The Victorian Children Sent to Canada
Thousands of poor London children were sent from Britain to Canada in the 19th century. For their organisers, it was Christian deliverance; for many children, the reality was very different.
In 1866 London’s fourth and final major cholera epidemic arrived, killing 5,500 by the time the contagion came to an end. Out of that public health disaster emerged three hugely influential East London charitable bodies: the Salvation Army; Dr Barnardo’s Juvenile Mission; and the Home of Industry, run by Annie Macpherson, a Scottish evangelical, who set up a large-scale programme of shipping London orphans and street children across the Atlantic for new lives in Canada. Between 1869 and 1925 an estimated 80,000 British boys and girls were sent to Canada as agricultural labourers and domestic servants by Macpherson, Thomas Barnardo and Maria Rye – the latter one of a small number of other philanthropists active in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Dublin. Only one third of them were orphans, meaning that the majority had been removed from parents and/or siblings.
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