Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

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This is one of those stories that's hard to love simply because it's a horrendous bit of history that's difficult to take, but I love it all the same as I bawled through most of it. This is an important book and the story should be made known, but put simply I was so irritated by Humphrey's writing and her vendetta that it lost a lot of impact for me. EMPTY CRADLES is a powerful testament to an ordinary woman's astonishing dedication, compassion and stubborn courage. Margaret Humphreys soon discovered that as many as 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britian and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the Empire—the last as recently as 1967.

INDEPENDENT"The secrets of the lost children of Britain may never have been revealed if it had not been for [the actions of] Margaret Humphreys. They didn't know where they were or why they were there, often believing they must have done something very bad to have been sent there. This is an event in history that I was not aware of, but sadly know in my heart that it still exists all over the world. Some children were falsely told they were orphans and some parents were shocked to find their children had been sent to the other side of the world without their knowledge or consent. So many tragic stories of young children sent from Britain to Australia and other countries and their terrible treatment at the hands of their “caregivers”.Empty Cradles is a well-written, heart-wrenching, tragic, but ultimately uplifting, story about the child migrant scandal from the UK to Australia post WWII, and I would highly recommend it to readers interested in such shocking social issues as this. The reality was very different: for numerous children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Western Australia and elsewhere. In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government.

It was a solution to two social problems at once : the children’s homes and orphanages of Britain were full to overflowing in those years - because, as we know, if a woman had an illegitimate child it was taken away from her and put in an orphanage if no adoptive parents could be found - those were the days, hey? My father argued with them that we were supervised at night by my aunt, who sat nearby nodding earnestly, so there was no need to take us into care. Post war Britain had overflowing orphanages, so the government and "social agencies" decided to pack unwitting children off to the "colonies", Australia, "Rhodesia", South Africa and even New Zealand.She is an unsung hero, her devotion, courage and sheer determination to reunite these people with their family members is inspiring - it made me want to do something better with my life. The untold cost lies in the following generations of children who feel so deeply the hollowness of a parent or grandparent who cannot tell a vital part of their own story. In fact for many children it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse far away from everything they knew. As she began to make enquiries MH was met with institutional amnesia and flat-out hostility from the charities and church organisations.

There is bitter-sweetness too in recounting the slight relief child migrants find when they can finally share their experiences and burdens. For the charities, the child migrant scheme was apparently a solution to the overflowing British orphanages and the fact that the colonies were in need of a cheap labour force. As recently as the early 1990s, when Humphreys was in the heart of her work, the British and Australian governments were busy either denying wrongdoing entirely or pointing fingers at each other. The work of The Child Migrants Trust is ongoing and relies on donations to support adults, who were once child migrants, in numerous ways.Almost all of the children, from orphanages or children’s homes, had parents who did not realise what was happening. As her husband so rightly points out, Margaret was indeed the right person in the right place at the right time and with an astonishing family. Subject of the film,Oranges and Sunshine, starring Emily Watson, this is the book that exposed the heartbreaking scandal of Britain's forgotten and abused child migrants, which has now been the focus of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse. But most of all for Margaret Humphreys, who innocently and naively stumbled upon this tragedy and pursued it with tenacity.