council had no effective means of checking whether children had changed their minds about emigrating before they were placed on ship, children’s records had not been properly transferred to receiving institutions in the past, and monitoring of children it had placed overseas was ineffectual. The failings were judged sufficiently serious for Whittick to suggest that if the Council did not take appropriate remedial action, then this might constitute a failure to uphold its funding agreement with the UK Government, and any further approval for emigration of children by the Council under the agreement might need to be suspended.¹⁶³ No comment appears to have been made at this point about Lady Beesborough’s close relationship to the Council or her endorsement of its work. By the autumn of 1960, Home Office inspectors were satisfied that the Council’s working practices were sufficiently improved for the threat of suspension to be withdrawn, but from this point on the Council only sent another three child migrants to Australia under this agreement.¹⁶⁴ Similar criticisms were also made about the administrative arrangements of the Catholic Child Welfare Council’s emigration sub-committee which almost entirely ended its child migration activities when the ‘voluntary’ inspection regime came into effect in 1957.

The Commonwealth Relations Office still judged it politically expedient to offer public statements of support for the voluntary societies still undertaking this work—particularly the Fairbridge Society—and the Oversea Migration Board continued its efforts to promote child migration.¹⁶⁵ In reality, though, any lingering enthusiasm for supporting this work within the UK Government was fading. When the Prime Minister, Harold MacMillan, met with the Australian Commonwealth Cabinet during a tour of Australia in spring 1958, the need to fill a thousand existing vacancies for British child migrants in Australian receiving institutions was directly raised with him.¹⁶⁶ Despite this being discussed with the Commonwealth Relations Office on MacMillan’s return to Britain, no initiative was taken to address this. When its civil servants and ministers became aware of a crisis surrounding Dr Barnardo’s Homes’ farm school at Picton in the summer of 1958, in which a number of men were convicted of sexual offences against boys in their work placements, serious consideration was given in the Commonwealth Relations Office to ending immediately the department’s funding agreement with the charity.¹⁶⁷ An adjournment debate in the House of Commons initially proposed by the Conservative MP, Nigel Fisher, in support of child migration in July 1958 was postponed until the following February when Alport contacted Fisher to suggest the timing could be unhelpful if the debate gave any publicity to the scandal at Picton.¹⁶⁸ When it was eventually held on 9th February 1959, Alport gave a glowing account of the value of this work.¹⁶⁹ However, his private briefing notes from civil servants suggested that the primary drivers for post-war child migration had been Australian Commonwealth immigration policy and the interest of voluntary organisations in this work, and identified no particular value in it from the perspective of the UK Government.¹⁷⁰

By the start of the 1960s, child migration was in significant decline. The Oversea Migration Board no longer discussed it in its meetings or annual reports.¹⁷¹ From 1961 onwards, only the Fairbridge Society and Dr Barnardo’s Homes continued this work to any degree, with Quarriers’ Orphan’s Homes also briefly sending small parties of children to Dhurringile. The total number of assisted child migrants going to Australia each year now regularly fell below a hundred. A Commonwealth Relations Office analysis suggested that, by 1960, of the 1914 places available for British child migrants in Australia, 1347 were vacant.¹⁷² Despite several hundred British children still being in residential institutions in Australia, the Commonwealth Relations Office and Home Office seemed to give up any hope of being able to influence conditions for child migrants once they arrived in Australia. Correspondence between the Scottish Home Department and the Home Office in the spring of 1960 indicated that the Home Office had received no reports from Australian authorities about conditions in receiving institutions since the reports provided for the renewed funding agreements in 1957.¹⁷³ Although Whittick generally seemed satisfied with the periodic visits that Home Office inspectors made to sending organisations in the United Kingdom, there seemed little interest in trying to force greater collaboration from Australian Commonwealth or State officials. The Commonwealth Relations Office was also aware that no reports on individual institutions had been received since 1957 when it came to consider the renewal of funding agreements with voluntary societies at the start of 1960, but no action was taken to chase the Australian Government for this information and funding agreements with voluntary societies were renewed without them.¹⁷⁴ By this stage, even the Commonwealth Department for Immigration seemed resigned to writing off the investment made in trying to attract British child migrants in any significant numbers. When it commissioned a major review of the assimilation of child immigrants to Australia, published in 1960, its programme of assisted migration for unaccompanied child migrants was not even mentioned.¹⁷⁵

Despite this growing apathy, the influence of precedent continued. Discussion of child migration policy in the report of 1961 Inter-Departmental Committee on Migration Policy was far terser than in the Shannon report five years before.¹⁷⁶ Noting the wider social trends—and changing attitudes to child-care—which had made child migration an increasingly unattractive option, the report noted that the societies undertaking this work ‘have virtually outlived their usefulness and the Home Office has considerable reservations about their standards of child care in such work as remains to them’. However, given that societies such as Fairbridge still had considerable political support, including on the Oversea Migration Board, there was little point in failing to renew child migration agreements under the Act given the controversy this would entail. As the report bluntly put it, ‘it would be particularly unfortunate to rouse fruitless controversy when the amount of money involved is so small and the societies themselves are likely to die a natural death before long for lack of child migrants’. The renewal could be used, however, to ask the Australian Commonwealth Government to take responsibility for the entire costs of assisted child migration—in return for a larger United Kingdom contribution to the larger Australian assisted migration programme. This would have the benefit of removing the administrative burden from these schemes from the Commonwealth Relations Office, but would be proposed on the basis that the Australians would be willing to withdraw this funding from voluntary organisations if they did not keep up the existing ‘voluntary’ arrangements in place with the UK Government in relation to their standards. The gradualist approach to reforming child migration had, in this policy judgement, run as far as it could, and the best that could be hoped for was to try to constrain bad practice until such time as the schemes wound down through lack of available children.

That process took somewhat longer than might have been expected. The assisted migration of British children without their parents to Australia continued until 1970, but the work of the Fairbridge Society carried on after this. In 1957, recognising the growing pressures in finding children for emigration without their parents, the Society had instituted one-parent and two-parent schemes in which children would be sent to their farm schools in Australia on a more temporary basis until their parent had also emigrated, successfully set up home and could receive them back into their care.¹⁷⁷ This scheme continued after the last unaccompanied child migrants had gone to Australia in 1970 and attracted far larger numbers of children than their original work with children sent without their parents.¹⁷⁸ Child migration to Australia ended, as it had begun, at the Fairbridge farm school at Pinjarra, gradually fading from public awareness until the experiences of the early post-war child migrants began to receive greater attention later in the 1980s.¹⁷⁹