Songs of Innocence (15 page)

But as so often happened, what started out as charitable exercises became government operations as the state gradually extended its reach into the realm of family life. In 1923, an Empire
Settlement Act was passed, allowing the state to fund the migration of children via an Overseas Settlement Board. This funding went largely to Kingsley Fairbridge, who had devised a new method of
settling the children into the colonies – the farm school. Fairbridge, who would die just a year later in 1924 of a lymphatic tumour at the age of thirty-nine, had by then set up his first
such school at Pinjarra, Western Australia. Fairbridge had a dream: to fill the empty lands of the Empire with farmers.
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Born in South Africa,
he had visited England in 1903 and had been struck by how overpopulated it seemed. His theory was that town-dwellers would adapt much more quickly if they were transplanted young: ‘Eight
years’ schooling would
barely give a man a glimpse of the possibilities which lie before a farmer,’ he wrote. ‘This will not be charity, it will be an
imperial investment.’

In the ensuing years, further farm schools would be established in two other locations within Australia, and the Roman Catholic church would also begin organizing migrations there too. Few of
the children who were ‘migrated’ in this way between the wars were given any say at all in what happened to them. In many ways the scheme devised in the 1920s was a throwback to the
Victorian days when the migrations of children had begun. And in fact the lives these children lived in the slums of British cities were little changed from those of their grandparents.

One of them was Flo Brown, who was put into a Barnardo’s home with an older half-sister, Gwynneth, and a younger half-brother, Joe, by her stepfather after the death of their mother. Their
family’s tale was a familiar one of a cycle of poverty and dislocation. Flo’s mother had also been raised in a home, in Liverpool, and had lost two husbands in the space of four years,
one in a mine accident and the other in a factory explosion. Her third husband was a womanizer, a drinker and an abuser: ‘He hit Gwynneth often, as well as my mother, and physical violence
was not the only abuse he subjected my sister to.’
²²
In 1925, after the birth of her fourth child, Flo’s mother dropped dead during a
violent argument with her husband. Her baby died later the same day of ‘unsuitable feeding – infantile asthenia’, meaning that it faded away for lack of nutrients. Later, Flo
would discover that her stepfather, too, had been a Barnardo’s boy. Her little brother, Joe, had rickets, and was separated from his sisters – something that never ceased to distress
Flo: ‘The rest of my life was to be dominated by this need to find Joey. I always knew where Gwynneth was but never Joey.’
²³

Flo was taken to Barnardo’s, and spent more than a year at a home in London before setting sail for Australia with no joy at all in her
heart. The voyage was
presented as ‘an exciting adventure’, she said, but she felt only misery at the prospect: ‘Apparently I cried for five days, so my guide lieutenant told me in a letter years
later, and if I had cried for one more day they were going to put me off the ship and send me back.’
²⁴

They arrived at Fremantle on 28 May 1928, and settled into a home which Flo described as being not inhumane, but certainly harsh: the children’s daily routine was ruled by a bugle and was
militaristic in style. Her work included dusting and polishing, sweeping and scrubbing benches. Boys who transgressed – stealing fruit from the orchard, forgetting to do their work –
were publicly thrashed in the dining hall.

Kingsley Fairbridge and his ilk had imagined they were giving slum children a fresh start or a clean slate. They were wrong, according to Flo. Even on the other side of the world, children such
as her were second-class citizens. She had hoped to become a kindergarten teacher, but was told bluntly that she did not have the intelligence of the average Australian: ‘Those words sank so
deeply into my being that I was to be well into my fifties before I began to challenge the untruth and the handicap those words laid on me. I was offered no extra tuition, no alternative education.
I was truly brought down a peg or two.’
²⁵
Flo eventually found her brother, Joey, in 1991, living in Warrington. Her sister, Gwynneth,
returned to Liverpool, where she married happily and had children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Some of these migrant children did thrive, but few ever really managed to shake off their past. John Lane, who had been abandoned by his unmarried mother and then happily fostered to a family in
the Cotswolds until the age of ten, wrote later that he always felt there was a void in his life, even though in his later years he was united with a family of half-brothers and sisters he had
never known existed: ‘Despite my apparent success, I found that at seventy years
of age, the absence of a childhood relationship with any of them had left me with
distinct feeling of remoteness – of a void in my subconscious like a deep well which yields no water.’ His puzzlement at having been wrenched from the bosom of foster-parents whom he
regarded as his real family never left him, he wrote.
²⁶

There were some positive experiences among the misery. But already there were concerns about the conditions in which these migrant children had to live – in 1924, the Overseas Settlement
Board had sent Margaret Bondfield, MP, to Canada to investigate conditions there, and by the mid-1930s the clamour for change was such that the migration, shut down during World War Two, would take
place only on a much smaller scale after 1945. In a sense, it was this new awareness of potential abuse, rather than the abuse itself, that was striking about attitudes to migration during this
period. This was a movement that had gone on for years with little adverse comment. But now children were beginning to be seen as individuals, with needs. Soon, it would no longer be acceptable for
the adult world to simply move them around like pieces on a chessboard. Soon, the children would have to be consulted.

The educational angle

Incrementally, all this new thinking was beginning to impact on the education system. For most children, the change would be imperceptible. But for a few, in particular the
difficult, the socially awkward and the ‘backward’, it would blow into their childhood like a gale. Over the next decade, an extraordinarily motley, eccentric and inspiring group of
people would assemble under the newly painted banner of ‘progressive’ education. For those who experienced their unique take on childhood, life would never be the same again.

Cyril Burt would certainly be regarded now as being among the more conservative proponents of this new style of education. ‘Child study has done much to foster
individual and differential teaching – the adaptation of education to individual children or at least to groups and types of different individuals,’ he told an audience of educationists
in 1927.
²⁷
‘Already a better understanding of child nature has led to the substitution of “internal” for “external”
discipline, and the predetermined routine demanded of entire classes is giving way to the growing recognition of the educational value of spontaneous efforts initiated by the individual, alone or
in social co-operation with his fellows.’ The most advanced ‘educational experiments’, Burt said, were being conducted by Maria Montessori, whose method of educating children
through ‘spontaneous self-development’ was creating interest in the United States, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, who had founded a school in Germany dedicated to teaching music through
movement; and Homer Lane, who had started a community for juvenile delinquents in Dorset.

That Burt should have publicly praised Lane in this way in 1927, two years after his death, is significant because it indicated that those close to the heart of the education system were
becoming aware of – and even approving of – this activity on its wilder fringes. Lane’s colony, the Little Commonwealth, in fact existed only from 1913 until 1918, when it was
abruptly closed down after two of its female ‘citizens’ accused Lane of having ‘immoral relations’ with them.
²⁸
Lane, an
American psychotherapist, was subsequently deported for failing to maintain his registration under the wartime ‘Aliens Act’. But his ideas lived on for many decades. Lane believed real
education was about ‘the path of freedom instead of imposed authority, of self-expression instead of a pouring-in of knowledge, of evoking and exploiting the child’s natural sense of
wonder and curiosity instead of a repetitious hammering home of dull facts’.
²⁹
In Dorset, he pioneered techniques such as group therapy, in
particular with delinquents aged between thirteen and nineteen. Residents aged over fourteen became ‘citizens’, free to choose which of the colony’s
‘families’ they would live in. The atmosphere could hardly have been more different from the regime at institutions such as Barnardo’s and Fairbridge. Here, there was little or no
adult discipline. The boys and girls developed their own ‘judicial machinery’ to deal with transgressions, and the adults studiously avoided giving the impression they were in charge.
The ‘citizens’ drew wages for working to provide the commonwealth with food, clothing or recreation, and there was, Lane reported, little time left for them to take part in formal
schooling.

Despite the sudden and ignominious closure of the Little Commonwealth, a host of other educational and psychological thinkers were ready to take on Lane’s views. Among them were Alexander
Sutherland Neill, a Scotsman who had met Lane during the war and who had hoped to join the Little Commonwealth. Instead, Neill undertook a course of psychotherapy with Lane in London before his
deportation, and then went on, in 1924, to found a school along similar lines to the Little Commonwealth. Summerhill spent its first three years in Lyme Regis in Dorset before moving to Leiston in
Suffolk. And a host of other little educational experiments were bursting out all over the country, often funded by wealthy enthusiasts who believed children should be allowed to regulate their own
lives.

The parents of the children who went to the schools often tended to have sent them not so much in pursuit of radical ideals but in a spirit of desperation. In their early days, they catered
mainly for society’s juvenile misfits – those who had transgressed, or who had simply failed to thrive in the mainstream system. Parents usually had to be able to afford to pay fees, of
course – though some of these early pupils later remembered protracted negotiations about the level of fees they would pay.

Peter Thomas, an only child whose father ran a small iron and steel
foundry in south Wales, had only intermittently attended school before he was sent, aged eleven, to
Dartington Hall, in Devon. There, Leonard Elmhirst, the heir to an estate in south Yorkshire, and his wealthy American wife, Dorothy, had begun what had originally been an experiment in rural
regeneration. In 1926, they founded a progressive school where children could take part in agricultural activities as well as doing lessons. ‘I’d been to a small fee-paying school for
about two or three years – I didn’t attend a great deal. I kept complaining about my stomach and eventually had my appendix out when I was eight, and that took time. I don’t know
that I had any particular friends,’ he recalled.
³⁰

For Peter – who was told on his arrival at Dartington that as there was already a Peter on the roll he would henceforth be known as Stuart – a traumatic early experience of the
school soon gave way to a whole new existence: ‘I was miserable for six, seven, eight weeks – I don’t know how long. We had to write letters home, one a week – I can’t
imagine what they were like. My mother said when I went back for the holiday they’d almost given up and gone to collect me. But suddenly my letters had started to get less tearful, I presume
because I got into the swing of the school.

‘It was such a friendly place – I was a single child and this was my family. I don’t know when I felt it, but I thought, it’s nice to have all these friends, they were
very friendly and the staff were lovely. Because I hadn’t really been to school consistently, I don’t think really in my heart of hearts I knew it
was
a school. You were
encouraged to go to classes, but I spent most of my time out on the estate. I got friendly with a local boy, Bobby Robson, who was my age. I just went to occasional classes.’ The biology
teacher, David Lack – a keen ornithologist who would later write a seminal work on Darwin’s finches – roped in Peter and his friend Bobby to help with a study of the local bird
population: ‘We helped make great big wire fenced traps which we moved from place to place, catching robins. I’m still a member of the British Trust for Ornithology.’

The school, whose headmaster for many years was a charismatic man called Bill Curry, fast began to gain a somewhat scandalous reputation. Particular umbrage was taken at
its lack of team games and at the fact that its pupils were in the habit of bathing nude in the River Dart, just at the point where it met the Ashburnham to Totnes railway line.

The experiences of children like Peter Thomas at schools such as Dartington Hall were rare exceptions, of course, in a system that was still largely dominated by routine and by rote. And the
activities of the staff at Dartington were starting to attract attention that went beyond the perennial gossip about nude bathing. As the 1930s crept in and the air in Europe began to darken, the
atmosphere around the school became more political. ‘Curry’, as he was universally known, became immersed in a pacifist campaign called the Federal Union, and the efforts of
Dartington’s staff were increasingly supplemented by those of liberal refugees from mainland Europe.

Such was the establishment alarm at these goings-on that the progressive schools gained their own security service file, entitled ‘Dartington Hall School and other
disturbances’.
³¹
The documents within it reveal that the security services became increasingly interested in what was going on at the
schools during the years before World War Two: ‘Dartington Hall has for some time been a matter of interest to us, and we have been able to reach some general conclusions about it . . .
presumably because it has never had to pay its way, the experimental purposes for which it was founded have tended to run riot. The most serious count against it is usually the lack of moral
restraint consequent upon the general encouragement to “self expression” and this has attached an unsavoury reputation to the school,’ read one note on the file. MI5 would have
been monitoring all manner of subversives, most of them adult, but there is something particularly potent about the notion that children are being
indoctrinated, that the
enemy is getting in, as it were, through the basement window. Similar themes would emerge again during the 1970s, as the fear that the more socially degenerate elements on the political fringes
might be finding ways of colouring the vision of the nation’s youth. The fear, of course, is a very potent one and goes to the heart of the debate about who actually has charge of
children’s lives. As the education system took on an ever-greater role, and children consequently spent more time away from their home environment, the myth of a potent and mind-altering
undercurrent in schools would become an ever-present one.