British children evacuated overseas in 1940-41

Under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 and 1937, the British Gov­ernment formally assisted private organisations to help people who wanted to settle in His Majesty’s Overseas Dominions. Most were adults.

What happened to the children? The Fairbridge Plan for caring for British child migrants originated with Kingsley Fairbridge’s Vision Splendid. He loathed the conditions of the thousands of under-privileged children with no future other than poverty. He wanted to transplant such children to the wide-open spaces in the colonies; the crowded orphanages were very happy to send their charges overseas.

For their part, the Australian and other British Empire governments hoped these schemes would supply them with much needed population and labour. They could have imported cheap labour from any country, but they wanted sound, British stock. "This programme is not a charity", declared the Prince of Wales in 1934 of the work of the Fairbridge farm schools... "it is an Imperial investment". These child mig­rat­ion schemes must have been seen to be successful; they received poor publicity from the outset, yet they continued until the 1960s.

But war time was different. The book Oceans Apart, written by Penny Starns and published by The History Press 2014, showed that from May 1940 many British parents und­erstood that their cities could be bombed to smithereens. Wise parents chose to move their children safety abroad to the British Dominions. As a result the Children's Overseas Reception Board (CORB) scheme was extremely popular, and 200,000+ applications were made by the time the scheme closed just four months later. One third of the CORB children were Scottish, one third were Welsh and the rest were English.

Was sound British stock still a criterion in WW2? The book discusses eugenicist views in Britain which the CORB programme assiduously tried to avoid. But the Dominion States decided on their own rules – South Africa refused to accept any Jewish children; a colour bar was in operation in all the host countries; the number of Catholic children was restricted; and children with any medical defects were excluded. German, Austrian and Polish refugee children, desperately trying to survive the war in Britain, were universally rejected by the CORB programme.

CORB children and supervisors arriving in New Zealand, 1940
Photo credit: Gauge

CORB packing lists were sent to British parents in 1940, to prepare for the evacuation of their children overseas. Host families in the new countries were given a list of guiding principles. The BBC agreed to support parent-child links with their regular Director of Empire Programmes.

Saying goodbye at the port was heartbreaking. When parents accomp­an­ied their children to the port, neither generation knew if they would ever see each other again. Singing patriotic songs loudly might have reflected the mood well, but the songs left the families emotionally exhausted. And the photos in the book evoke an optimistic experience that was also full of loss and heartbeak.

On at least one occasion the ship never made it to the Dominions. In Sept 1940, the ship SS City of Benares was torpedoed by a German U-boat en route to Canada. Carrying 406 passengers and crew including CORB children and private evacuees, the ship sank in the freezing waters of the North Atlantic and 256 passengers died. Wherever possible, the adults onboard sacrificed their own lives in order that the children could get safe seats on the life­boats.

After the City of Benares went down, attempts were made to resurrect the CORB scheme, but by March 1941, British parents were not prepared to risk another catastrophe. In total 2,863 British children had safely arrived, half of them to Canada (1,523), and the rest to Australia, South Africa and New Zealand.

I was not surprised that the old British Empire nations rallied to help the children. One would expect Canada etc to want to help the motherland, and would want to bring in good quality children to per­haps make their future homes in the ex-colonies. But one might not have expected the USA to feel very connected to British children. No CORB children were sent to the USA but welfare agencies in the USA organised private evacuations. Huge companies like Kodak and Ford also participated.

CORB children disembarking in Montreal, July 1940
Photo credit: National Archives of Canada

The book discusses at length what happened to the children, once they landed. The British government paid for the ship fare but it was up to the host nation to feed, clothe and house the newly arrived young visitors. Some were adopted by warm, loving host families, especially when the host families were already related to the sea-vacs. But if perfect strangers took them in, the Australian government paid finan­cial support to the foster parents while the Canadian government did not. No doubt that homesickness was an issue for all the children, so there was an urgent need to stay in contact with their parents back in the UK.

Some private sea-vacs met with hostility. In Canada in particular it was felt that these arranged evacuations were enabling the wealthy and educated classes to save their own sons from fighting in the war. But since the children were all under 16, this sounds far fetched to me.

But the decision to go home at the end of the war created mixed emotions. Some of the older evacuees even chose to remain in their new homes and not return at all. Others went back to the UK, but app­lied to return to their host nation as adult migrants, or encour­aged their entire families to emigrate. Even those CORB evacuees who rushed back to their parents as soon as possible might have had some trouble settling down in post-war Britain. The youngest of the CORB children certainly had learned to speak with foreign accents during their years away.

By February 1946, most sea-vacs had arrived back home in the UK.