Discovery Reveals No Apology Necessary

Normally this corner of The Booster is dedicated to our past, but this week’s story is about current events – two events in particular. At Benares Historic House where I work, we were fortunate recently to strike a mother lode of information on a former resident of the home. Ninety years ago, Carrie Furze spent her days in Benares’ basement cooking meals, washing clothes and otherwise doing her job quietly behind the scene. Such was the life of a domestic servant. Benares was her home, but it wasn’t her home, and until recently that’s all we knew of Carrie.

The second event took place at the convenience store down the street from Benares this past weekend. It was there that I came across a headline in the Daily Telegram that read “Britain to Apologise for Mass Export of Children.”

These two events are bound by a common thread.

Carrie left Benares in 1919 to work for the Owen family in Toronto. Tom Drew-Smith is a descendant of this family and it was during a visit to Benares that Tom told us many new stories about the once-obscure Carrie, including the fact that she came to Canada as part of the very same mass deportation of boys and girls that has recently become the hot topic in Britain’s parliament.

The movement to send orphaned and underprivileged children to Canada and other British colonies began in the 1860s with good intentions. But, as the old adage goes, the road to hell often starts out that way.

There were laws in the UK restricting child labour by age and hours of permissible work, but these were easy to circumvent at a time when England’s “mill towns” had no organized police forces.

Thomas Barnardo – a doctor in London’s poor East End – formed a placement agency to find a family for abandoned and injured children, and he also financed the construction of homes where these children could live in the meantime. Here they came to be known as “home children.”

Frustrated by the slow adoption rate in a country with so much wealth and yet so much destitution, Barnardo joined forces with other agencies such as Kingsley Fairbridge’s Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies.

Carrie’s younger brother, Ernest was 13 when he came to Canada in 1902 under the sponsorship of the emigration movement, and Carrie arrived a year later, at age 15 – presumably after their father left home, leaving their financially-distressed mother, Lucy unable to care for them.

With seemingly unlimited potential, Canada could easily be a haven for homeless children. But in the days when communication between Britain and here was only as fast as a trans-Atlantic steamship, Canada was also a place where migrant children could end up permanently out of reach of their sponsor societies and forever out of contact with whatever family they might still have in the UK. Earlier this month, Australia’s prime minister, Kevin Rudd expressed sorrow on behalf of the island nation for the mistreatment that many of the deported children suffered there after being taken in by “parents” who adopted them as unpaid labourers at farms, shops and factories.

Following Australia’s lead, British prime minister Gordon Brown apologized last week for Britain’s role in sending children into servitude in the first place. It’s likely that Canada will follow its Commonwealth compatriots in apologizing for its role in accepting deported children and for not ensuring that these children were properly cared for.

But for Carrie and Ernest, an apology may not be necessary. Not all home children suffered and (judging by one particular photograph given to us by the Drew-Smith family after their visit to Benares) Carrie appears to have benefited from the program.

In the photo, Tom is wearing his university graduation gown and Carrie is standing beside him wearing a proud grin. Carrie may have been just a paid servant to Tom’s late uncle, but to Tom, Carrie was as much a member of the family as anyone else in his uncle’s home.

As a child, Carrie was taken away from a mother she likely never saw again, but in Canada, Carrie found a new family that loved her dearly. Tom even named his daughter Carrie.

As for Ernest, it’s hard to say whether migration to Canada had any real effect on his life. He worked as a farm laborer in Saskatchewan but in 1916 enlisted for duty during World War I. It was Ernest’s fate to die in the defense of his empire but unlike so many hundreds of thousands of British soldiers killed in stalemate battles like Passchendaele or the Somme, Ernest’s life ended at the heroic battle at Vimy Ridge. Ernest died as a Canadian soldier. A photo of Private Furze in his uniform holds a place of honour on a dresser in the room at Benares that his sister once called home.

So thank you to Tom and to Tom – to Dr. Barnardo for having the compassion and diligence to help disadvantaged children find a better life. And to Mr. Drew-Smith for being kind enough to share his memories of Carrie with the museum staff.

Now that we know Benares’ maid better we consider her family, too.