The Forgotten Children (15 page)

‘Boys to be farmers.’ A trainee boy harrowing.

‘Girls for farmers’ wives.’ Christina Murray (right) making butter outside the principal’s house above Nuffield Hall.

‘This is not charity, this is an imperial investment.’ The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII, in 1934. He launched a fundraising appeal in London for Fairbridge with a personal donation of £1000. (Photograph courtesy of APL)

Kingsley Fairbridge, the founder of the farm schools. He believed, ‘The average London street Arab and workhouse child can be turned into an upright and productive citizen of our overseas Empire.’

Princess Elizabeth after her marriage, 1947. She donated £2000 from her wedding gifts ‘to assist individual old Fairbridgian boys and girls get a start in life’. The loan fund failed. (Photograph courtesy of Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/APL)

Lord Slim became chairman of the London Fairbridge Society. Slim dismissed Principal Woods when he proposed to remarry a divorcee, but took no action against staff who physically abused the children. (Photograph courtesy of Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/APL)

David’s party of 1959 in front of the magnificent John Howard Mitchell House in Kent prior to leaving for Australia. Back row, left to right: Mary O’Brien, John Ponting, Richard Hill, Paddy O’Brien, Dudley Hill, Billy King, David Hill. Front row: Myrtle O’Brien, unknown, Wendy and Paul Harris, Beryl Daglish, unknown.

Eight-year-old Ian ‘Smiley’ Bayliff in his new outfit, shortly before sailing with his three brothers to Australia. His parents tried unsuccessfully for years to get their boys back from Fairbridge.

Vivian Bingham arrived at Fairbridge as a four-year-old and was treated badly by her cottage mother, who held her head down the toilet for wetting her bed.

The magnificent first-class lounge of the S.S.
Strathaird
. None of us had ever seen the luxury we experienced on the journey out to Australia. (Photograph courtesy of the State Library of Victoria)

Once at Fairbridge we ate our meals from metal plates and bowls, sitting on wooden benches in front of lino-top tables.

‘The boss’, Principal Woods, a towering influence over Fairbridge for twenty-eight years, with his former missionary wife, Ruth, on the steps of the Fairbridge chapel.