A large part of the my research to date on children's experiences with various welfare agencies has inevitably focused on the children who were selected by institutions like Barnardo's and The Waifs and Strays Society to emigrate to Canada to start a new life.
These experiences were explored for my PhD research back in 2014, and in 2016 I presented my findings at The Social History Society Conference as part of a panel on migration alongside Eloise Moss, Charlotte Wildman, Ruth Lamont, and Luke Kelly. My research challenged some of the dominant narratives about child migration experiences - namely, that children and their parents had little say or knowledge about their relocation, and that stories of children's migration solely pointed to their loneliness, exploitation, mistreatment, and abuse. Of course, there are many stories that draw attention to these experiences, and these have been well documented by other historians such as Joy Parr, Ellen Boucher and Gordon Lynch, as well as the testimony of many former migrants. My research intended to provide more balance, depth and complexity to these stories, and to point to some of the more positive experiences that children encountered when they were relocated thousands of miles away from everything they had known. Some of these stories will be re-told in my book A Home from Home?
Since this research, I've thought long and hard about where research on child migration should turn attention to next. The field is well saturated with research that has interrogated the policies and practices of migration agencies, and increasingly, the experiences of some of the children who settled overseas. Despite a thriving field of research, there are still many paths left to be explored and newer approaches from fields such as the history of emotions, the 'new' history of experience, and 'new' imperial history, that might offer fresh insights into the subject of child migration in the past.
Most recently, I have returned to the letter that child migrants wrote from their new locations to consider some of their individual and collective experiences. I was struck by how many of these migrant letters offered evocative and sensory descriptions about their new locations, and particularly about the natural world and environment. And many of these letters indicated that migrants held onto highly sentimentalised imaginings of their previous environments - the environments that in many cases had been deemed by case workers to be inappropriate, degraded, dirty, or immoral. Of course, many children would not have shared such a view - despite meagre possessions and furnishings, their home life might still have been emotionally rich.
Nevertheless, I wanted to explore this link between ideas of home, the natural environment, and emotion that child migrant letters alluded to. I presented some of this new work to the North American Conference on British Studies in November 2020. And when I was asked to write a blog piece by the Institute of Historical Research for their new Environment and History feature, this seemed the perfect opportunity to tentatively grapple with this connection more formally, and on paper! You can read the piece here. I'm now working these ideas up into a longer essay, which should make a new and critical contribution to the existing field on child migration. I believe that looking at the way that children wrote about the landscape and nature in their new locations, and how they recollected and imagined the 'Old Country' can tell us much about their conceptions of home, belonging, and identity, as well as provide fresh insights into their immediate experiences of settling and adaptation that other sources, such as visitors reports, cannot.
In the meantime, if you'd like to hear more about this research join me at my next talk on Wednesday 19th January 2022 at 5pm for the Migration History Seminar Series at London Metropolitan University. The link for booking is in the 'Talks' section.