Orphans, Waifs, Strays and the Deserted

It will have become apparent by now that the Local Government Board (LGB) (the successor to the Poor Law Board [PLB] in 1871) was responsible for the oversight and regulation of the activities of local boards of guardians and that this included the emigration of children in their charge. In particular the central authority was required to approve the departure of each child individually. As a result important questions arose, especially about the proper interpretation and application of the law as well as about how policy should be framed.

In sharp contrast, the activities of the private bodies and individuals having taken children into their care were not subject to any comparable regulation or scrutiny, except when they fell foul of certain general laws such as the law of habeus corpus. Nevertheless, many of the questions that surfaced in connection with the emigration of Poor Law children were equally pertinent in the case of the trans-shipment of those who were the responsibility of private agencies. For this reason the way in which the issues confronting the LGB were dealt with has a wider relevance than would be suggested by the fact that eventually the majority of children sent to Canada were drawn from private organisations.

At the outset the Local Government Board wrestled with the problem of which Poor Law children were eligible for emigration. The current legislation only permitted those who were orphans or who had been deserted to be included. But who exactly was an orphan and who had been deserted? Orphan status was not a settled matter. For example, in 1870 the Wareham-Purbeck union wrote to the PLB telling them that they were considering sending a few ‘orphan girls’ to Canada with Maria Rye. Shortly after, however, their clerk wrote again to explain that they were not taking matters further because ‘the parents of the children in question don't at present … seem inclined to let them go out’. These children were obviously not orphans, but the correspondence reflected the fact that the term ‘orphan’ was commonly used to refer to many children who happened to be separated from living parents. Sometimes the phrase ‘orphaned in one parent’ was used.