17 Sample essay

Not Here by Choice:
Canada’s Importation of Child Labourers between the 1830’s and 1940’s

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Submitted to: Professor (Professor’s Name)

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“Outcasts, street waifs, “children of vicious and criminal tendencies,” and the “offal of the most deprived characters…of the Old Country.”¹ Such was the language used in newspapers, trade union reports, and even the Canadian Parliament toward the end of the nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries to describe British pauper children who had been brought to Canada as apprentices and indentured as domestic servants and agricultural labourers. This episode in Canadian history wherein children – and British children at that, not any of the ethnic groups typically hailed as inassimilable – became the target of hostility, is one that was largely disregarded in Canadian historiography until Joy Parr’s 1977 Yale University dissertation which brought attention to the fact that many Canadians are descended from young children removed from their surroundings in Britain and sent to work in Canada.² Since then, other historians have published works that explored the juvenile immigrant movement and the conditions under which these children lived and worked.³

This essay explores the factors that that motivated Canadians to import more than 100,000 British pauper children as indentured labourers between 1830 and 1940. It argues that Canada’s practice of importing young labourers was the combined results of Britain’s attempts to deal with its poor and Canada’s labour needs. Changing public perceptions of childhood eventually led to the demise of the practice.

¹ “Editorial,” Toronto News, 6 May 1884, A2, Canada, House of Commons. “Report of the Select Standing Committee on Agriculture and Colonisation of the House of Commons,” Journals, (1888): 10.
² Joy Parr, The Home Children: British Juvenile Immigration to Canada, 1868-1924,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1977), iv.
³ Major works include Joy Parr, Labouring Children, British Immigrant Apprentices to Canada, 1868-1924 (London: Croom Helm, 1994); Kenneth Bagnell, The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada (Toronto: MacMillan, 1980); and Roy Parker, Uprooted: The Shipment of Poor Children to Canada, 1867-1917 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008).

2

Advocacy for formally organizing the emigration of destitute children from Britain began before 1830. In 1826, Robert Chambers, a London police magistrate, appeared before a British Parliament Select Committee convened to address the broader issue of emigration. As a key witness, Chambers declared that London had become overrun with beggar children and that the best solution was to send them to Canada. He stated that

children who [are] down and out, those twelve years of age and upward, should be sent to Canada, where they [are] badly needed, to be apprenticed to persons who…would be glad to receive them as workers on the land.¹⁰

Chambers’ testimony was supported by others who also believed in the great public benefit of emigrating homeless boys.

By the 1830s, several private agencies, notably the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy (renamed the Children’s Friend Society in 1834), were already providing training to children and sending them as apprentices to Canadian farms.¹¹ The mission of the Society was to rescue poor children from their negative urban environments and provide them with “useful, healthy, and profitable employment.”¹² Although the British Colonial Office opposed efforts to organise child emigration on an official basis, the Society sent 141 child apprentices to Upper and Lower Canada between 1833 and 1836. As debates about child emigration persisted in the British Parliament over the next decade, private agencies continued to train and equip poor children for the colonies.

¹⁰ Bagnall, Little Immigrants, 23. 
¹¹ Gail H. Corbett, Barnardo Children in Canada (Peterborough, ON: Woodland Publishing, 1981), 23.
¹² Charlotte Neff, “The Children’s Friend Society in Upper Canada, 1833-1837,” Journal of Family History 32, 32 no. 3 (July 2007), 235. doi: 10.1177/03631999007299906.

3

Small numbers of child labourers were sent through various organisations until the late 1860s, most often at the request of Canadian emigration agents or provincial governments in Upper and Lower Canada and the Maritimes. By the late 1860s, the level of support in Canada for the movement had increased. Prominent officials and citizens from many towns assisted the philanthropic organisations by providing homes for distribution centres. For example, the mayor and a justice of the peace in Niagara-on-the-Lake supported Rye’s purchase of an old court house and jail.³⁷ Belleville’s Mayor and city council donated a home to Macpherson,³⁸ while the citizens of Galt gave her a farm and land and the family of Mr Justice Dunkin – Minister of Agriculture from 1869 to 1871– raised half the funds to purchase a home in Knowlton, Quebec.³⁹

Similarly, Sir George Cox, president of Midland Railway Company and later a Liberal Senator, donated the home “Hazel Brae” rent-free to Barnardo in Peterborough, Dr. Morley Punshon, a Methodist minister, bought a home in Hamilton for Stephenson, and William Gooderham, a wealthy Toronto citizen, gave Fegan a distributing home.⁴⁰ Sir Charles Tupper, the Canadian High Commissioner in London, assisted Barnardo to get a 2,800 hectare industrial farm in Manitoba in 1887.⁴¹

³⁷ Kohli, Golden Bridge, 72.
³⁸ When the home burned down in 1872, City Council offered another house rent and tax free for 3 years; local citizens furnished the home and took in the children. Wagner, Children of Empire, 66-67.
³⁹ Ibid, 68-69. The Province of Quebec granted the remaining funds for the Knowlton purchase.
⁴⁰ Ibid, 104.
⁴¹ Dr. Barnardo wrote to Tupper asking the Canadian government to grant him good land near Winnipeg for a farm training school plus railway transportation from all ports of entry to Winnipeg. LAC, RG17, Agriculture, Volume 411, Docket 44833, 26 June 1884. Tupper suggested that Bernardo contact the President of the CPR. Ibid, 11 July 1884. The Manitoba and Northwest Railway granted land to Barnardo. Ibid, RG17, Agriculture, Volume 487, Docket 53503, 3 June 1886.