From the mid-1930s to the early 1950s, the Fairbridge Society operated a unique residential training centre for underprivileged British children in Canada. The Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School was located on Vancouver Island, in Canada's most westerly province, British Columbia. The Fairbridge Farm School was a remarkable community and is significant to the history of child welfare and social action in several respects.

The very fact of its existence is remarkable, because the Fairbridge enterprise was established several years after British child migration to Canada had officially ended. From the 1860s onwards nearly 100,000 dependent children were sent to Canada by organisations such as Barnardo's. Resettlement schemes involving British ‘home children’ had always been controversial, but after the First World War child migration was discredited as a means of Empire settlement and as a child welfare strategy. Accordingly, in the mid-1920s the Canadian government enacted regulations that were supposed to put an end to the trans-Atlantic child migration movement. The Fairbridge Society, however, managed to circumvent these regulations in the early 1930s.

The Fairbridge Farm School was remarkable because it was located in British Columbia, a province that had had no experience with British home children, and because it was established in the early years of the Depression, a time when many Canadians were opposed to immigration of any kind. The Fairbridge enterprise was also notable because of its overtly imperial complexion and its quintessentially masculine character.

No less striking is the fact that the Fairbridge initiative in Canada began at a time when Canadian social workers were defining their profession. Members of this ascendant profession were young, university-trained women who were opposed to child migration and institutionalised child care. They collided with representatives of the Fairbridge Society, most of whom were middle-aged, Empire-minded males.

At the risk of oversimplifying matters, the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island was contested terrain between opposing camps of child welfare advocates. The two camps – gentlemen and players, a fraternity and a sorority – were defined by ideology, age, gender and social class. As this chapter will show, the sorority ultimately triumphed in the struggle for control of Fairbridge. In the process, the sorority helped to affirm the status of social work as a profession and to establish a distinctive character for child welfare programmes in Western Canada after the Second World War.