Introduction

These are the impressions made on Kingsley Fairbridge (born in 1885) during his first journey to England in 1903. Having grown up in South Africa, he was shocked by the living conditions of the poor that he encountered in England. He also became aware of the many destitute children in the streets there, who were condemned to a life in the workhouse (Sherington and Jeffery, 1998, p. 15).

Following his return home, later in 1903, the solution to the problem occurred to him:

Fairbridge would spend the rest of his life making this “vision” become reality by setting up the Child Emigration Society (CES) and a farm school in Australia in 1912, where formerly destitute British children grew up and were trained to become farmers on the land. After Fairbridge's death in 1924, his work was continued by the CES and by his wife, and the farm school scheme expanded as additional farm schools in Australia, Canada, and Rhodesia were opened in the mid-1930s.

The CES selected mostly orphaned and destitute children in Britain for emigration to one of its farm schools. After their arrival, the children would live at the farm school where they would be trained to become farmers on the land on which, later on, as adults, they would become farmers themselves. They would thus be accustomed from the beginning to the special conditions of the country in which they would farm (Hill, 2007). The (British) children lived in little cottage homes, each shared by 12 children (Bean and Melville, 1989, p. 81), supervised by a matron (Arthur Lawley, in CES 1922/1923, p. 8).