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Dedication
This book is dedicated to my mother, Marjorie Skidmore (née Arnison),
who let me believe that I was the driving force behind unlocking her story.
I thank her for taking me back to her lost childhood. She always was
— and still is — a much stronger woman than I can ever hope to be.
In 2007, sisters Joyce Earl and Marjorie Skidmore revisited the Whitley Bay sands of their childhood days. This was their first return to their place of birth since being removed from their mother’s care in February 1937, over seventy years earlier. The experience allowed for some very curative memories to surface.
Photo by Patricia Skidmore.
Foreword
This is an important book telling a life-changing story, and its publication is long overdue.
When, in February 2010, I made a formal full and unconditional apology to the victims of the child migrant program on behalf of the U.K. government, it was with the story of Marjorie right at the forefront of my thoughts.
It was right that we said sorry to Marjorie and all those truly let down. Sorry — as I said then — that she and so many others were allowed to be sent away at the time when they were most vulnerable, sorry that instead of caring for her and thousands more, this country turned its head and their tears were not seen and their cries for help not heeded. Sorry also that it has taken so long for the day of atonement to come, and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved to be given.
In addition I am delighted that Marjorie was able to be reunited with her brother as a result of the family restoration fund we set up with a £6 million grant.
I am humbled by the determination of Marjorie and all former child migrants to have the failures of the past acknowledged, I’m inspired by her and their refusal to be victims, and I’m inspired also by the strength of her spirit. The actions we took in government cannot change the past but can go some way to easing even a small amount of the pain Marjorie and child migrants have endured for many decades.
I believe that Marjorie, Too Afraid to Cry will also play a role in helping share with the world an astonishing story of courage in the face of unthinkable hardship. Courage is the greatest quality of all, for on it everything else depends — and Marjorie has shown a courage that all should applaud.
Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown
Preface
This is a story of my mother, Marjorie, who was one of the thousands upon thousands of children who were removed from their families, their communities, and their country to be placed in one of the British colonies to provide “white stock” and cheap labour for that colony.
As a child, it angered me when I asked my mother about her past and she would not tell me. The anger stemmed from fear, as I imagined the many horrid secrets that she was keeping from me about her past. I felt such a strong sense of not belonging that I told the other children in my school that I came from Mars. We had no past. There was nothing to root me to my birthplace. I did not understand why my mother was so vague about her family and why they all lived in England while we lived in Canada.
It took me many years to discover why my mother would not tell me about her childhood family — it was not because she was keeping a dark secret, but because she had lost her roots.
By 1937, Marjorie’s family had been living in Whitley Bay, in northern England, since the early 1920s. Unemployment there was high, and Marjorie’s father had left his family and the area to look for work. He did find employment around London but had not returned home for the past four years. From time to time he sent some money to his wife and their nine children, but it was rarely enough to sustain them.
In February 1937, with the permission of Marjorie’s father, Marjorie, two sisters, and a brother were removed from their mother’s care by one of Britain’s many emigration societies, the Fairbridge Society. (Kingsley Fairbridge started the Society for the Furtherance of Child Migration to the Colonies in 1909. It was soon shortened to the Child Emigration Society. In 1935 it was renamed the Fairbridge Farm Schools Incorporation, and by the early 1950s it was renamed again to the Fairbridge Society Incorporation. For the purposes of this book, the “Fairbridge Society” will be the main title used.) The society placed the four children in the Middlemore Emigration Home, over two hundred miles southwest of Whitley Bay, in Selly Oak, Birmingham. There they waited their turn to be tested to see if they were mentally and physically fit enough to be accepted for emigration to Canada.
Six months later, ten-year-old Marjorie and her eight-year-old brother were sent to the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. Marjorie recalled that when leaving Liverpool on the Duchess of Atholl she physically pulled an “imaginary cloak” of protection around her as the shoreline slipped away. For this ten-year-old, forgetting her past, her family, and England was the only survival tool she had to enable her to face her frightening and uncertain future. She and her brother were separated and continued to be so until they were well into adulthood. Two of her sisters were at the Middlemore Emigration Home and her beloved mother was in Whitley Bay with her other siblings. She had no one.
Their younger sister was sent out eleven months later, but the older sister, Joyce, was left behind at the home in Birmingham. She was deemed to be too old for the Fairbridge farm school scheme. She was only twelve, but her records incorrectly showed that she was thirteen.[1] Her loss was as great as her siblings’. They were simply gone one day, and she was not even allowed to say goodbye to them when they left for Canada. Joyce stayed at the home until she was sixteen, then was sent back to her family.
I started my research with a small handful of my mother’s early memories, mostly from her childhood at Whitley Bay: she recalled swinging on an old rusty gate, yelling to her mother for a half penny. It was her tenth birthday. She eventually ran off across the alley to school without so much as a farthing. She also recalled playing on the sands at Whitley Bay, the Spanish City Fun Fair at the north end of the town and walking over to St. Mary’s Lighthouse at low tide. I had a photograph of my mother (see top front cover and page 172), although it would take finding several other pieces of her journey before we recognized this as a photograph from the day she arrived at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School. She had vague memories of Canada House in London and of leaving Liverpool. The rest was locked away.
I was determined to unlock her hidden past. I contacted the Whitley Bay School District. They still had records from the 1930s, and I was not only able to discover which schools she attended, but also the dates she attended and the addresses she lived at while at each school. I tracked down the only home where they lived, across the alley from a school: a brownstone house on John Street. I stood and imagined her swinging on a rusty gate and running off to school. I walked the Whitley Bay sand and imagined her playing there as a child. I visited the lighthouse and the old fairgrounds. I walked the same streets that she did as a child.
When I felt that I had found what I could of her first ten years in Whitley Bay, I brought my mother back to the little seaside town of her birth in 2007 to share with her all that I had found. Her big sister Joyce came with us. Seventy years had passed since the sisters had seen Whitley Bay. They both said that they did not remember much, but I walked quietly behind them, with a notepad, as memory after memory poured out.
Together, we walked from the last flat they lived in with their family, on Whitley Road, to the