Sorrow of the children shipped to Canada all alone

**The sorrow of children sent to Canada alone**

Siblings Rose and Fred Shapcott, pictured when they entered Barnardo's in 1891, were among those sent to Canada.

When 10-year-old Rose Shapcott and her 14-year-old brother Fred were orphaned and placed in a Barnardo's children's home in 1891, they had no idea they would be separated and sent thousands of miles away across the Atlantic.

The siblings were sent to Canada under the British Home Children child migration programme, which saw about 100,000 impoverished children from Britain sent to overseas colonies including Canada between 1869 and the 1940s.

Rose's great grandson Malcolm Farrow said the children were separated from their families and sent to Canada as cheap labour, often suffering mistreatment at the hands of those who took them in.

Farrow said Fred was sent first to Saskatchewan, and later Rose asked to be sent over when she was 17, believing they would be reunited.

Instead, she was sent thousands of miles away to Peterborough in Ontario and went on to have "a very sad life", Farrow said.

Rose eventually married, but Fred managed to bring her back to England because he was worried about her.

She had a baby boy out of wedlock, but he was placed in care because he had a disability. At one stage, Rose was admitted to an asylum in England when she began to struggle with her mental health, Farrow explained.

In the end, she returned to her husband in Canada, without her son, and died in 1916.

Farrow sits on the board of the Home Children Canada charity, which works to raise awareness of the young child migrants, some of whom died in childhood.

Its work has included finding and recording burial sites across Canada, including a mass grave of 76 British Home Children in Etobicoke, Ontario, and putting up a monument in their honour.

In another case, George Roberts was 15 when he was sent to Canada on a ship called the Corsican, which left Albert Dock in 1913.

According to Simon Roberts - George's great uncle - he was born out of wedlock in Liverpool in 1897. After his mother moved to London to escape the shame, he was placed in care when she began struggling to support him and his older brother.

Roberts said that, being a little older, his uncle was "one of the luckier ones", but many children suffered horrific experiences.

He said "the problem was that, although I think there were good intentions in the UK, there was no inspection process or supervision in Canada".

Roberts said some of the children died and that abuse included being "put into fields in the middle of a Canadian winter with no shoes, with no boots, and told to work the fields".

He said he was "extremely disappointed to discover that there is no memorial to the journeys undertaken by these children in the country from which they were sent".

He said the Home Children Canada charity was "trying to get Liverpool City Council to allow us to put a memorial up to remember these poor lonely little children, many of which were treated horrifically in their short lives".

The Home Children Canada charity said it would be willing to pay for the statue, but needs permission to erect it in the city.

Sheila Dodd, another descendant of one of the British Home Children, said the charity believed 10-15% of all British Home Children came from the Liverpool area, with at least six sending agencies and homes based in the city.

Dodd said her grandmother Heather McGrath and her grandmother's brother James were sent to Canada via Liverpool in 1930 and 1927 respectively.

She said she was able to speak to her grandmother, who told her about "her terrible experiences".

Dodd said she hoped the memorial could be built in Liverpool so she and other descendants could visit it as a place of pilgrimage.

The BBC has approached Liverpool City Council for comment.