10:38am Saturday 27th February 2010
THE boys had had a difficult childhood, growing up in an orphanage under the parsimonious gaze of the Guardians of the Durham Poor, knowing, like Oliver, that their every mouthful was a bite out of local resources.
In July 1884, the Guardians learned that, at a tenner a time, male Roman Catholic orphans could be sent to Canada to populate the prairies. This, they learned, was a method “of reducing charges on the ratepayers of various parishes”.
They scouted around the youngsters in their care for possible savings. Their eyes alighted on three in Tudhoe orphanage who ticked all the right boxes – John Thomas Hopkins, 13, Stephen Clarke, 12, and John Glenn, only eight – and shipped them out.
This week, Gordon Brown apologised for the Child Migrants Programme which between 1920 and 1970 sent 130,000 “waifs and strays” from children’s homes to Canada, Australia and New Zealand to work on the land.
But it goes back further than that. It started in 1618 when 100 unwanted youngsters were sent to the new British settlement of Richmond, Virginia, in the US. Sadly, Britain is the only country which for 400 years used emigration as a childcare strategy.
Dave Yates, a retired headteacher in Consett, is researching a book on Durham workhouse.
In the minutes, he discovered the story of the Tudhoe orphans.
But they weren’t three isolated cases. On their journey to the Liverpool docks they were joined at Barnard Castle by “a large party of boys from the north”. All Catholics, all orphans, all unwanted, all with tickets for a steamship called the Peruvian.
The Northern Echo didn’t report their fate, although it did give details of the volunteer soldiers sailing with them to Quebec*.
The packed Peruvian sailed at 4.30pm on August 21, 1884, and arrived nine days later in Rimouski, Quebec. It was not a bon voyage for the three.
A fellow passenger complained to the Durham Guardians: “Save for the clothes they stood up in, they had no outfit. They had no great coat, scarf or gloves, no baggage of any kind. Had it not been for Captain Smith’s kindness in speaking of their condition in the bleak winds that swept down from the north, they would have suffered much more than they did.
“The saloon passengers lent them warm clothing but when my attention was first called to two of them, I was standing muffled up to the nose and they with blue lips and chattering teeth sitting too sick to walk about, standing the cold as best they could in their simple jackets and waistcoats and their feet as cold as ice.
“They were under charge of no one on the ship save that the purser had orders to put them off at Rimouski. On arrival they were set off with no one to meet them and being a French settlement, no one to talk to.”
In reply, the Guardians said the boys had gone to a home where nuns knocked them up an outfit for £3: one each of overcoat, blouse, trousers, drawers, vest, shirt, undershirt, stockings, garters, handkerchief, cravat, collar, cap.
Then they were despatched to work either as servants or farmhands in French-speaking households, quite literally a world away from the Durham mining communities into which they had been born.
I wonder what became of them, poor mites.
■ Many thanks to Dave Yates.
*For more, go to www.thenorthernecho.co.
uk/features/blogs/staff/echomemories/
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