^ 1979 Prince Charles with Fairbridge boys and the Principal at the swimming pool
UK child migrants sent to Australia sue government over abuse
29 Aug 2018
More than 100 Britons who were forcibly sent abroad as children under a resettlement scheme are suing the UK government over the abuse they faced.
In March, the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse said all 2,000 survivors should receive financial compensation within 12 months.
But the British government has failed to set up any scheme providing redress.
Between 1945-70, some 4,000 children were separated from their families and sent to Australia and Zimbabwe.
As part of the scheme, children from deprived backgrounds who were often already in social care – some as young as three years old – were sent away with the promise of a better life.
The scheme was overseen by government, and managed by charities and the church. Victims say they went on to be sexually, emotionally and physically abused.
Rex Wade was one of the last children to be sent to Australia as part of the programme in 1970.
At the age of 10, he was shipped from Cornwall with his brother to Tasmania.
He says he was subjected to a punitive regime and was treated “cruelly for any misdemeanour”, to the point that his tormentors would set a dog on him and other children if they misbehaved.
“It was physical, verbal and mental abuse,” he says.
“I lost everything I ever had; the relationships I had with my family. It’s a lot to deal with and you just don’t get over it.”
‘They took my childhood’
John Glynn, who was sent to a Christian Brothers institution in Western Australia when he was eight years old, is one of the 100 former migrants to bring the case forward.
At the institution in Clontarf, he was told he was not loved by his family in Britain. Through his seven years with the Christian Brothers he was beaten brutally with a cane, and also sexually abused.
“As I get older it gets worse,” the 74-year-old says.
“I think about that a lot now. They took my childhood from me. They took my country from me, my heritage.”
For several decades, the UK sent children across the world to new lives in institutions where many were abused and used as forced labour. It’s a scandal that is still having repercussions now.
Imagine the 1950s, in the years before air travel became commonplace or the internet dominated our lives. Imagine being a child of those times, barely aware of life even in the next town. An orphan perhaps, living in a British children’s home.
Now imagine being told that shortly you would board a ship for somewhere called Australia, to begin a new life in a sunlit wonderland. For good. No choice.
Read the full article here (published February 2017)
Historically, the migration of British children was part of a longstanding policy aimed at easing the strain on UK orphanages and strengthening the British population abroad.
More than 130,000 children were shipped to Commonwealth countries from 1618 until 1970, to countries like Canada, New Zealand, Zimbabwe and Australia.
The Independent Inquiry Into Child Sex Abuse (IICSA) investigated the final 4,000 children sent to Australia and Zimbabwe between 1945-1970.
It found children suffered sexual and emotional abuse, as well as forced labour. Some were also wrongly told they were orphans, depriving them of the opportunity of meeting their birth parents.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We want to reassure those affected we are committed to providing a timely response to the Inquiry’s recommendations.”
But despite the recommendation in March, the government is yet to set up a compensation scheme for the surviving child migrants.
BBC correspondent Sanchia Berg said many “of the migrants feel time is running out” as most are elderly, and some are frail.
Since March, 14 of the survivors have died.
Meanwhile, lawyer Alan Collins, who is representing the victims, said: “The government needs to step up to the plate and bring into force its redress scheme.
“Compensation can never put matters right, that’s impossible and it would be insulting to suggest otherwise.
“But it is action, it is a recognition that meets the words that have been spoken by the politicians.”
In 2010, then-Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the British government for sending British children abroad.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-45340295
Prince’s Trust ‘covering its backside’ over child migrant abuse, David Hill says
Former Australian ABC managing director tells UK inquiry the youth charity set up by Prince Charles had child abuse files years before expressing abhorrence
10 July 2017
The former Australian ABC managing director David Hill has accused a youth charity set up by Prince Charles of “covering its backside” by denying it had known of serious abuse suffered by child migrants sent to Australia.
Hill told a UK national inquiry in London on Monday that the Prince’s Trust had recently criticised the Fairbridge Society over the physical and sexual abuse suffered by children who were sent to its farm schools in Australia.
Fairbridge had high-level connections in the UK, including royalty, when it was running the Australian schools in the 1950s and 60s. Fairbridge was absorbed in 2011 by the Prince’s Trust, a youth charity set up by Prince Charles in 1976
Hill told the independent inquiry into child sexual abuse on Monday that he was sent to a Fairbridge farm school at Molong in NSW in 1959.
In May the society heard from many former child migrants about the appalling treatment they received at institutions run by Fairbridge, the Christian Brothers in Western Australia and other church and charity groups.
It heard that children were forced to work barefoot on farms or in quarries, their schooling was inadequate, their food substandard and they were regularly beaten and in many cases sexually abused by their so-called carers.
Hill said Fairbridge had in the past routinely lied and denied any wrongdoing when confronted about the abuse. He said the Fairbridge files had been with the Prince’s Trust for the past six years and contained many references to abuse.
Hill noted that the inquiry had received a letter from the Prince’s Trust in recent days expressing its abhorrence of the abuse suffered at Fairbridge farm schools. But he said he suspected the trust of cynicism as it had not previously acknowledged such abuse despite it being in the records they held.
“I can’t help thinking that the Prince’s Trust is simply covering its backside,” he said.
Hill was one of nearly 7,000 British children in state or charity care who were sent to Australia up until the 1970s, supposedly to improve their prospects. He said a 1956 inspection of Australian institutions had resulted in a blacklist of places that were deemed “unfit for children”.
But because the Fairbridge Society had royal and aristocratic backing the blacklist was torn up and its farm schools continued to operate.
That meant “hundreds more children, including me and many as young as four”, continued to be sent into conditions “harsher than at adult prisons in Australia”, Hill said.
Child migrants kept being sent to farm schools in Australia despite officials knowing some harboured paedophile rings
- British child migrants were sent to Australian farm schools with paedophiles
- A U.K. inquiry is examining sexual, physical and emotional abuse of children
- Catholic Christian Brothers and royal-back Fairbridge Society worst offenders
Child migrants kept being trafficked from Britain to Australia despite officials knowing that some institutions they were sent to harboured pedophile rings, a U.K. inquiry was told.
Dr Margaret Humphreys of the Child Migrants Trust told the child sexual abuse inquiry in London that recruiters were sent to the U.K. to select children for church and charity-run farm schools in Australia.
‘We would categorise that now as child trafficking.
Among the worst offenders were the Catholic order the Christian Brothers who ran farm schools in Western Australia and the royals-backed Fairbridge Society which ran farm schools in NSW.
There was knowledge that some of the institutions were quite clearly pedophile rings,’ Humphreys told the inquiry.
She said the sexual abuse of even one child should have prompted an inquiry but that didn’t happen and hundreds of children were abused.
They were left ‘lonely and isolated’ to deal with the abuse on their own, she said.
Humphreys slammed the defence that such abuse was in line with the ‘standards of the day’.
‘When was it ever the standards of the day to rape children, to abuse children in this way?’ she said.
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno
How can I get in contact with David Hill? I want him to know about Sir Harold Haywood’s role helping PIE & PAL to draft Paedophilia Q&A
Another Director of The Prince’s Trust – Sir Harold Haywood
Sir Harold Haywood, who also happened to have been Prince Charles most trusted charity aide, responsible for the Prince’s Trust.
For almost twenty years, from 1955-1974, Haywood occupied one of the top positions at the NAYC National Association of Youth Clubs, first leading as Education and Training Director, and then Director of Youth Work.
via cassandra cogno
Under Haywood’s NAYC directorship, Sir Angus Ogilvy, husband of Princess Alexandra was appointed President, with Jimmy Savile as Vice-President; a slew of celebrity attended fundraising events were organized, new headquarters were built on premises at Devonshire Street.
Angus Ogilvy and Jimmy Savile
Sir Harold Haywood’s time as Chairman of Albany Trust
From 1974 to 1977
Haywood is chairman of Albany Trust – during this time he coaxed into existence a booklet entitled Paedophilia: Some Questions and Answers along with fellow Albany Trustees, members of the Paedophile Information Exchange (PIE’s Keith Hose and Tom O’Carroll) and the Paedophile Action League (PAL).
It was abandoned after a trustee saw a draft and branded it monstrous.”
One of the Booklet’s stated aims was to argue for the positive social benefits paedophiles brought to society:
“… about paedophilia, and to argue that those involved represent no special threat to society, but on the contrary are often a force for social good.”
1975-1976: Haywood & Napier, Albany Trust & Nucleus at Earl’s Court
Sir John Major and Gordon Brown will give evidence to child sexual abuse inquiry
Two former prime ministers will be called to give evidence to the public inquiry into child abuse next week as it examines the ill-treatment of children sent abroad under state-approved migration programmes.
Sir John Major and Gordon Brown are the first prominent public figures to be asked to account for the conduct of state institutions before the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
Sir John is to give evidence about his government’s response as the scandal of how British children were abused in farm schools and church institutions in Australia emerged during the 1990s.
In 1983 he wrote to one MP stating that Britain was not responsible for the way child migrants had been treated in other countries.
John Major lambasted over child migrants
July 22 2017
The former prime minister is facing criticism for his handling of the issue of the ill-treatment of child migrants who were deported from Britain to Australia.
Sir John Major should have been called before a public inquiry to explain why his government refused to accept any responsibility for the plight of child migrants, a leading campaigner said yesterday.
Margaret Humphreys, director of the Child Migrants Trust, told the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) that as the scale of the scandal emerged in the 1990s her efforts to engage the Conservative government were in vain. Sir John and other ministers repeatedly said that the issue of ill-treatment of the migrants was a matter for governments in Australia and other countries.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/john-major-lambasted-over-child-migrants-sd0czzwhr
Dr Margaret Humphreys: ‘ALARMED that JOHN MAJOR did NOT attend this inquiry’
21 July 2017
The Duke of Gloucester, Queen Elizabeth’s cousin, was patron of the Fairbridge Society
The Duke and Duchess of Gloucester are seen off on their departure for Australia by King George VI and the Queen’s mum 1945
http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2011/05/30/from-the-eyes-of-an-eight-year-old/
Duke of Gloucester (Queen’s cousin) and links to:
Jaz Karim – worked at Christ’s Hospital School and the Queen’s Club – – Duke of Gloucester – is pres of Christ’s Hospital School and a member of the Queen’s Club.
From CH forum:
http://www.chforum.info/php/viewtopic.php?t=4526
Duke of Gloucester a freemason
The Duke of Gloucester did charity work with Savile – – it looks as though Savile is wearing his eyeball rings in the picture with the Duke and children
^ His father, Henry, the Duke of Gloucester was patron of Fairbridge school where abuse was rife and covered up.
Current Duke Of Gloucester – Richard –
for over thirty-two years was President of the Institute of Advanced Motorist
the Institute of Advanced Motorist. Current vice presidents of the IAM include former BBC Crimewatch presenter and safety campaigner Nick Ross and former transport minister Sir Peter Bottomley MP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_of_Advanced_Motorists
Sir Jimmy Savile is a member of the Institute of Advanced Motorists
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/sir-jimmy-savile-fixes-crash-329267
Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester, arrival at The Hurlingham Club. Birgitte, Duchess of Gloucester, GCVO, is the wife of Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester
http://www.ebay.com/itm/35mm-Slide-of-Birgitte-Duchess-of-Gloucester-arrival-at-The-Hurlingham-Club/391836230087?_trksid=p2047675.c100011.m1850&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D45042%26meid%3D64e8cec093f64e1080854d7534d565d2%26pid%3D100011%26rk%3D1%26rkt%3D4%26sd%3D352050275174
Jeffrey Archer, jailbird who invested in Harvey Proctor’s tie shop, a Hurlingham Club member.
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-hurlingham-club-has-kicked-out-vicky-pryce-but-not-because-of-what-she-did-8937634.html
CLAN @CLAN_AU
Is @InquiryCSA aware Barnardos in Australia will NOT released records to children of ChildMigrants Wrong
1984
Freemasons agree to underwrite the Board of Fairbridge Western Australia Inc
http://fairbridgekids.info/?page_id=2646
Child abuse inquiry may demand access to royal archives
Mar 11, 2017
Britain’s largest public inquiry could seek access to the royal archives after hearing evidence that they hold material relevant to investigations into child abuse cover-ups.
The independent inquiry into child sexual abuse (IICSA) — which has declared that “no one, no matter how apparently powerful, will be allowed to obstruct our inquiries” — believes that the archives contain evidence about Fairbridge, a charity with high-level royal connections which was heavily involved in child migration schemes.
Thousands of children suffered harsh physical punishment and sexual assaults at remote farm schools run by Fairbridge in Western Australia, which were visited by members of the royal family.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/cd96a686-05d0-11e7-976a-0b4b9a1a67a3
Betrayed children sold into slavery
Children in the dining hall of Fairbridge Molong in 1948.
The British government betrayed thousands of child migrants sent to Australia, and a key charity supported by British aristocracy and even touching the royal family has refused to apologise for appalling abuse.
Former ABC managing director David Hill, a child migrant at one of the Fairbridge Society’s biggest farms at Molong, western NSW, will make the claim today before the British independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
Mr Hill will also call for the charity to publicly apologise and the British government to provide child migrants full redress and compensation.
About 7000 underprivileged children were transported to Australia between 1913 and 1966 as part of the Fairbridge scheme, targeted at ‘‘orphans and waifs to prevent the vices of professional pauperism’’.
But the British government not only knew of the dreadful Dickensian conditions suffered by the children, all of them underprivileged and physically and emotionally abused on the farms as child labourers in the Australian bush, they then organised for the society to get more money to transport more children.
The UK Fairbridge Society refuses to acknowledge or apologise for the treatment meted out to the children.
The inquiry has heard that 60 per cent of the children sent to Fairbridge Molong were sexually abused. Fairbridge officials have told the inquiry that responsibility for the children lay with the NSW officials of the scheme, at odds with documentary evidence subsequently unearthed showing that all major decisions and power was at the British end.
Mr Hill will tell the inquiry that none of the improved conditions were carried out — not even the most basic of comforts such as a pillow to sleep on, nor was there any accountability.
Under the new conditions the farms were to provide apprenticeships or training schemes but none was provided. Children left school at 15 to work on the largely self-sufficient farm running the piggery, slaughtering the animals for food and growing crops.
Mr Hill told The Australian he couldn’t understand how the government could continue to send children to the farm when they had been warned of the horrendous conditions the children faced.
“The documents show that the children farms were condemned as unfit for children and they began suspending the migration but Fairbridge officials went ballistic and the Home Office quietly tore out the black list and hundreds more children, including me, were then condemned to such a fate,’’ Mr Hill said.
“A year later the British government then got involved in painful negotiations with the UK Fairbridge Society to modernise conditions, yet none of the reforms were introduced.
‘’I was sent out in 1959 and not one of the changes were implemented …. the changes were supposed to make the conditions more homely and make the farm closer to a family situation. But when I was there from 1959 for just under three years none were introduced, there were no pillows let alone a comforting arm.’’
Mr Hill’s opening statement will mark the beginning of the third stage of the British inquiry, focusing on institutional failures.
Documents of the Fairbridge Society show that there was concern for one principal, accused of sexual assaults through the 1940s but he was not removed from his position until the mid 1950s by the British commissioners.
In 1956 there was such concern about the conditions, a British commission travelled to the 26 Australian child migrant farms and subsequently black-listed 10 of them, including Fairbridge Molong, for their subhuman facilities.
But Fairbridge Society secretary WR Vaughan stormed into Australia House in the Strand and threatened to involve the society president, the Duke of Gloucester, who was the Australian former governor-general and Queen Elizabeth’s uncle.
Not only was the explosive report then sequestered in the Home Office files, the government later agreed with the society to increase its funding on the basis that conditions for the children improved.
Mr Hill’s 2007 book The Forgotten Children detailed stories of the children at the home, which sparked a successful $24 million class action by more than 160 of the Molong children in the NSW Supreme Court.
But Mr Hill’s further evidence of the British government cover-up will provide uncomfortable hearing for Prince Charles’ foundation, The Prince’s Trust, which merged with Fairbridge Foundation in 2010.
Mischief
Some files on Fairbridge Farm Schools closed for 75 years
https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm199798/cmselect/cmhealth/755/8052011.htm …
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno ^^ Have you gathered these @IICSA_media @iicsa_vscp ?
That @CassandraCogno is a fascinating question to @IICSA_media @iicsa_vscp I for one will be most curious to see if any answer arises. #CSA
Certainly @CassandraCogno
no surprise if conduct of @IICSA_media @iicsa_vscp matches that of @JerseyInquiry
http://voiceforchildren.blogspot.com/2017/03/jersey-child-abuse-inquiry-report.html?showComment=1489355138846#c2939300393638504911 … – #CSA
Mischief @mischiefx
Fairbridge Society – 1944 investigation – gross indecency
http://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/37086/33674 …
Chairman of the Fairbridge Society Charles Hambro was head of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE).
He was involved in with the clandestine organisation (later known as MI6) for many years previously.
The Fairbridge Society child migrant scheme was “shameful” and “barbaric”.
Fairbridge has refused to apologise for past injustices.
Discovery77 @discovery77
Gil Woods, the secretary of the UK Fairbridge Society said “my highest priority is to protect the name and the reputation of Fairbridge”
Three former Fairbridge boys have claimed that the then-Australian Governor General, Lord Slim, sexually molested them during rides in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce while visiting the home. It is understood these allegations could be considered by the inquiry.
The inquiry could also definitively answer a crucial historical question. Did the British government know it was sending children to be mistreated in a foreign country?
Margaret Humphreys is adamant: “We want to know what happened, we want to know who did it, and we want to know who covered it up for so long.”
In fact, government files reveal that there was a time when the migration programme could have been stopped. It came in 1956 when three officials went to Australia to inspect 26 institutions which took child migrants.
There was enough warning of this “fact-finding mission” to allow a Fairbridge official to warn the manager of the Molong farm
The resulting report, delivered back to the British government, was fairly critical. It identified a general lack of expertise in child care and worried that children were living in institutions in remote rural areas, whereas the trend in Britain was towards fostering them into urban families.
However the report had a second “secret” section, never published, which went a little further.
This named names – including those of five institutions which were not up to standard. When the UK’s Home Office saw the report, it wanted five more added to create what became an infamous blacklist – places which should not receive more children because of poor standards of care. Fairbridge Molong and Bindoon were both on the list.
- St Joseph’s orphanage, Sydney
- Dhurringile Rural Training Farm, Victoria
- St Joseph’s, Neerkol, nr Rockhampton, Queensland
- Salvation Army Training Farm, Riverview, Queensland
- Methodist Home, Magill, Adelaide
- St Vincent’s Orphanage, Castledare
- St Joseph’s Farm School, Bindoon, Western Australia
- St John Bosco Boys’ Town, Glenorchy, Hobart
- Fairbridge Farm School, Pinjarra, Western Australia
- Fairbridge Farm School, Molong, New South Wales
But the report had barely scratched the surface. It made no mention of sexual or physical abuse.
Dring the post-war years, sexual accusations were made against three principals of the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong.
David Hill has revealed they included a claim that Frederick Woods – the man who beat boys with a hockey stick – was “sexually perverted” and had abused a girl resident. An internal investigation exonerated him.
This does not appear to have been disclosed by the Fairbridge Society either to the public or the 1956 inspectors. They had a schedule to keep to, and their visits to institutions spread across a vast country were fleeting.
Something strongly resembling a cover-up began. Files held at the National Archive set out the response of government officials. One wrote in 1957 that the Overseas Migration Board, which advised the government, was “sorry the mission was sent at all”.
Some on the board “urged very strongly that the report should not be published.”
The government archives record that at a meeting with the organisations running the migrant programmes, Lord John Hope, under-secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, discussed what would be disclosed to parliament from the report.
“I think you can rely upon us to do what we can in as much as we shall pick out all the good bits,” he said. “I shall not be in the least critical in Parliament.”
The UK Fairbridge Society piled on its own pressure – its president was the Duke of Gloucester, uncle to the Queen. Officials discussed the “immediate parliamentary repercussions” which could result from holding up the migrant programme.
Sir Colin Anderson, the director of the Orient Line, which benefited from the business of shipping the children, appealed for the report not to be made public because of the controversy it might cause.
In a sympathetic phone call, a senior official from the Overseas Migration Board responded that the Fairbridge Society was an “extremely fine endeavour for which everyone felt the highest praise”.
And what did the government do? Files at the National Archive show officials squirmed in institutional discomfort at the idea of taking any meaningful action.
In June 1957 the Commonwealth Relations Office sent a secret telegram to the UK High Commission in Australia – “we do not want to withhold approval”, it said, for more children to to be sent from the UK.
After more pressure from the Fairbridge Society, 16 children waiting to travel were sent on their way.
The key recommendation of the inspectors, that the British home secretary agree each and every decision to send a child, was quietly shelved.
The Fairbridge Society continued to ship out children, though concentrated on those whose mothers intended to join them later.
“The British government not only continued to approve children to be sent, but they financially subsidised for them to go. To institutions they had put on a blacklist unfit for children, condemned.”
Molong Farm School finally closed in 1973. The Fairbridge Society is now part of the Prince’s Trust and still runs activity holidays for children.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39078652
Viscount Slim
Good Viscount Slim, Australian Governor-General/WW2 leader confirmed as paedo by @IICSA_media Inquiry
“I am really angry with Fairbridge. …They just wiped their hands and walked away.” The charity, now known as the Fairbridge Foundation, continues to work with underprivileged children in Australia and Britain.
Unlike Barnardo’s, which has acknowledged that its child migrant scheme was “shameful” and “barbaric”, Fairbridge has refused to apologise for past injustices.
It argued in a submission to an inquiry by the Australian Senate in 2001 that nothing seriously wrong took place at its migrant centres.
“We have conceded all along that the treatment of children was not perfect,” said the chairman of Fairbridge in Australia, John Kennedy. “But what good would an apology do?”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1550381/WWII-hero-accused-of-sex-assault-on-children.html
Sir William Slim, Chief Scout of the Commonwealth
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten and Lt. General Sir William Slim
Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck, Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten and Lt. General Sir William Slim
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander and William Slim (left) – Mountbatten speaking about Slim – Chief of the Imperial Staff
“The finest general World War Two produced.”
Sir Slim William was appointed deputy-constable and lieutenant-governor of Windsor Castle in 1963 and was promoted constable and governor in 1964
The Constables and Governors of Windsor Castle are in charge of Windsor Castle in England on behalf of the sovereign.
He died on 14 December 1970 at St Marylebone, London. He was accorded a full military funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor
Slim is further commemorated by a plaque in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral and by a statue at Whitehall unveiled by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.
Truthseeker1 @thewakeupcall09
Lord Louis Mountbatten former chauffeur Norman Nield exposed him
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, there have been such newspaper headlines as, “‘Uncle Dickie’ the Sex Pervert” (N.Z. Truth, Sept. 8, 1987), since Mountbatten’s former chauffeur, Norman Nield, started revealing details of the late Lord Mountbatten’s alleged sexual exploitation of boys.
Paedophile Lord Louis Mountbatten
Edward Prince of Wales and his cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten “relax” in a canvas swimming pool on board H. M. S. Renown during their 1920 Empire Tour.
Lord Louis was a great grandson of Queen Victoria and the uncle of Prince Philip (consort of Queen Elizabeth II). Mountbatten was also a promiscuous bisexual who was famously rumored to have had an affair with Edward VIII (who was Prince of Wales at the time) when he accompanied him on his Empire tours (see photo above).
The Queen. Like any human being, she is subject to the influence of those around her. While he lived, Lord Mountbatten was a persuasive counsellor, and he formulated the plan for Prince Charles’s unusually rigorous education.
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07/26/magazine/an-informal-look-at-the-royal-family.html?pagewanted=all
During official visits to the Fairbridge Farm School near the village of Molong in 1953 and 1955, the former general Field Marshall William Slim allegedly fondled young boys as they rode in his official car.
School: The majority of pupils at Fairbridge Farm School, of which Viscount Slim was a patron, were British migrants
Mr Stevens claims Viscount Slim would arrive at the school in his Rolls Royce and ‘the next minute we were sitting on his knee and he’s got his hands up our trousers’.
Slim was raised to the peerage, taking the title Viscount Slim of Yarralumla and Bishopston.
Fairbridge had an aristocratic support base
Slim Williams with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip
@mischiefx
The Times, July 9, 1953 The Queen Mother – tribute to the founder of Fairbridge Farm Schools during Rhodesia trip
Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, attends a garden party in the grounds of Government House, Canberra, with Governor-General Field Marshall Sir William Slim – Feb 17, 1954
Mr Hill said that in 1956 the British government sent a fact-finding mission to Australia to investigate child migration and it had recommended the blacklisting of the Molong school. But he said documents in the London-based Fairbridge Society archives showed members used their influence in the upper echelons of the British establishment to get the blacklisting quietly dropped.
@mischiefx
British Gov’t knew Fairbridge farms were unfit for children, documents show
In 1956 a fact-finding mission was sent to Australia to evaluate how child migrants were being treated.
Mr Hill said that in 1956 the British government sent a fact-finding mission to Australia to investigate child migration and it had recommended the blacklisting of the Molong school. But he said documents in the London-based Fairbridge Society archives showed members used their influence in the upper echelons of the British establishment to get the blacklisting quietly dropped.
Mischief
The Times, June 7, 1957 Fairbridge Society, now struggling to get children, introduces the “family scheme”
Sir Charles Hambro…new “family scheme”
@mischiefx
British Gov’t knew Fairbridge farms were unfit for children, documents show
@mischiefx
The Times, July 26, 1957 Child Migrants Australia – “British Allegations Not Accepted”
@mischiefx
Princess Alexandra with Governor-General Sir William and Lady Slim, 14 August 1959.
Princess Alexandra visited Australia from 14 August to 20 September 1959.
Prior to arriving in Australia, the Princess met Rolf Harris, an Australian song writer and artist, at a London party for the Royal Commonwealth Society. Harris told the Brisbane Telegraph, ‘Mainly she wanted to know about Australia… She is terribly excited about the trip’. Harris added, ‘Later, when we danced, she asked if I would teach her some Australian terms’. He informed her that a Queenslander is a ‘bananalander’ and that a fine fellow is a ‘beaut bloke’. Harris also stated that, ‘She is a wonderful girl, completely natural and able to put you at ease… She is not the slightest bit stuffy. And she dances wonderfully.’1
The accent during her tour was on the youth. Officials attempted to invite as many young people as possible to the public functions attended by the Princess.
http://guides.naa.gov.au/royalty-australian-society/chapter11/index.aspx
Discovery77 @discovery77_
Fairbridge had an aristocratic support base
The Times, July 25, 1934 – Donations to the Child Emigration Society/ Fairbridge Farm Schools
@mischiefx
Transcript and evidence from final day of public hearings in child migration programmes case study:
Click to access Public%20hearing%20transcript%2010th%20March%202017.pdf
https://www.iicsa.org.uk/key-documents
Part one of public hearings for the Child Migration Programmes case study have concluded. Part two will begin again on 10 July
are the abusers & organizers in Australia going to be investigated & charged?
No. of issues with Christian Brothers – apparently claiming childrens’ money – unpaid labour. Internal audits fraught.
Can’t see any other media coverage of hearings except La Vile?
@discovery77_
Incidentally (& despite fundingraising), read somewhere PM Baldwin & Ed. Prince of Wales weren’t close, but seems to me they were, always together
Abuse inquiry: Australian orphanage was ‘feast of kids’
1 Mar 2017
A former child migrant, sent from Wales to an Australian orphanage, has told a child abuse inquiry how it was a “feast of kids” for paedophiles working there.
Castledare orphanage near Perth, run by the Christian Brothers order, was like “a legal paedophile ring”, he said.
The witness told the inquiry: “If someone did it in the public eye, he’d go to court, he’d get sentenced and he’d serve time.
“If he’d got a habit on, if you’re a Christian Brother then it seemed to be a free-for-all.
“We knew what would happen if you told somebody, especially in authority, they would say ‘this doesn’t happen here.'”
He went on to claim that Brother Murphy was later “transferred from place to place” to effectively hide him.
He said his time at the orphanage still haunted him and was “probably something I will never forget”.
The inquiry also heard from another former child migrant, Oliver Cosgrove, who is now in his late sixties and who also lived at Castledare.
He said the Christian Brothers, who ran the home, would visit the children’s beds at night.
The first phase of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse is looking at the way organisations have protected children outside the UK.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 children were moved from the UK to Australia after World War Two.
They were recruited by religious institutions from both the Anglican and Catholic churches, or charities, including Barnardo’s and the Fairbridge Society.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39131761
Child migrants ‘used for perverted desires’ in orphanage
Mar 3 2017
A former child migrant has described the Australian orphanage he was sent to as “a concentration camp”.
statement by John Francis Hanley was read to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA).
Mr Hanley was migrated to Australia aged six and placed in the Castledare Orphanage near Perth, run by Roman Catholic order the Christian Brothers.
The children were “beaten, abused and used for the Brothers’ perverted desires,” the inquiry heard.
Mr Hanley, who was born in 1947, described being sexually abused by two Christian Brothers, both in his bed and in their rooms.
Another man – who he said “was part of the Christian Brothers paedophile ring” – collected boys from the home and abused them elsewhere, the inquiry heard.
Another former child migrant described to the inquiry the abuse she suffered at Goodwood Orphanage near Adelaide.
The anonymous witness – who was sent to Australia in 1949 – said “she was beaten into submission” by the time she left the home.
She gave evidence that during her time at the orphanage, the institution was visited by the then Archbishop of Adelaide Matthew Beovitch.
A group of the British girls “got together” and decided to tell him about the beatings.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39155279
28 Feb 2017
After 2 1/2 years ICSA inquiry hears evidence from its first non-expert witness. Marcelle O’Brien, born Worthing, shipped to Australia.
IICSA child sex abuse inquiry public hearings under way
2/27/17
Former child migrants are to give “very emotional accounts” about the physical and sexual abuse they faced, the first public hearing in the independent inquiry into historical child abuse in England and Wales has been told.
Thousands of British children were sent to Australia and other parts of the British Empire up to 1974.
Many were exposed to “unacceptable depravity”, the inquiry heard.
A lawyer speaking on behalf of the UK government expressed “deep regret”.
Inquiry counsel Henrietta Hill QC said claims of “systematic sexual abuse” in institutions and work environments would be heard.
The children, she said, were sent without consent of parents, wrongly told they were orphans, and denied basic details about their family backgrounds during their future lives.
One of those giving evidence is David Hill who aged 12, was sent overseas with his two brothers to the Fairbridge Farm School in Western Australia.
He told the hearing: “We’ll never be able to undo the great wrong that was done to these children. But what is important to the survivors of sexual abuse is where this inquiry is satisfied with the evidence – name the villains.
“Many of them are beyond the grave and therefore beyond the law but it would bring a great deal of the comfort to the people who as children were victims of these children if they were named and shamed.”
In 2009, the Australian government apologised for the cruelty shown to the child migrants.
Britain also made an apology in 2010. The apology contained no specific mention of sexual abuse.
The abuse scandal of the British children sent abroad
The first phase of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) inquiry is looking at the way organisations have protected children outside the UK.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 children were moved to Australia after World War Two.
They were recruited by religious institutions from both the Anglican and Catholic churches, or well-meaning charities, including Barnardo’s and the Fairbridge Society, with the aim of giving them a better life.
Many, however, went on to suffer physical and sexual abuse in homes and so-called farm schools run by religious orders and charities.
Allegations children were picked by paedophiles to travel abroad and claims of a cover-up are expected to be made.
Aswini Weereratne QC, representing the Child Migrants Trust (CMT) support organisation, said this “long overdue inquiry” would hear of a “crushing catalogue of sexual abuse, deprivation, violence and abuse”.
She said the UK government “does not seek to defend” what she described as a “shameful period in the UK’s recent history”.
Ms Weereratne said the inquiry will hear from 22 former child migrants – their average age was nine when deported and one was aged only three or four years old.
The abuse that some of the children sent abroad were said to have suffered included “torture, rape and slavery”, Ms Weereratne said.
Opening the inquiry, chairwoman Prof Alexis Jay said the task of the panel is to examine the extent to which public and private institutions have failed to protect children from sexual abuse in the past.
Speaking on behalf of former child migrant Oliver Cosgrove, who was sent to Australia in 1941, Imran Khan said: “(It was) a scheme to populate the empire with good, white British stock and which led to the physical, emotional and sexual abuse of countless children, many thousands of miles away from their families.
He added: “The fact that the witness statements are so similar in the accounts they give of abuse can mean only one thing: This was a systematic and institutional problem.”
For the government, Samantha Leek QC said: “Child migration is wrong. It should not have been sanctioned or facilitated…
“The lifelong consequences for those involved are a matter of deep and sincere regret.”
A £6m family restoration fund was set up to allow the migrants to travel to the UK and ministers are now considering extending it.
The independent inquiry was set up after the death of Sir Jimmy Savile in 2011 when hundreds of people came forward to say he had abused them as children.
The hearings are taking place at the International Dispute Resolution Centre in central London, with the first phase concerning Australia expected to last 10 days.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39099778
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno
British Government ‘betrayed children’ sent to Fairbridge farms
Commonwealth Relations Office threatened with intervention by Queen’s Uncle Duke of Gloucester if Fairbridge blacklist not removed
The Duke of Gloucester was patron of the Fairbridge Society and on a visit to Launceston in 1965 all the children at Tresca were presented to the Duke at an afternoon tea reception at Launceston Town Hall. The Duke being a royal we had all been told we had to bow when he shook our hand.
http://nma.gov.au/blogs/inside/2011/05/30/from-the-eyes-of-an-eight-year-old/
THE FAIRBRIDGE SOCIETY. PRES H.R.H THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER
Threatened with Duke of Gloucester’s (11th Governor-General of Australia 1945-47 intervention to allow children to continue to be sent abroad
A woman who was sent from England to Australia as a child was molested and left so hungry she ate grain meant for pigs, an inquiry has heard.
Marcelle O’Brien, now in her 70s, was four years old when she was sent to a home in Pinjarra, western Australia, run by the Fairbridge Society.
They were recruited by religious institutions from both the Anglican and Catholic churches, or charities, including Barnardo’s and the Fairbridge Society
She was molested by her school’s deputy principal and caned, the inquiry heard.
Ms O’Brien is the first victim to give evidence to the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.
She described the “mental cruelty” and “sadistic” treatment she endured at the home where she was forced to do “slave labour”.
The inquiry heard she had been told “you’ve got no parents – they’re all dead”.
The inquiry heard that Ms O’Brien’s mother was unaware where daughter had gone.
Henrietta Hill QC, counsel to the inquiry, asked: “Is it your understanding that your mother did not know that you had gone to Australia?”
“That’s true, yes,” Ms O’Brien replied, before adding: “She didn’t know where
The Fairbridge Society in whose care Marcelle was trusted, had royal and establishment supporters. The evidence showed it was prepared to discredit the birth parents of its children.
But the names of the Fairbridge deputy principal Marcelle O’Brien says indecently assaulted her, and the “cottage mother” who treated her so badly, were not given, despite calls for the “guilty to be named”.
This is not a court. The inquiry has no powers of prosecution, only the remit to make “findings of fact”.
The foster mother later wrote to the Queen in an effort to get Ms O’Brien back to the UK, the inquiry was told.
Subsequent correspondence between the Queen’s Lady in Waiting and the Fairbridge Society was read out at the hearing.
“The child’s undesirable mother wanted her emigrated,” said a letter from the society to the Lady in Waiting.
Ms O’Brien told the inquiry this was untrue, adding: “She never wanted that. She wouldn’t have wanted that.”
The palace was apparently reassured by the Fairbridge response.
A letter from the Lady in Waiting to the society said “the Queen was pleased to hear” that it was considered to be in Ms O’Brien’s interests to remain at the school.
Ms O’Brien told the inquiry panel: “They didn’t take any notice. The Royal Family just didn’t want to know anything. They stopped you from going back to your own original home.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39116293
Tom Symonds @BBCTomSymonds
Marcelle was reunited with her British mother by the Child Migrants Trust. Her mother said ‘those bastards took you away from me”
Queen Mother tried to ‘rescue’ British child sent to Australia
Please explain how the Queen/Mother tried to ‘rescue’ her? This is someone’s real trauma not a fairytale!
Disgusting how journalists treat survivors. If they’re not attacking them they’re contriving a romantic tale.
Yes Marcelle did write to the Royals too by the sound of it
Peter Bagshaw also wrote
Daniel De Simone @DdesimoneDaniel
For those following today’s @IICSA_media hearing, this is a 1951 letter from Buckingham Palace to the Fairbridge Society
The society had assured a Lady in Waiting to the then Queen – wife of King George VI – that Marcelle O’Brien was “happily settled” abroad
Here’s the initial letter to Fairbridge which says the then Queen – wife of the king – had received a letter from Ms O’Brien’s foster mother
The Fairbridge letter said “the child’s undesirable mother wanted her emigrated” but Marcelle O’Brien told the hearing this was untrue
Survivor testimony @ Child Abuse Inquiry yesterday & today – unimaginable wickedness. All with longterm collusion of HMG. National shame.
Transcript from the public hearing today into the Child Migration Programmes case study are now on our website –
Aswini Weereratne for the Child Migrants Trust says it is unhappy with the number of perpetrators’ names being withheld from the hearings
Lawyers back call for national child abuse inquiry to name perpetrators
Aswini Weereratne QC says it is an ‘issue of open justice’ that the redacted names of abusers be overturned
1 Mar 2017
Lawyers have called for more transparency from the national child abuse inquiry over the naming of the perpetrators after their identities were withheld from the public hearings.
Aswini Weereratne QC, who represents the Child Migrant Trust, said she was unhappy about the ciphering of the names of abusers at the public hearing particularly as many of them are now dead.
“I want to put it on the record,” she said. “Really it is about the naming of abusers. It is really an issue of open justice that they should be heard.” Weereratne was speaking on the second day of the inquiry’s first public hearings. She indicated she may challenge the whole basis on which the redaction of abusers’ names was being applied.
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno
How long before calls for libel law to be extended to cover the dead again
Abused and publicly flogged: the UK child migrants sent for a better life in Australiahttp://gu.com/p/4y2yf/stw
#IICSATerrible to hear children spoken of as ‘stock’ and sent to ‘distribution centres’.
SejalKariaITVVerified account @SejalKaria
Note how Ms O’Brien, a child of 4 described as “it”
27.2.17 David Hill, a child migrant, addresses IICSA about his hopes for societal understanding of effects of CSA
Child migrants sent to live in Australia may have been sex abuse victims before they left the UK
...new evidence from a public inquiry in Australia that suggests many had already been suffering at the hands of predators before they left the UK.
Gordon Brown says the Home Office was warned of the risks child migrants faced abroad at least a decade before the policy was finally stopped in 1970.
More than 130,000 UK children, some as young as three, were sent to former colonies such as Australia from the 20s to the 60s with the promise of a better life.
Instead they were often left vulnerable to cruelty and – in many cases –physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Mr Brown apologised on behalf of the nation in February 2010 while still PM. He writes: “My apology was incomplete.
“We now know that scores of children were themselves subject to abuse before they were deported to foreign countries.”
One victim revealed they were just five when the sickening attacks started.
Mr Brown said the new evidence needs to be addressed urgently by Britain’s Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which was set up in 2014 following the Jimmy Savile case.
That was partly modelled on the Australian inquiry. The UK probe has been beset by difficulties and the resignations of three successive chairmen but is now trying to proceed under the leadership of Rotherham abuse expert Professor Alexis Jay.
Mr Brown reveals the new evidence paints a “picture of violence and rape”.
He also warns that a Family Restoration Fund set up by campaigners at the Child Migrants Trust – to which the Government contributed £6million in 2010 – is due to run out of cash within weeks.
It was supposed to help those sent abroad as kids be reunited with their families but at least 100 of them have not received any aid.
Mr Brown writes: “That funding runs out in March 2017.
“But even now at least 100 migrants are waiting for the Child Migrants Trust to trace their families.
“Some are only now in the early stage of making contact with their UK relatives. Others have yet to come forward for help.
“It would be inhumane to deprive them of their last chance to meet their kith and kin.
Gordon Brown’s father Ebenezer started a school in Israel. Tabeetha School, Jaffa. Janner close to Eb and Gordo.
UK Government accused of knowingly sending children to ‘crook’ institutions in Australia
Nov 26 2016
The UK Government continued to send child migrants to Australian institutions despite knowing they were being mistreated, according to allegations in a submission lodged to the UK inquiry into institutional child sexual abuse.
Inquiry could prompt more legal action against UK Government
Former child migrants have already successfully brought a class action against Australian authorities over the abuse suffered at Fairbridge.
David Hill, who in 1959, aged 12, was sent to Fairbridge Farm School in New South Wales, said “the British government knew that these institutions were crook and unfit for children”.
Mr Hill said legal action against the UK government following the airing of the allegations against them at the UK inquiry was likely.
“My guess is that as a result of this British inquiry you will see former British child migrants take action against the British Government, and good on them,” he said.
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno
Sex abuse inquiry hears hundreds of migrant children were fostered in NZ
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno
Workshy Goddard would never have been able to do the child migrants module – she’d already announced there was no CSA problem in NZ despite UN deploring the backlog in cases as inhumane for complainants – everytime wasted time & £££ of CSA Inquiry is trotted out I think of her
Britain’s Child Migrants
...unanswered questions about the rationale for the child migration policy and who drove it forward within a context of secrecy, deception and lies.
…need to address the relationship between the charities, the churches and the state in the implementation of this policy.
April 21, 2016
Liz Davies
The forced migration of children as a social policy began in the 17th Century and continued for 350 years until coming to an end in 1970.
It is estimated that 130,000 child victims of 200,000 parents were sent to Canada, New Zealand, Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Australia. Most child migrants had no idea of their birth families or the reason why they were sent to the colonies and parents were not told what had happened to their children. They were sent to populate the Empire with ‘good, white British stock’. Many of the children lived in large institutions and were used as cheap labour suffering abuse, cruelty and neglect.
The boys were trained as farm labourers and the girls as domestic servants.
But instead of a happy new life in the sun, many children encountered a Dickensian regime of poor food, hard labour and callous treatment.
As early as 1882, Dr Barnardo was sending to Australia, New Zealand and Canada ‘young people of good physique, trained to make use of their hands, of tested moral character, of an age where they were easily adaptable with few home or family ties to bind them to the mother country’ (Williams, 1943 p118).
The Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry in Northern Ireland has already heard evidence from child migrants, as has the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
We lived in constant fear of being flogged or molested. We had no dignity or self-esteem. I would cry my eyes out at night and wonder what I had ever done to deserve such treatment when I had committed no crime. We were told we were the sons of whores, the lowest form of humanity.
We need to be heard so we never, ever see this happen again.
It is not yet known whether the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) in the UK will grant child migrants core participant status and therefore enable them to be legally represented.
It is concerning that the main IICSA public hearings are not accepting personal accounts of child abuse which are instead being presented through the Truth Project strand of the Inquiry which is not part of the legal process of prosecution and justice.
THE FAIRBRIDGE SOCIETY
PRES H.R.H THE DUKE OF GLOUCESTER
During official visits to the Fairbridge Farm School near the village of Molong in 1953 and 1955, the former general Field Marshall William Slim allegedly fondled young boys as they rode in his official car.
“The finest general World War Two produced.”
Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten, Supreme Allied Commander South East Asia
Singapore. Supreme Allied Commander SEA Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten addressing troops flanked by (left) General (later Field Marshal), LtGen William J. Slim, C-in-C Allied Land Forces, (right) Deputy Supreme Allied Commander SEA LtGen Raymond Wheeler, USA and (far right) Air Chief Marshal Sir Keith Park, RAF, Allied Air Commander SEA. Right: Saigon. Field Marshal Terauchi surrenders his swords to Mountbatten. WWII hero accused of sex assault on children
has been accused of sexually assaulting destitute children sent to Australia as part of an imperial settlement scheme.
03 May 2007
Field Marshall Viscount Slim, who routed the Japanese in the jungles of Burma, was appointed governor general of Australia after the war.
The war hero, who died in 1970, allegedly groped underprivileged British children who had been sent to Australia as part of a now discredited plan to populate the Empire with the unwanted offspring of the working class.
The explosive claims – disputed by the Burma Star Association – concern visits Viscount Slim made to a child migration centre run by the Fairbridge Society in rural New South Wales.
The society was one of several child migration charities which dispatched about 100,000 impoverished British children to Australia, Canada and other far-flung parts of the Empire from the late 19th century to the 1970s.
During official visits to the Fairbridge Farm School near the village of Molong in 1953 and 1955, the former general allegedly fondled young boys as they rode in his official car.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1550381/WWII-hero-accused-of-sex-assault-on-children.html
Viscount Slim memorial, burma star association, mountbatten
Field Marshall Viscount Slim KCB, CB, DSO, MC was referred to by Admiral of the Fleet Earl Mountbatten, who was Supreme Allied Commander of Southeast Asia, as “the finest general World War II produced”.
Mountbatten was Prince Charles’s greatest mentor
Fairbridge Society Annual Reports – 1949 to 1979
1979
Front Cover featuring Prince Charles on his Fairbridge Pinjarra visit
http://fairbridgekids.info/?page_id=3015
Mr Stevens, who left the school in 1959 at the age of 16, says Fairbridge has £3.4 million [A$8 million] in funds which it should use to set up an educational fund for the children of former pupils as a form of compensation.
“I am really angry with Fairbridge. They just wiped their hands and walked away. We should have a bloody royal commission into the buggers.” The charity, now known as the Fairbridge Foundation, continues to work with underprivileged children in Australia and Britain.
Unlike Barnardo’s, which has acknowledged that its child migrant scheme was “shameful” and “barbaric”, Fairbridge has refused to apologise for past injustices.
It argued in a submission to an inquiry by the Australian Senate in 2001 that nothing seriously wrong took place at its migrant centres.
“We have conceded all along that the treatment of children was not perfect,” said the chairman of Fairbridge in Australia, John Kennedy. “But what good would an apology do?”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1550381/WWII-hero-accused-of-sex-assault-on-children.html
FAIRBRIDGE
Company number 00176613
- Registered office address
- Prince’s Trust House, 9 Eldon Street, London, United Kingdom, EC2M 7LS
Previous company names
| Name | Period |
|---|---|
| THE FAIRBRIDGE DRAKE SOCIETY INCORPORATED | 17 Nov 1987 – 10 Jul 1992 |
| FAIRBRIDGE SOCIETY (INCORPORATED)(THE) | 03 Sep 1921 – 17 Nov 1987 |
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00176613
Fairbridge directors:
Judge John McCluskey, Sir William McAlpine and
- Director: HOWESON, Charles Arthur, Commander
COMMANDER CHARLES ARTHUR HOWESON – colleague of Prince Philip and Prince Charles – charged with buggery – director of Fairbridge
Correspondence address Smallack Barn, Smallack Drive Crownhill, Plymouth, Devon, PL6 5FB
Fairbridge:
Charles Howeson
Appointed before 2 July 1992 Resigned on 31 March 1993
Occupation Company Director
https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/00176613/officers?page=2
Also in Australia 1979
Incredibly, Osborne and his voluminous files were never thoroughly investigated by police. According to officers who viewed the Osborne material at the time, the names on the index cards, so dutifully recorded by Osborne, were not only those of the boys he had seduced, but adults – members of the judiciary, the legal profession, politicians, academics, and even police officers – with sexual interests in children.
One former officer said the Osborne material was enough “to bring down the [then Queensland] government overnight”.
Osborne was found dead the day after he was questioned by investigators in September 1979
The current Duke of Gloucester
The Duke is a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, and 2nd son of Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, who was the third eldest son of George V, and Princess Alice. At the time of his birth he was 5th in line to the throne.
http://www.britroyals.com/windsor.asp?id=richard_gloucester
Currently:
Fairbridge is a UK charity that supports young people aged 13–25, that has existed since 1987.
Each year it supports around 3,700 disengaged young people who are either not in education, employment or training – or at risk of becoming so – at one of its fifteen centres on the country.
In January 2011 it was announced that Fairbridge will become part of The Prince’s Trust.
Fairbridge is the result of the merging of two organisations, the Drake Fellowship and the Fairbridge Society.
The Fairbridge Society was established in 1909 by Kingsley Fairbridge. Moved by the levels of deprivation he saw in inner city areas of England, he established a charity to offer opportunities and education abroad to young people from broken homes.
Operation Drake was launched in 1978 at the suggestion of HRH The Prince of Wales. It was a two-year, round-the-world venture in which 400 young people from 27 nations worked with scientists and servicemen on projects in 16 countries. John Mogg (British Army officer)(also known as Sir Herbert John Mogg) was a Chairman of the Operation Drake Fellowship.
In 1980, George Thurstan, one of the organisers of Operation Drake, formed the Drake Fellowship to help under-privileged young people from centres based in the heart of the inner cities.
In 1987, the Drake Fellowship merged with the Fairbridge Society to become Fairbridge Drake, and in 1992 the name was changed to Fairbridge.
Fairbridge’s patron was Princess Alexandra, The Honourable Lady Ogilvy, its President was Damon Buffini and Vice-Presidents were Lady Dodds-Parker and Sir William McAlpine
(Alistair McAlpine, Baron McAlpine of West Green was his younger brother)
Child abuse, arms deals, murders, deep state, Cyprus.
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2016/05/lord-mcalpine-and-family.html
William McAlpine’s fellow director at Fairbridge in Scotland was James Torbett of the Celtic boys club scandal –
Torbetts boss at Celtic was Kevin Kelly who wanted the name of Celtic kept clean at all costs…. Torbett then made him a director at his business The Trophy Centre. Kevin Kelly was pictured at Kilsyth with Jimmy Savile, Keith O’Brien etc.
One of William McAlpine’s fellow directors at Fairbridge in Scotland was James Torbett of the Celtic boys club scandal
Ex-Celtic coach James Torbett to stand trial charged with historical sex abuse of SIX boys
6 Apr 2018
FORMER Celtic Boys Club coach and founder James Torbett is to stand trial charged with historic sexual abuse of six young boys.
The 70 year-old today faced the allegations during a hearing at the High Court in Glasgow.
Torbett, of the city’s Kelvindale, faces a total of 12 charges spanning from January 1970 to August 1994.
The boys mentioned are said to have been aged between four and 14 when Torbett is first accused of abusing them.
A number of locations are listed on the indictment including Barrowfield Football Ground in Glasgow’s London Road, where Celtic used to train.
Offences are said to have occurred at Torbett’s home, dormitories in Belgium and France as well as training facilities in Glasgow’s west end and Bristol, England.
Prosecutors also list “factory premises” known as The Trophy Centre in the city’s Pollokshaws.
Torbett’s QC Tony Graham today pled not guilty on his behalf to the charges.
Judge Lady Stacey set a trial due to begin in June. The case could last up to 10 days.
Bail for Torbett was continued meantime.
The 70-year-old faces a total of 12 charges spanning some 24 years and involving children as young as four.
https://www.glasgowlive.co.uk/news/glasgow-news/former-celtic-boys-club-coach-14495376
Celtic Chairman Kevin Kelly pictured with Jimmy Savile among others.
Of the four companies that Jim Torbett was involved in Celtic Chairman Kevin Kelly was involved with three of them.
- PLANROLE LIMITED Dissolved
- CENTENARY SCOTCH WHISKY LIMITED Dissolved
- THE TROPHY CENTRE LIMITED
Truthseeker1 @thewakeupcall09
More worryingly … a fourth company that Convicted Paedophile Jim Torbett was a director in
FAIRBRIDGE IN SCOTLAND Dissolved (Director Resigned 20/02/1997)
FAIRBRIDGE IN SCOTLAND a charity involved with helping young people.
DID Jim Torbett have access to young children there too?
Truthseeker1 @thewakeupcall09
Celtic FC Lord John McCluskey wrote in support of paedophile Robert Henderson QC
“Torbett was a director at Fairbridge, now part of the princes trust, with ex Metropolitan Police chief David McNee, Lord McAlpine’s brother William and Lord McCluskey amongst others.
http://aanirfan.blogspot.com/2017/05/celtic-savile-murdered-boy-dunblane.html
Pervert Jim McCafferty worked for a vulnerable children’s charity with ties to notorious football abuser Jim Torbett.
McCafferty was employed by the Drake Fellowship – later Fairbridge Drake – where he took homeless boys on overnight trips.
Torbett, who was later convicted of abusing three boys at Celtic Boys Club, was the managing director of the charity, which eventually became Fairbridge in Scotland.
Iain Hamilton, who ran a Salvation Army hostel for vulnerable children, told us McCafferty used a Drake Fellowship minibus to take two or three kids at a time on overnight stays to London.
McCafferty is believed to have been working for Drake Fellowship at the time.
Iain said: “The group concentrated on yacht trips. We would send the kids down near London with McCafferty.
“They would go away for the weekend with the Drake Fellowship. McCafferty had a lot of contact with the kids then. After what he has admitted, this period should be investigated.”
The Record’s original whistleblower on McCafferty – who we have not named – told how he was abused in a van used by McCafferty for Drake Fellowship activities.
The vehicle was also used by McCafferty to take kids on their trips to London.
He said: “He ran this youth group that would take kids away to outdoor activities.
“I think the van had signage that mentioned Drake. He invited me to his office in the Sighthill area of Glasgow as well.”
Two other teenage boys also told us they fled a weekend trip organised by McCafferty in 1984.
Another victim, who revealed McCafferty’s links to Crewe Alexandra coach Barry Bennell, who is at the centre of an abuse scandal in England, said he knew McCafferty when he worked for Fairbridge Drake.
The Drake Fellowship merged with the Fairbridge Society to become Fairbridge Drake in 1987.
The organisation worked with vulnerable young people to help them into education and training.
They became Fairbridge, named Fairbridge In Scotland north of the border, in 1992.
Celtic Boys Club coach Jim Torbett was named as managing director in company accounts that year
Torbett was later convicted of abusing three young boys while at Celtic Boys Club from 1968 to 1974.
He was jailed for two-and-a-half years in 1998.
Yesterday, a former Celtic Boys Club player, who asked not to be named, told the Record that Torbett regularly organised matches against McCafferty’s Craigneuk Colts side in Wishaw in 1990.
The player, then 14, he was not abused by either man, but stated that McCafferty would often visit the Celtic youth side’s showers after the game.
McCafferty once took two women involved with Craigneuk Colts to visit Torbett’s Trophy Centre in Glasgow in the late 80s
A former committee member said: “McCafferty told us he was friendly with the guy who owned that place.
“We met Mr Torbett there. McCafferty introduced us. He said, ‘This is a good friend of mine. He’ll give you a discount’.”
McCafferty this week insisted that he only ever had a “football relationship” with Torbett.
Torbett resigned his directorship of Fairbridge in Scotland later while awaiting trial for sex abuse.
Fairbridge were later dissolved and their activities came under the guidance of the Prince’s Trust in 2011.
A Prince’s Trust spokeswoman said: “We have checked and our HR records do not go as far back as the dates you have mentioned.”
There were no answer at Jim Torbett’s plush Glasgow flat last night when the Record tried to contact him regarding his relationship with McCafferty.
A witness has also told how McCafferty referred to Torbett as his “good friend” as they attempted to set up a new football team together.
http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/scottish-news/pervert-coach-kitman-jim-mccafferty-9420855
Sir David McNee (director of Fairbridge) rose to become the most powerful policeman in Britain.
As Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police between 1977 and the autumn of 1982, he wielded great influence and, by necessity, became privy to secrets which other, less robust men would have taken to their graves long ago. But on the eve of his tenth decade, and 33 years after his retirement from the top job, a cloud — or at least a question mark — has appeared over his time as boss at New Scotland Yard.
It concerns an alleged ‘cover-up’, and in this instance the circumstances are particularly disturbing, given that it would have involved turning a blind eye to the sexual abuse of minors.
Allegations of unchecked VIP paedophile activity in this era are neither new nor rare.
Yet, BBC’s Newsnight programme reported an instance of apparent official protection of child sex abusers that was fresh and shocking. The report alleged that in 1981, following a three-month police surveillance operation deploying a secret camera, the prominent Liberal MP Cyril Smith was arrested at a paedophile sex party at a council flat in Lambeth, South London. Boys of around 14 years of age recruited from local care homes were present.
Other figures allegedly identified by the operation were a senior member of the intelligence agencies and two senior police officers.
Smith was reportedly taken to a police station in Westminster. But instead of being remanded in custody and later charged, as the officers on the operation expected, the MP was almost immediately released without bail.
The officers’ astonishment was compounded when they were summoned to a meeting and told to hand over all evidence they had gathered on Smith — including notebooks and incriminating video film — and to say nothing more of the affair.
If they did speak out they might be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act. They would be the miscreants, not the morbidly obese child molester.
The same day this report was aired, the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) announced that the Met had asked it to look into 14 claims of police corruption or dereliction linked to historical allegations of child sex abuse by members of the Establishment.
There is yet another, previously unreported allegation of a historical police operation being closed down without explanation, having caught a senior politician in a compromising situation.
…newspaper has been told that a surveillance squad targeting a paedophile ring providing rent boys for orgies photographed Leon Brittan entering premises where the parties were believed to have been held on at least two occasions. At the time he was a minister in the Home Office.
A planned raid was called off at the last moment, allegedly on orders from senior Met command. Photographs and papers that could have been used as evidence then went missing, one officer who was part of the surveillance team has alleged.
The allegation is from the same era as the BBC’s story concerning Cyril Smith. If true, who could have ordered such scandalous and, indeed, criminal interventions? Not the then Met boss David McNee, according to the man himself.
Celtic FC Fairbridge In Scotland Lord John McCluskey & Paedophile Jim Torbett
Celtic FC Lord John McCluskey wrote in support of paedophile Robert Henderson QC
In April 2011, Fairbridge will merge with The Prince’s Trust. The united organisation, will be called The Prince’s Trust.
The Times, February 5, 1937 MP for Rothwell – little children had been placed in a position little different to that of drudges
@mischiefx
Fairbridge Society – 1944 investigation
http://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/37086/33674 …
Fairbridge Society – 1944 investigation – gross indecency
http://hssh.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/hssh/article/download/37086/33674 …
Fairbridge Society and the Big Brother Movement
(1993) The shameful secret of Britain’s lost children: Thousands of ‘child migrants’ were sent abroad after the war.
The child abuse scandal of the British children sent abroad
26 February 2017
For several decades, the UK sent children across the world to new lives in institutions where many were abused and used as forced labour. It’s a scandal that is still having repercussions now.
Imagine the 1950s, in the years before air travel became commonplace or the internet dominated our lives. Imagine being a child of those times, barely aware of life even in the next town. An orphan perhaps, living in a British children’s home.
Now imagine being told that shortly you would board a ship for somewhere called Australia, to begin a new life in a sunlit wonderland. For good. No choice.
It happened to thousands of British children in the decades immediately following World War Two, and they had little understanding of how it would shape their lives.
The astonishing scandal of the British child migrants will be the first subject for which the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse will hold full public hearings. It’s first because the migrants are now nearing the end of their lives.
Clifford Walsh stands in the port of Fremantle near Perth in Western Australia.
He is now 72. Fremantle is where, in 1954, aged nine, he stepped off the ship from London, looking for the sheep he’d been told outnumbered people in Australia 100 to one.
He ended up at a place called Bindoon.
The Catholic institution known at one point as Bindoon Boys Town is now notorious. Based around an imposing stone mansion in the Australian countryside, 49 miles north of Perth, are buildings Walsh and his fellow child migrants were forced to build, barefoot, starting work the day after they arrived.
The Christian Brothers ruled the place with the aim of upholding order and a moral code. Within two days of arriving he says he received his first punishment at the hands of one of the brothers.
“He punched us, he kicked us, smashed us in the face, back-handed us and everything, and he then sat us on his knee to tell us that he doesn’t like to hurt children, but we had been bad boys.
“I was sobbing uncontrollably for hours.”
His story is deeply distressing. He tells it with a particularly Australian directness. He is furious.
He describes one brother luring him into his room with the promise he could have some sweet molasses – normally fed, not to the boys, but the cows. The man sexually abused him.
He claims another brother raped him, and and a third beat him mercilessly after falsely accusing him of having sex with another boy.
“We had no parents, we had no relatives, there was nowhere we could go, these brothers – these paedophiles – must have thought they were in hog heaven.”
He has accused the brothers at the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, the first time he has fully disclosed his experiences.
At the time he says: “I was too terrified to report the abuse. I knew no other life.
“I’ve lived 60 odd years with this hate, I can’t have a normal sexual relationship because I don’t like to hold people,” says Walsh. “My own wife, I couldn’t hug.”
He was troubled by all the memories.
“I couldn’t show any affection. Stuff like that only reminded me of what the brothers would do all the time.”
Britain is perhaps the only country in the world to have exported vast numbers of its children. An estimated 150,000 children were sent over a 350-year period to Virginia, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
Australia was the main destination in the final wave between 1945 and 1974.
There were twin purposes – to ease the population of orphanages in the UK and to boost the population of the colonies.
The children were recruited by religious institutions from both the Anglican and Catholic churches, or well-meaning charities including Barnardo’s and the Fairbridge Society. Their motivation was to give “lost” children a new life, and it would be wrong to say that every one of Britain’s exported children suffered.
But for too many, the dream became a nightmare. Hundreds of migrant children have given accounts of poor education, hard labour, physical beatings and sexual abuse.
Attempts were made to recreate a happy home life. At the Fairbridge Farm School in Molong, four hours outside Sydney, children lived in cottages, each with a “house mother”.
Fairbridge was not a religious order, like the Christian Brothers, and some of its former children have praised the start it gave them.
But not Derek Moriarty. He was at Molong for eight years, one of hundreds of children to have endured poor food, inadequate education and physical labour. His life has been deeply affected by his Fairbridge upbringing.
He suffered at the hands of the then-principal of the school, Frederick Woods, a man he says kept 10 canes, and to the horror of the children, a hockey stick – which he used to beat the boys.
Perhaps inevitably, Moriarty alleges sexual abuse – by a member of staff who took his clothes off and touched him.
“I was nine or 10,” he says, “and I didn’t understand it.” He eventually ran away from Molong, attempted suicide at the age of 18 and has always suffered from depression, not helped by the years it took to discover the details of his family back in the UK.
In 2009 the Australian government apologised for the cruelty shown to the child migrants. Britain also made an apology in 2010.
The pressure for answers and reparations had been growing. Questions might never have been asked, had it not been for two seekers of the truth.
In the early 1980s a Nottingham social worker, Margaret Humphreys, came across Australian former migrants who had suddenly started to realise they might have living relatives in the UK.
Many had been told, as children, their parents were dead. It wasn’t true. “It was about identity,” she says, “being stripped of it and being robbed of it.”
Her life’s work has been about reuniting “lost children” with their lost relatives. Having reinstated their sense of identity, she went on to build a lifelong bond with many former migrants, and they began to disclose the physical and sexual abuse they had suffered.
“As you go along, you’re learning more and more about the degrees and the awfulness of the abuse. That’s been incremental because people can really only talk about it over a longer period of time when there is trust. There’s a lot of trauma involved here.”
Further revelations about the Fairbridge homes were uncovered by one of their own.
David Hill was shipped out from Britain with his brothers to the Fairbridge farm at Molong in 1959. He was one of the lucky ones. His mother followed him later, providing him with a stable future.
He became a highly successful public figure in Australia. He was chairman and managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and is a keen historian. Hill brought together the Fairbridge boys and girls to tell him their stories. Like those from the west of Australia – they were dominated by beatings and abuse.
Derek Moriarty was among those who unburdened themselves for the first time to Hill, as part of the research for his 2007 book The Forgotten Children and a 2009 ABC television documentary.
“I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders when I told him,” Moriarty says. “But my abuse paled into insignificance compared to some others.”
David Hill’s work triggered claim after claim from men and women about their experiences as children.
They wrote and told him of a litany of sexual abuse. There was no sexual education at the school and, failing to understand what was happening, they were left traumatised.
Hill makes the astonishing claim that 60% of the children at Fairbridge Molong allege they were sexually abused, based on more than 100 interviews.
The Australian law firm Slater and Gordon successfully claimed compensation on behalf of 215 former Fairbridge children, of whom 129 said they had been sexually abused.
For the Christian Brothers the figures are even higher. The Australian Royal Commission on child abuse recently revealed 853 people had accused members of the order.
Hill is one of the expert witnesses who will give evidence to the UK Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). The inquiry has been bitterly criticised since its creation – and some have questioned its huge scope.
Is there any point in it considering the history of child migration, dating back so far?
The Australian Royal commission is examining child migration closely. In 1998 the UK’s Health Select Committee also held hearings, in which the Child Migrants Trust described the Christian Brothers institutions as “almost the full realisation of a paedophile’s dream”.
But the committee did not get to the bottom of it, concluding: “The Christian Brothers were very insistent that the abuses were not known to those who controlled these institutions. We cannot accept this.”
Sources close to the current public inquiry have told the BBC it will produce new and startling revelations about the scale of sexual abuse abroad, and attempts by British and Australian institutions to cover it up.
This will include an examination of the claims of some child migrants that they were sent abroad weeks after reporting sexual abuse at their children’s home in the UK. The allegation is that they were hand-picked. Either to get them out of the way, or because they were of interest to paedophiles.
Three former Fairbridge boys have claimed that the then-Australian Governor General, Lord Slim, sexually molested them during rides in his chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce while visiting the home. It is understood these allegations could be considered by the inquiry.
The inquiry could also definitively answer a crucial historical question. Did the British government know it was sending children to be mistreated in a foreign country?
Margaret Humphreys is adamant: “We want to know what happened, we want to know who did it, and we want to know who covered it up for so long.”
In fact, government files reveal that there was a time when the migration programme could have been stopped. It came in 1956 when three officials went to Australia to inspect 26 institutions which took child migrants.
There was enough warning of this “fact-finding mission” to allow a Fairbridge official to warn the manager of the Molong farm: “It would be advisable to see (the children) wore their socks and shoes.” Even in a land where it was easy to encounter poisonous wildlife, that wasn’t standard practice at many of the institutions.
The resulting report, delivered back to the British government, was fairly critical. It identified a general lack of expertise in child care and worried that children were living in institutions in remote rural areas, whereas the trend in Britain was towards fostering them into urban families.
However the report had a second “secret” section, never published, which went a little further.
This named names – including those of five institutions which were not up to standard. When the UK’s Home Office saw the report, it wanted five more added to create what became an infamous blacklist – places which should not receive more children because of poor standards of care. Fairbridge Molong and Bindoon were both on the list.
- St Joseph’s orphanage, Sydney
- Dhurringile Rural Training Farm, Victoria
- St Joseph’s, Neerkol, nr Rockhampton, Queensland
- Salvation Army Training Farm, Riverview, Queensland
- Methodist Home, Magill, Adelaide
- St Vincent’s Orphanage, Castledare
- St Joseph’s Farm School, Bindoon, Western Australia
- St John Bosco Boys’ Town, Glenorchy, Hobart
- Fairbridge Farm School, Pinjarra, Western Australia
- Fairbridge Farm School, Molong, New South Wales
But the report had barely scratched the surface. It made no mention of sexual or physical abuse.
Given the length of time it took for the child migrants to tell their stories, this is perhaps unsurprising.
But during the post-war years, sexual accusations were made against three principals of the Fairbridge Farm School at Molong.
David Hill has revealed they included a claim that Frederick Woods – the man who beat boys with a hockey stick – was “sexually perverted” and had abused a girl resident. An internal investigation exonerated him.
This does not appear to have been disclosed by the Fairbridge Society either to the public or the 1956 inspectors. They had a schedule to keep to, and their visits to institutions spread across a vast country were fleeting.
Similarly, at the Christian Brothers’ homes in Western Australia, children were terrified of criticising the brothers.
Former Bindoon resident Clifford Walsh was there during the fact-finding mission. He doesn’t remember it, but says speaking out would have resulted in an extremely severe, possibly even life-threatening, beating.
The truth is that neither the institutions, nor the inspectors, came close to creating the sort of atmosphere where children could tell them their darkest secrets and be taken seriously. If that had happened, not just in Australia, but throughout modern British history, we might not have needed the current public inquiry.
It might have missed the crimes being committed in the institutions, but when the 1956 report hit the desks of Britain’s bureaucrats it created quite a stir.
Something strongly resembling a cover-up began. Files held at the National Archive set out the response of government officials. One wrote in 1957 that the Overseas Migration Board, which advised the government, was “sorry the mission was sent at all”.
Some on the board “urged very strongly that the report should not be published.”
The government archives record that at a meeting with the organisations running the migrant programmes, Lord John Hope, under-secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, discussed what would be disclosed to parliament from the report.
“I think you can rely upon us to do what we can in as much as we shall pick out all the good bits,” he said. “I shall not be in the least critical in Parliament.”
The UK Fairbridge Society piled on its own pressure – its president was the Duke of Gloucester, uncle to the Queen. Officials discussed the “immediate parliamentary repercussions” which could result from holding up the migrant programme.
Sir Colin Anderson, the director of the Orient Line, which benefited from the business of shipping the children, appealed for the report not to be made public because of the controversy it might cause.
The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse
- The inquiry into historical child sex abuse in England and Wales is to examine claims made against local authorities, religious organisations, the armed forces and public and private institutions
- Momentum for the inquiry started with the Jimmy Savile scandal
- The inquiry is expected to take about five years to complete
- The first phase of the inquiry will consist of 13 separate investigations
The child sexual abuse inquiry so far
In a sympathetic phone call, a senior official from the Overseas Migration Board responded that the Fairbridge Society was an “extremely fine endeavour for which everyone felt the highest praise”.
And what did the government do? Files at the National Archive show officials squirmed in institutional discomfort at the idea of taking any meaningful action.
In June 1957 the Commonwealth Relations Office sent a secret telegram to the UK High Commission in Australia – “we do not want to withhold approval”, it said, for more children to to be sent from the UK.
After more pressure from the Fairbridge Society, 16 children waiting to travel were sent on their way.
The key recommendation of the inspectors, that the British home secretary agree each and every decision to send a child, was quietly shelved.
The Fairbridge Society continued to ship out children, though concentrated on those whose mothers intended to join them later.
David Hill’s response is anger, even today. With tears in his eyes he says: “I’m surprised how vulnerable it has made me feel – that it could happen and happen to the extent that it did.
“The British government not only continued to approve children to be sent, but they financially subsidised for them to go. To institutions they had put on a blacklist unfit for children, condemned.”
Molong Farm School finally closed in 1973. The Fairbridge Society is now part of the Prince’s Trust and still runs activity holidays for children.
The Prince’s Trust said it had never been involved in child migration, “but we do hold the archive of the former Fairbridge Society. We are cooperating fully with this important inquiry.”
Bindoon remained open until 1966. It is now used as a Catholic college.
The Australian Royal Commission recently estimated that 7% of the country’s Catholic priests were involved in child abuse.
And such is the scope of sexual abuse allegations in the Catholic and Anglican churches in the UK that entire strands of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse are dedicated to them.
The IICSA investigation will be able to seize the records, not just of the British government but also the migration institutions themselves – including the archives of the Fairbridge society.
Sixty years later, former Bindoon boy Clifford Walsh strongly believes this inquiry can help answer some of his questions about the culpability of the government and British institutions.
“They sent us to a place that was a living hell. How come they didn’t know that? Why didn’t they investigate? And if they investigated, then they were incompetent or there was a cover-up.”
The child migration programme will also provide ample evidence for the UK’s effort to consider the long-term effect of child sexual abuse. Something which may turn out to be a central theme of the inquiry.
Historian and Fairbridge boy David Hill estimates it took victims he interviewed 22 years on average before they felt able to disclose what happened.
But it will also provide a final chance for Britain’s lost children to return to the land of their birth and tell their stories. The anger has not gone away, and their childhoods have left invisible scars which have lasted a lifetime.
One of the child migrants we spoke to asked us not to name him, after he returned to Bindoon armed with a sledgehammer.
His target? The ostentatious burial place of Brother Paul Keaney the institution’s founder. By the time he’d finished, enough damage had been done to the marble grave slab that Bindoon’s current owners, a Catholic college, were forced to remove what remained.
It was one man’s small blow against a history of child cruelty.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39078652
Cassandra Cogno @CassandraCogno
Royal Archives request in advance of July hearings – will bishop Peter ball info be requested too by @IICSA_media @iicsa_vscp ?
The Queen supported establishment paedophile Bishop Ball even him after his police caution.
In 1994, when she was distributing Royal Maundy money in Truro, Ball was there with his brother, who was Truro’s bishop.
After lunch in the Chapter House, the Queen, who had been on the high table with local dignitaries, went across to Ball, held out her hand and said in the clearest of voices: ‘My love and encouragement, Bishop.’
The Story of Britains Child Migrants
Empty Cradles by Margaret Humpreys [6]
A most moving book. I cried about 20 times during reading the book.
It is the story of how Margaret, a social worker for Nottinghamshire County Council gradually discovers the unpalatable truth that the British Government and childrens charities trafficked children as young as 4 to Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Rhodesia.
It was part of a deliberate policy to rid Britain of the problem of full childrens homes, paying for their upbringing as well as having the “benefit” of populating the Empire with young white blood. These children were transported as orphans, often with names and dates of birth altered so that their parents, who had often not agreed or even known about the theft of their children, would not be able to contact them and vice versa.
If you think that is stark, then add to the mix some emotional, physical and sexual abuse. Then top it off with lies and cover up by institutions and government. Many aspects will be familiar to those who know about Britains child sexual abuse and forced adopted and secret courts of today.
Kenneth Bagnell wrote a book about Canadian child migrants called Little Immigrants in 1980 [11]
Fairbridge Society Timeline
http://fairbridgekids.info/?page_id=2646
The Prince’s Trust
Mr. Benson was ‘head hunted’ for the post of Director of Operations, with The Prince’s Youth Business Trust.
Director
THE PRINCE’S YOUTH BUSINESS TRUST
March 1980 – October 2001 (21 years)
Director
YOUTH ENTERPRISE SCHEME (N. IRELAND) 16 May 1986 to 24 March 2000 (14 years)
At the time of the assaults, in 1986, Benson was working for the Prince’s trust. The girl told a school friend and the police were alerted but Benson denied the allegations and was not prosecuted until 29 years later.
Princess Diana, in intimate confessions recorded on video by her voice coach, described her sex life with Prince Charles as “odd, very odd”.
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