Immigration & Emigration - History, Australian History - General & Miscellaneous, Immigration & Emigration - Oceania & Australasia, 20th Century British History - Social Aspects, Immigration & Emigration - Great Britain

Empty Cradles

Name: Empty Cradles
Author: Margaret Humphreys
ISBN: 9780552165327

by Margaret Humphreys

Write a review

Overview

In 1986 the author, an ordinary Nottingham social worker and mother of two, received a letter from a woman asking for help to trace her parents. She claimed that at the age of four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British Government. Margaret Humphreys replied that she must be mistaken, yet curiosity drove her to investigate the case, and she claims to have found that the woman's story was just the tip of an enormous iceberg; that up to 150,000 children, some just three or four years old, were deported from British children's homes and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the Empire - the last as recently as 1967.
Many had been told that their parents were dead. The parents were also often deceived, and many believed that their children had been sent to good foster homes in Britain. The reality, Margaret Humphreys says, was in many cases a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in Western Australia and elsewhere. In this book she describes her investigations, how it became her mission to reunite these children with their families in Britain, and the founding of the Child Migrants Trust, funded by Nottingham County Council, which has worked to obtain recognition of the scandal and compensation for its victims.

Synopsis

THE BOOK THAT EXPOSED THE HEARTBREAKING SCANDAL OF BRITAIN'S FORGOTTEN AND ABUSED CHILD MIGRANTS - now a film, Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson.
In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. At first incredulous, Margaret discovered that this was just the tip of an enormous iceberg. Up to 150,000 children, some as young as three years old, had been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to a 'new life' in distant parts of the Empire, right up until as recently as 1970.

Many were told that their parents were dead, and parents were told that their children had been adopted. In fact, for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. Margaret and her team reunited thousands of families before it was too late, brought authorities to account, and worldwide attention to an outrageous miscarriage of justice.