Lilian Madden migrated from Barnardo’s Village Home for Girls to Canada in 1896 as a domestic servant at the age of twelve.² She and her sister left Liverpool on 30 July 1896, and arrived in Quebec after sailing on the Scotsman for a month with several other members of Barnardo’s home. Little is known of what Lillian made of her new country upon arriving in Canada or of the challenges she faced in settling into her new life in Ontario. Unlike many other migrants, whose loneliness, isolation and yearning for ‘home’ and family endured for many years following their migration, Lilian would have found comfort in having her sister, and later, one of her brothers, Bertram, close by in Ontario. Lilian regularly visited her sister and given that Bertram later followed his sisters to Ontario, it is probable that she maintained some contact with her family members that remained in England.³

Despite having family close by, Lilian also chose to remain in touch with Barnardo’s. She participated in the inspections they carried out: an expected feature of migrants’ life after arriving in Canada, but which nevertheless required young people’s assent. She also wrote letters to staff that documented her progress and news, and shortly after arriving in Ontario, donated one dollar to the charity and subscribed to the institution’s Ups and Downs magazine produced especially for migrants like herself. One of Lilian’s letters was reprinted in Ups and Downs July 1899 issue, where she reported on her progress, well-being and happiness. She also enquired after one of her peers, Emily Siney, who had also migrated to Canada from Barnardo’s, asking for her contact information so that she might keep in touch with her. Her letter stated:

In referring to the institution’s matron as ‘Mother’ and in closing her letter ‘your loving Home girl’, Lilian’s correspondence also indicates the impact that welfare experiences could have on belonging and identity. Lilian chose to, in this letter at least, construct her identity around her experience as a Barnardo’s Girl – both historically and in the present, she claimed association, kinship and connection to the institution and the staff members who had cared for her, despite her separation in time and space from the organization. She also extended her sense of belonging by articulating feelings of love and affection for the Home and through the use of familial terminology to refer to staff members.

While Lilian’s last contact with Barnardo’s appears to have occurred in 1901, census and marriage records provide further glimpses of her life in Canada. Placed in domestic service with the Staples family in Durham, Ontario in 1900, when Lilian was sixteen, she remained there for some time, possibly until her marriage in 1903.⁵ She married Charles William Sumner Gibbons, a carpenter, who had migrated to Canada from England seven months before, in Brant, Ontario. This marriage was short-lived: Charles died five years later, when their only son was just three years old.⁶ It is not known whether Lilian was in touch with her mother who remained in London until her death in 1924.⁷ Lilian lived in Canada until her death in 1969.⁸

Lilian’s story of residential care and migration is typical of many other children who spent part of their childhood in British welfare institutions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite policies that sought to segregate children from problematic family members in order to allow them to make a fresh start and to aid their moral transformation, in practice, many children continued contact with family and friends. At the same time, children’s institutions modelled their childcare practices on family ideals, by promoting the cultivation of affective relationships between children, their peers and institutional staff. Not only did continued relationships with institutional staff offer greater social capital and new networks of support in the wider world, but they also provided a source of warmth, friendship and affection, often for many years. As young people tried to navigate the challenges of the world beyond institutional walls, these relationships complicated children’s perceptions of family, which in turn shaped their sense of belonging and identity.

This chapter explores children’s and relatives’ views of ‘family’ – both biological and institutional – by examining their responses to policies and practices in the two largest children’s institutions operating in Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Dr Barnardo’s Homes, founded in 1870, and The Waifs and Strays Society (WSS), established in 1881. Both institutions had a Protestant Evangelical ethos underpinning their work, which aimed to ‘rescue’ orphan, neglected, destitute and outcast children. They sought to ‘save’ children by providing them with a home, food, clothing, training and religious instruction that might equip them with the moral and industrial values considered necessary to become productive citizens. By 1905, Barnardo’s had cared for approximately 8,500 children in ninety-six homes established since its foundation, while The WSS had cared for a total of 3,410 children in ninety-three established homes. The focus on two of the most prominent children’s institutions operating in Britain at this time allows the chapter to highlight the similarities and differences between organizations. This demonstrates that, despite common attitudes and policies, institutions articulated distinctive approaches within a broader landscape of statutory and voluntary welfare provision. The type of welfare assistance provided to these children by Barnardo’s and The WSS was typical of the era. It was driven by contemporary anxieties about an increasing population of deviant, criminal and degenerate ‘slum’ children, but also grounded in ideas about good citizenship, imperial duty and service to the nation.⁹ The solution to this threat was perceived to be their removal from all forms of contagion – moral and physical – which included their separation from their inadequate home and family life.

How welfare institutions endeavoured to dismantle relationships between children and relatives has been well documented in scholarship.¹⁰ Policies that censored or prohibited contact between children and family members, and their forced removal from family, relocation and migration, served to undermine children’s relationships with relatives and friends.¹¹ Meanwhile, children’s representations as orphans in institutional literature reinforced a public view of these children as cared for by nobody but the institution.¹² Parents have been treated as a fleeting presence in children’s institutionalized lives: beyond admission, their continued involvement in children’s lives, their knowledge, attitudes and responses to various childcare practices, and their experiences of navigating and negotiating the welfare system are for the most part absent from scholarship.¹³ While some research has started to put parents back into view in welfare studies by exploring the ways in which they called upon those in power, such as local magistrates, to exert their parental rights over children, this chapter takes a different approach to uncover the competing and complex family models at play for institutionalized children.¹⁴

The chapter first uses the charities’ publications to argue that ideals about the family were central to institutional care in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By demonstrating how these organizations sought to manufacture an artificial family model, which aimed to provide children with new forms of social capital alongside emotional and material support, this chapter departs from scholarship that has previously highlighted disciplinary and punitive institutional practices. In doing so, the chapter shows how major voluntary welfare organizations modelled their practices on the nuclear family, rather than on ties associated with kinship or friendship. Children cared for within these settings were taught to view these affective ties as offering ultimate security.¹⁵ The second part of the chapter examines individual care records and correspondence to chart the ways in which children and relatives sought to maintain affective ties. Here, the institutions’ expectations relating to child–family contact are explored, as well as the contact achieved between children and families. Finally, the chapter examines children’s responses to these competing notions of ‘family’ after leaving institutional care. Institutional training aimed to forge new identities for children that were shaped by contemporary citizenship ideals of productivity and morality.¹⁶ By equipping children with skills to thrive independently, alongside a new network of support crafted through the institutional ‘family’, these agencies hoped that children would not return to their biological family for support. Former residents’ lives after care were diverse, but many did choose to maintain contact with relatives, alongside relationships with institutional peers and staff. ‘Letters home’ to the institution, underused in previous studies, are analysed to consider how former residents gave meaning to their experiences and articulated feelings of belonging and identity.¹⁷ This reveals the complexity of the emotional dynamics of working-class life, inside and outside the residential institution.¹⁸

Creating an institutional ‘family’

The notion of ‘family’ for children in residential care was a contested but important issue. Ideas about ‘family’ mattered greatly to children’s institutions: throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and with greater input of middle- and upper-class women in welfare administration, welfare provision was increasingly influenced by domestic and family-based models of care. Reformers, such as Florence Hill, Jane Senior and Louisa Twining, had called from the late 1860s for children’s welfare institutions to adopt practices that might allow for the creation of a sense of a natural home and family life.¹⁹ Large, barrack-style spaces that were used to mass children together were criticized because of the institutionalizing effects these sites had on ‘inmates’: they received little individual attention or care within them and remained ignorant of domestic and family life. These spaces were not like homes, but instead operated like prisons to contain and manage a large number of children. As such, smaller domestic sites, such as cottage homes, were promoted as producing more favourable conditions in which to care for children. At the heart of these spaces was the idea that these sites might enable the creation of cosy, familial life. Some research has examined the increasingly domesticated nature of care provision across statutory and voluntary welfare, focusing on the scale and material environments of these institutions,²⁰ but the affective familial practices that many institutions sought to create have remained a peripheral focus. While provision of welfare in smaller ‘home’ settings may have enabled the provision of more ‘kindly’ elements of care,²¹ little research has unpicked the familial ideology and rhetoric that was central to these ‘new’ domestic forms of childcare and the practices that aimed to provide inmates with a sense of family life.²²

Barnardo’s and The WSS both sought to manufacture a sense of ideal family life.²³ The charities’ periodicals referred to institutions as families that were ever-growing and to children who were now cocooned safely in loving family life. Staff across both institutions were encouraged to assume roles as ‘mothers’ and ‘fathers’.²⁴ The WSS handbook, for example, outlined that its matrons and masters were expected to display ‘personal kindness and individual sympathy’ as well as show a ‘loving interest in the spiritual and temporal welfare’ of those they cared for.²⁵ In doing so, they might create a ‘true friendship with children that was deep and long-lasting’ in nature.²⁶ Meanwhile, Barnardo assumed the role of ‘Father’ to the ‘largest family in the world’.²⁷ Not only was this role promoted to his supporters through periodicals such as Night and Day, but he readily adopted the role of father to the institutional family when addressing children passing through his institution. Former ‘inmates’ who subscribed to Ups and Downs, for example, were encouraged to think of themselves as part of a large family with Barnardo as father. Night and Day regularly emphasized that the Cottage and Boarding Out schemes were the only way to achieve what Barnardo called ‘The Family Plan’. Girls in particular were thought to benefit from the institutional family. If the institution was to ‘bring up young girls ... to insure the highest results in life’, they must ‘let them live in small family groups, not so large as to render it impossible for the head, or “mother” to become personally acquainted with and to study carefully the character of each girl’.²⁸

Staff members thus assumed a crucial role in creating the institutional ‘family’. In an article entitled ‘A new village family’, the author ‘An Old Mother’, stated: ‘We are always building new cottages at Ilford: – not, indeed, with bricks and mortar, but with living precious stones, which must fit together to form a family.’²⁹ While reformers extolled the virtues of raising children in smaller cottages rather than large barrack-style institutions to create a sense of family, the author here indicates that facilitating children’s individuals personalities to fit together and to get along was, in fact, the task of utmost importance in building a sense of family. Staff members assumed a crucial role in this task: ‘the Mother has need of all her energy’ in order to create a ‘happy home circle’ with ‘good order’, in which inhabitants are trained in ‘quietness and obedience’, and benefit from the ‘kindly influences and pleasant glow of the household hearth’. The author argued that an ideal, happy institutional family could only be achieved by providing new arrivals with a home that shared these qualities.

But importantly too, the idea of the institutional family required the cooperation of institutional inmates. Within Barnardo’s homes, he stated that ‘Family life is made the most of, and the cottage girls live as if they were sisters. Indeed, many sisters are among them, for the Homes often admit a whole family of children’.³⁰ The notion of family life, too, referred to the everyday rituals, routines and practices enacted within the institutional spaces that might work not only to enhance a sense of family cohesiveness between children and ‘mothers’ or ‘fathers’, but also by creating an affective peer culture for children. Moments of celebration and other special events beyond the everyday household routine might help to cement a sense of familial togetherness for inhabitants. Nurturing and affective practices, such as treating children through the provision of pocket money, gifts, holidays and days out, helped to foster family time and create a deeper social bond between inhabitants.³¹

Maintaining family bonds

Institutional policies discouraged and, at times, prohibited contact between children and relatives. Relatives could not contact children in The Foundling Hospital directly; instead, mothers had to ask members of staff to provide them with short updates on their children’s health and welfare. Mothers could also apply for an ‘introduction’ – a meeting to reunite mother and child – once children came of age.³² Meanwhile, work by Abrams and Murdoch on Quarriers Homes and Barnardo’s, respectively, has demonstrated that these institutions discouraged contact where possible: occasional visiting days during the week made it hard for working parents to visit.³³ Barnardo often refused to grant access to parents deemed to be of questionable moral character.³⁴ Practices, such as children’s relocation and migration, and the often-deliberate obscuring of children’s location and circumstances, were designed to erode familial bonds.

Barnardo’s implied its preference for contact to be severed between children and their family in much of its public-facing literature. In literature aimed at institutions’ supporters, the charity was often critical of children’s relatives, presenting them as an impediment to the best interests of the child and to the provision of care. The charity’s magazine Night and Day, for example, stated:

A similar sentiment was conveyed in another article, which stated that children’s ‘worst enemies are their own relatives, whose feelings of attachment to them are often dictated only by the most utter selfishness and by complete indifference to the children’s real happiness and welfare’.³⁶ Instead, Barnardo’s institutional family was positioned as superior to children’s relatives in caring for and raising children.

While the organization may have desired to prohibit contact between children and interfering family members, in reality, the complete erosion of ties between children and relatives was difficult to achieve and was the source of constant negotiation and complaint from relatives. The institution also acknowledged the inevitability of children and relatives maintaining contact. According to the charity’s guidance and regulations, foster parents of boarded-out children were required to accommodate visiting relatives on specific days, as long as they could provide the necessary written authorization from Barnardo’s to permit visitation. This requirement allowed the charity to vet applications for visitation, and to grant or deny such privileges. Barnardo’s stated in the guidance that ‘only respectable relatives are granted the privilege of visiting children’ and that they should permit ‘no other visit from relatives or friends of the Child without DR. BARNARDO’S authorisation’.³⁷ Each girl at the Ilford Girls’ Home was allowed to receive two visitors, either friends or family members, once every three months on set visiting days.³⁸

These conditions and the infrequency of visiting days made it harder for relatives to maintain contact with children. Permission to visit children was dependent on subjective assessments made about familial morality, conduct and character. For some, contact was impossible if the institution deemed them to be problematic or immoral. Nevertheless, many institutionalized children were able to retain ties with family members and friends. Contact was often quickly resumed upon leaving care: updates and news about young people’s progress after leaving the institution highlight that youths located in both Britain and Canada routinely travelled to visit and stay with friends and relatives in their old neighbourhoods. Meanwhile, other articles demonstrated that where visits between youths and family members were impossible, letters, gifts and money were exchanged.³⁹

Of significance too is the shifting rhetoric employed to describe children’s family and friends, particularly for child migrants, who were often emigrated in order to distance them from apparently problematic relatives. Prior to and during children’s institutionalization, the organization’s public-facing literature was overtly critical and disapproving of relatives and the bonds of attachment they held for children. However, in reports about young people’s progress following discharge from the institution, little judgement was cast on family members and friends. Accounts of these continued relationships were unembellished by conjecture and most were presented as unproblematic for young people’s future well-being. An 1899 edition of Ups and Downs, for example, described how Alfred Barnes was shortly to travel from Montreal to England with the intention of spending a couple of months with his relatives in London.⁴⁰ Meanwhile, Mary Simpson saved enough money for a return ticket to England in 1900 to visit her relatives before returning to Canada in the autumn to take up a new situation.⁴¹ One article published in Barnardo’s magazine for migrants suggests that young people routinely enquired about their relatives if they had not kept in touch, and that the institution always assisted children in tracing and reuniting with relatives:

And in seeking to offer ‘solace for such aching hearts’, the article described that Barnardo’s staff were ‘always willing to do anything in our power in cases of this kind … and thus we may hope before long to be successful in putting you in communication with, at anyrate, someone amongst your relatives and friends’.⁴³

The institution also helped young people to stay in contact with family members in other ways, including an annual Christmas excursion from Canada to England, and an assistance programme that helped child migrants bring out relatives from England.⁴⁴ Young people apparently made use of these schemes. In 1900, Horace Blunt saved enough money to help his mother emigrate to join him while Jennie Kibble facilitated the emigration of her younger sister.⁴⁵ In addition to the 242 children that migrated to Canada in the first of five parties to leave England that year, there were fifteen ‘outsiders’ who had ‘not been inmates of the Homes, and comprising chiefly of relatives of boys in Canada who have advanced the necessary amount for their emigration expenses’.⁴⁶

Extant WSS sources suggest that the Society was more flexible than Barnado’s in permitting familial contact. Despite subjective and often derogatory accounts of children’s families that accompanied application forms written by esteemed members of their local community, the Society presented a more moderate view of relatives’ character. Each issue of their monthly magazine highlighted a selection of cases recently accepted for admission, and provided a statement of details:

Unlike Barnardo’s, The WSS offered no explicit judgement in communicating details of the family life of children they admitted, instead allowing readers to make their own assessments. However, the use of emotive language, evocative, detailed descriptions of the material conditions of familial poverty, and the suggestive highlighting of parents’ failings all helped to shape readers’ verdicts about the character of children’s relatives.

In response to reformers’ calls to create a sense of natural family life in children’s institutions, The WSS’s publications increasingly acknowledged the importance of the parent–child bond to children’s development. In many cases, institutions allowed relatives to correspond with inhabitants, enquire about their well-being with staff members and foster parents, and to visit children on specific days, as long as contact was deemed not to endanger the child in any way. The WSS set out its mission statement, claiming that it intended to neither break children’s family ties, nor ‘replace’ biological relatives. Rather, the Society stated that ‘where it can be avoided it is wiser not to break through the natural tie which no institutional life can replace to the young child’.⁴⁸ Such terms shaped relatives’ perceptions about their rights and entitlements: in many cases, parents seemed to be knowledgeable that they were not wholly rescinding their rights to or responsibilities for children, regardless of the expectation that they would wholly commit children to the institution’s care. Indeed, relatives were quick to involve persons and agencies of power to support their case when they were unhappy with institutional decisions or felt that their concerns were unheard.⁴⁹

Application forms for admission and accompanying letters from influential community figures offered subjective and often pejorative opinions about the morality, respectability and character of families. Yet, despite these critical and derogatory letters, relatives’ rights to communicate with or visit children were seldom rescinded. Where contact was denied, judgements were seemingly based on ensuring the safety and best interests of the child. Johanna M.’s mother was not allowed to contact her because in the past she had repeatedly taken Johanna out on the streets with her while she solicited trade as an apparent prostitute, and as such, the Society deemed her most likely to continue to have an immoral influence on her.⁵⁰

Other cases of family contact were less straightforward and could be contentious to negotiate even between staff members. One matron informed WSS Founder and Director Edward de Montjoie Rudolf that she had turned away two ‘rude’ and ‘immoral’ friends who had arrived at the home to visit Isabella B. because she judged them to be ‘dreadful women who seemed bent on having her back’. Rudolf responded by reminding the matron that Isabella’s friends had a right to visit her and should be allowed to do so. While the matron conceded to his advice, she warned that if, at any point in the future, Isabella’s friends seemed to be immoral, she would immediately turn them away.⁵¹

For other children under the Society’s care, relatives continued to play an important role in their lives even when physically distanced. Many relatives sought to keep in touch through regular letter writing and monthly visits to institutional homes. However, distance and expense made visits either impossible or irregular for many poor families. Letters sent between relatives and the Society nevertheless suggest that there was some space to negotiate the ability to visit children’s placements. One mother complained to The WSS Head Office that the cost of a one-day ticket from her home in London to Bournemouth where her son was, was a ‘great strain’ that prevented her from visiting him more than once a year. She wrote a number of times in desperation to ask the Society to transfer him closer to her so that she might visit him more easily and more often. The Society acceded to her series of pleas a year later when a space opened up in one of their boys’ homes in London.⁵² Meanwhile, another mother expressed her distress at ‘the thought of the long distance and at her consequent inability to see her child’, who was due to be transferred from Knebworth, Hertfordshire to Dolgellau in north-west Wales.⁵³ WSS policies did not allow children to return to their family homes temporarily or for holidays, but many family members wrote to ask for permission in any case and often repeatedly.⁵⁴

Despite rising literacy rates among the poor, maintaining contact by letter could also be difficult and sporadic. Not only was letter writing time-consuming and expensive for those struggling to stave off destitution, but the ability to write with some degree of confidence and ease required habitual practice.⁵⁵ If parents did not write to children, it did not mean that they did not care; others waited to visit occasionally throughout the year or wrote only when needed. Meanwhile, for children residing in institutions or with foster families, some degree of assistance with letter writing may have been required, and especially so for younger children who probably had little experience, if any at all, in letter writing.

Despite being sporadic, letters were exchanged between children and relatives on special occasions. One girl received a letter and a gift of a bible for her birthday,⁵⁶ while another received five shillings from her mother at Christmas.⁵⁷ Others wrote in response to important events: Thomas T. wrote to his mother to let her know that many of his fellow residents were due to emigrate to Canada, perhaps to alert her to the possibility that he, too, might be chosen to be sent overseas. Concerned by his letter, Thomas’ mother wrote almost immediately to the institution to begin the process of requesting his removal.⁵⁸ The boy and his mother appear to have worked together to ensure that their family was not broken up permanently. Another mother, who had sent her daughter gifts in the past, sent another before she was due to emigrate. The matron opened the package first: perhaps because she thought it suspect, but more likely because mail was subject to inspection. Alongside the mother’s present was a letter that pleaded with her daughter not to go to Canada, but to come home instead.⁵⁹ Her daughter never received the letter, and it is very unlikely she received the accompanying gift.

Overall, it is difficult to gauge the extent to which children and relatives kept in touch. Few records exist that document visits received by children in each of the Society’s homes. Letters that survive in the Society’s archives were, by definition, unusual. They had found their way into individual case records because, following inspection, something in their contents warranted further investigation. Some letters filed in case records were unlikely to have been received or read by the intended recipient. Meanwhile, many other letters would have been exchanged without additional intervention by staff; correspondence containing seemingly trivial ephemera, which only had meaning to author and recipient, was deemed to be mundane and risk-free by staff. As such, these ordinary letters were not sequestered by staff, but instead were probably kept by children as cherished possessions and reminders of the strength of love, devotion and yearning that was felt among family members.

Evidence thus demonstrates that the practices of both institutions were more complicated than simply severing children’s relationships with their family and friends. While this may well have been the desire of these institutions in some cases – particularly where children had problematic relatives – this was impossible to achieve in practice. Family members, friends and children were active agents in negotiating and contesting practices that sought to prevent, prohibit, restrict and limit contact. As close readings of institutional literature and policy show, welfare institutions could be flexible and accommodating in their practices regarding familial contact. Relatives’ treatment and their contact with children was shaped by the personalities of those that wielded power: as Murdoch has shown, Barnardo often went to great lengths to supervise and restrict some children’s relationships with their relatives,⁶⁰ while Rudolf encouraged his staff members to be amenable and obliging to relatives’ contact with and involvement in the care of children. The publicly stated intentions of both institutions, too, suggest a more complicated understanding of children’s relationships with their families. Both institutions acknowledged that despite providing children with a sense of ideal domestic life through their creation of an institutional family model, both children and relatives retained intimate and affective bonds through their absence and even when contact was infrequent. While institutions had the power to mediate and supervise these relationships during children’s institutionalization, they accepted that they could have little influence on these bonds following children’s discharge.

As a result, children’s understandings and experiences of welfare in voluntary institutions were diverse, dependent on a range of factors including the institution they resided in, the staff members responsible for making decisions about contact with relatives and the institution’s assessment of familial character. In turn, understandings of relatives’ character could be shaped by individuals entirely unaffiliated with the welfare agency. Important figures in local communities, such as clergymen, teachers, police officials, philanthropists and even neighbours, possessed a great deal of power over how children’s relatives were represented and understood by institutional staff. This could affect whether children retained their ties with family and friends.

Children’s responses to family practices

The dual models of family – biological and institutional – shaped children’s sense of selfhood and identity. The family unit, whether biological or artificially constructed, was the first and most important site for children’s socialization and emotional development, which served as a microcosm of broader societal norms and relationships. Where children’s biological families were deemed to be unsuitable, as was the case with some children admitted to residential care, the institutional family model functioned as part of a larger system of reformation, in which familial-type relationships created within the institution sought to educate poor, ‘undomesticated’ children about the value of domesticity and family life. This education aimed to influence how they raised their own children and made a home. Letters written back to the institution following children’s discharge from care provide insight into how this type of intervention affected young people and their sense of being in the world.

Letters written back to the institutional home formed a vital aspect of early aftercare processes that welfare institutions such as The WSS and Barnardo’s established to monitor progress from afar and provide further support in times of need.⁶¹ Numerous ‘letters home’ survive in case records, while others were published in institutional periodicals. These letters speak of children’s attachment to the institution, their desire to develop their relationships with staff, and their recognition of the importance of family, especially the institutional family that had at times afforded them new opportunities in life. It is not possible to determine the veracity of the published letters: they appear either fully or partially anonymized, which frustrates efforts to trace them back to original case file content. These published letters are, however, remarkably similar in content and tone to young people’s letters ‘home’ that were merely added to case files and not designed for publication. These letters can thus reveal how children responded to the institutions’ idealization of friendship and familial relationships.

The published literature provides a telling narrative of how welfare agencies wanted children to imagine their institutional homes and to represent the relationships forged within them. As Rebecca Swartz’s chapter in this volume highlights, published letters extolled institutional success while also providing insight into children’s experiences – usually positively framed – of welfare interventions. The WSS’s periodicals assured readers that children imagined and acknowledged staff as family members: Mrs B., the matron of the Mirfield home, for example, ‘was always called mother by the children’.⁶² Barnardo similarly stated the girls who lived in his Girls’ Village Home (G.V.H.) thought of their matron as mother. For some, yearning and nostalgia for the home occasioned frequent visits from former ‘inmates’ later in life. He stated:

Such statements promoted the idea that these institutions were so successful at creating a sense of warm, cosy family life that bonds and relationships between inhabitants endured well after children were discharged from these homes. Additionally, periodicals and correspondence pointed to the intimacy that developed between children while residing in the institution and later in the lifecycle following children’s discharge. Former inmates kept in touch with each other, sometimes through correspondence, but often by visiting each other, frequently across great distances. For young people who had migrated to Canada, Ups and Downs provided a space in which to maintain relationships that might have been lost over time or distance, as well as an opportunity to trace these friends and reunite.

Letters also played a role in allowing young people to make sense of their experiences and to construct, explore and come to terms with their identity. Nostalgia and yearning for the institutional home and the relationships that made the institutional family were common emotions in letters sent home by young people. A letter from a former WSS boy, Harry M., reprinted in the institution’s periodical, for example, stated:

In his letter, Harry seeks to articulate his connection to his institutional ‘home’ and to sustain his childhood attachment. His attention to specific activities undertaken with fellow residents suggests that his sense of belonging was rooted in the interpersonal dynamics and sociability of the home. Here, his fantasy of returning home provided a source of comfort. Harry may well have hoped that the act of remembrance would renew his bonds with the home, while also consolidating his identity as belonging to the institution as a former ‘inmate’ or one of the Society’s ‘Old Boys’.

It is unclear what prompted Harry’s letter back to the institution, if indeed there was a reason to write. As other historians have shown, nostalgic views of past events were often elicited by gruelling, traumatic or challenging experiences in the present, such as war, migration and resettlement.⁶⁵ Recent difficulties, ruptures and dislocations in his life course may have elicited Harry’s letter and his act of recalling an idealized view of his childhood home. Renewing relationships with the home and its staff provided important reference points that helped young people come to terms with the present through recalling the past: these reflective practices could be essential to grounding oneself and understanding selfhood. Conversely, his letter may well simply have been a signal of his affection for the institution that had provided him with a happy childhood.

Young people’s correspondence allowed them to express a sense of belonging. This was particularly important for children who had experienced residential care, many of whom may have experienced little stability, affection and nurture prior to institutional admission. As Gillian Lamb’s chapter in this volume reveals, institutional welfare provision could afford a better material quality of life. For these children, a more permanent home that brought them out of danger, the provision of warm clothing and regular mealtimes, as well as the ability to foster bonds with fellow inhabitants and staff members, may have offered a richer life than they had previously known. Of course, and as research has documented, this was not the experience for many children who suffered varying degrees of isolation, exploitation, trauma and abuse within residential welfare institutions.⁶⁶ The institutional home meant different things for different individuals and these meanings could change over the life course. However, a number of young people who had spent their childhoods in nineteenth-century residential care were keen to identify and be acknowledged as ‘old boys’ or ‘old girls’. Letters sent back to the institution by former inmates routinely referred to themselves as such,⁶⁷ while several membership clubs were established for former institutional inhabitants.⁶⁸

It is probable that fashioning an identity as an ‘old boy’ or ‘old girl’ brought with it a sense of solidarity, closeness and belonging for some individuals who, following their discharge from the institution, might have few relationships that offered intimacy and support in the wider world. Some children had few or no surviving relatives because relationships had broken down. Relationships with peers and institutional staff were important forms of social capital for those who left the institution and entered the wider world with next to nothing. For some, acknowledgement from institutional staff as an ‘old boy’ or ‘old girl’ was important: institutions frequently promoted an image of the ‘ideal’ former inmate as a young person that, following discharge, appreciated the care that they had received, and strove to do well and prove themselves a credit to the Society’s work. This ideal meant achieving economic independence, leading a moral and humble life, providing for family, and expressing gratitude to God and to the institution’s work to ‘rescue’ them.⁶⁹

Numerous letters published in both institutions’ periodicals made reference to these markers of success. Mary Ann Jane Tooth’s letter, for example, expressed her pride in keeping her place for nearly two years, and her hope to please her mistress so that she might ‘keep her for as long as she likes’. She also stated that she was ‘doing her best to save my money for the bank. My mistress says that I am very careful with my money and that she never had any girl so saving like me’.⁷⁰ Meanwhile, Mary Dalgarno’s letter published in Ups and Downs stated that she liked her employment and was enjoying life in Canada better than England, and that she hoped to hear from some of the old friends she grew up with in Barnardo’s Homes. She closed her letter stating, ‘I am not ashamed to say that I am a Home girl, for I cannot thank Dr. Barnardo enough for what he has done for me.’⁷¹

Others who had grown up in the homes rejected identities as an ‘old boy’ or ‘old girl’. They expressed shame and embarrassment at having been victims of poverty or recipients of stigmatized charity. A number of agencies struggled to monitor residents’ trajectories after leaving institutional care and explained that some young people avoided further contact with the institution. They sought to keep their backgrounds secret, so that they might fashion a new identity or preserve an image that was free from the taint of pauperism and institutional life. Indeed, for some, doing so allowed them to gain higher-paid work.⁷² One former WSS inhabitant wrote to the Society to offer a small donation. An accompanying letter highlighted that although she read The WSS periodical Our Waifs and Strays to her daughter every month, she did ‘not tell her that her own mother was one of those same poor little girls fifteen years ago. I think she is better left untold. I shudder to think what might have happened to me … had it not been for your grand Society’.⁷³

Although grateful for the care she received from the institution, her reluctance to divulge this information to even her own family ensured that there were no visible, lasting indications that the woman had been a welfare recipient. Institutional homes were experienced in a multitude of ways. Yet, whether understood as positive or negative, the evidence suggests the lasting impact of childhood experiences on people’s identities across the life course.

Despite providing an idealized family form within the institution, many children returned to live with relatives after institutional care. However, this did not necessarily mean that bonds with staff members or co-residents were forsaken. Lily A., aged ten, entered The WSS St Lawrence’s Home in Exeter with her sister Mabel, aged twelve, in 1903. Their mother was described as doing her best for them since her husband’s death, but that she was not ‘entirely satisfactory’, having had two further illegitimate children. During her time in the institution, Lily kept in touch with her mother and, in 1907, returned to live with her for a month. She returned to the Home, however, although the reasons why are unclear: it may have been too difficult for her mother to maintain her. After she was discharged to service in 1909, evidence shows that she continued to foster an intimate and affective relationship with her former matron. The choice to keep in touch with her matron was a personal decision: records show that her sister Mabel did not attempt to sustain a relationship with WSS staff after her discharge from care. Lily’s letters indicate a reciprocal emotional bond: Lily’s letter in 1909 thanked the matron for sending her a gift of a bow and collar. While the exchange of gifts between former institutional ‘inmates’ and staff members was unusual, staff members frequently provided emotional support and, at times, material support was offered to young people by the Head Office. The provision of resources was usually well documented and rationalized. It ranged from routine expenses, such as railway fares or lodging expenses, to specialist provision including items such as a replacement surgical boot.⁷⁴

Lily also sustained a close relationship with her mother, who she saw at least every week, and she stated that she was paid well enough in service to pay her mother to do her washing.⁷⁵ By doing her washing, Lily’s mother performed her care and love for her daughter through labour, while Lily’s payment to her mother functioned both as a source of additional income and as an expression of care. A number of letters sent by Lily to her former matron at the start of 1911, when she was aged eighteen, suggest that she had experienced sexual harassment or assault from her new master. She wrote that her master:

Lily benefitted from her relationships with both her mother and her matron in different ways in resolving the danger she faced. She alerted her mother to her master’s behaviour and was duly provided with information that she found useful.⁷⁷ Given the personal and distressing threat, it is unsurprising that Lily chose to approach her mother. Lily’s choice to keep in regular contact with her matron meant that she also felt comfortable approaching her for help when she needed it most. Receiving Lily’s letter, her matron immediately arranged her removal and helped her find a new place of work. While previous correspondence suggests that Lily’s mother had successfully secured employment for her daughter in the past, instead of discharging her back to her mother’s care to find employment, the Society secured employment immediately for her and in doing so was able to oversee her well-being and monitor her progress from afar. The Society may have considered Lily’s supervision necessary following her master’s sexual assault. Nevertheless, Lily’s letters demonstrate that the matron occupied an important position in her network of friends and family. The longevity of relationships with institutional staff proved advantageous in times of need, providing young people with new forms of social capital that extended beyond their immediate family and community.

For some children and young people, connections to biological family remained resilient, despite institutions’ attempts to undermine these bonds. William L. was aged thirteen when he was received into The WSS’s care in June 1905.⁷⁸ His mother had died in childbirth, so he had lived with his deaf father and stepmother for a number of years. His father was described as a ‘very rough kind of man’ who ‘had not done well for any of his children’. His eldest sister, Harriet, had run away, and his second sister, Julia, had been taken into a training home. The youngest child, Maria, remained in the family home with William. His family sought admission to WSS care, because the stepmother was afraid that he would ‘come to a bad end, unless taken in hand’. She stated that he was ‘given to wandering, stays out all night frequently’ and feared that ‘he is given to pilfering, bad language, and smoking’.⁷⁹ The stepmother’s account of William’s behaviour was particularly critical. She may have been exasperated by attempts to control him and genuinely feared for his future; equally, she may have been keen to dispose of a behaviourally challenging boy by seeking his admission to the institution.

The application thus painted the family as undesirable: the father had evidently failed to raise his children adequately, demonstrated by Harriet’s escape from the family home and the welfare intervention that had ‘rescued’ Julia. William’s continued contact with his father and stepmother while in the institution was very unlikely to be desirable or beneficial from the Society’s perspective. There is no indication, however, in the case record of deliberate efforts to restrict contact. Upon admission, William articulated his eagerness to be trained in gardening and farm work and to emigrate to Canada to use these skills. This was fortuitous: William’s emigration would resolve any difficulties that might be encountered in preventing William’s exposure to his family’s bad influence while in care. As such, he spent some time in the Society’s St Aldhelms’s Home, before being proposed for emigration in 1907. William’s stepmother and father had chosen not to answer the questions relating to consent to emigrate on The WSS application. As a result, the Society sought familial consent from his family to facilitate his emigration in 1907: it is unclear whether the Society attempted and failed to get in contact with his father and stepmother, but correspondence shows that they sought consent from his uncle, who expressed his reluctance to approve William’s migration. In answer to the uncle’s response, The WSS stated that William had now reached the age of fourteen, which allowed him to decide his own future and to consent to his migration himself.⁸⁰ In February 1907, William signed his own consent form, ‘being desirous to emigrate’, and sailed for Canada in the summer.⁸¹

In 1910, his sister Julia, who had herself been taken into a different welfare organization, began a search to trace William, writing to the Society’s Head Office in London, and then later to staff located in Canada. Within two months, Julia and William had been reunited through correspondence. William had told his sister that he was living with very nice people who had been a good master and mistress to him. Despite his acknowledgement that he was ‘getting on very well’ in Canada, he admitted that he ‘yearns just a little for the old country’. No doubt, getting back in touch with his sister only exacerbated these feelings, particularly as they had been out of contact for many years, since both children had been removed from their family home by different agencies. William had indicated to her that he would save his money and try to return in the spring of 1911. Julia related William’s plans to the Society, perhaps in the hope that they might aid his passage back to the UK given his homesickness. The Society instead advised her that she should encourage him to stay where he was, stating:

In spite of the Society’s hope that William would remain where he was, he returned to England in 1911 aged twenty-one, when he reported to his old WSS home in Islington in November and again in December to enquire for assistance to obtain work, and stated that he was living with his sister Julia. The staff at the Islington home described him as ‘comfortably clad’ but advised they could not aid him until he first made contact with The WSS Head Office.⁸³ It seems that the Society referred him to the Church Army for support, but he absconded from their home two days after his admission.⁸⁴ Little is known about what happened to William after he left the Church Army Home, but notification of his sudden death from heart failure in Canada in 1933 suggests that at some point he had made up his mind to return to the country. He faced immediate difficulties in obtaining suitable work and may well have struggled to establish himself. Perhaps he was without a reference of good character or savings to tide him over. Given his admission into the Church Army Home, he was probably unable to stay long term with his sister and her family. Navigating and renewing family relationships could be complex work, especially for those who had lived away from home and biological relatives for several years: William had not lived with his sister since he was nine years old. Perhaps his experience of returning to London had not lived up to the nostalgic view for the ‘old country’ he had articulated in his letter. The difficulties he faced in re-establishing himself were beginning to undo his sentimental narrative of returning ‘home’ to the ‘old country’. Despite his yearning for family and friends in England, the reality of once again being dependent on others and upon charity may have exacerbated feelings of discord and perhaps disappointment about his place in the world. Perhaps his attempts to reconnect with his sister had been problematic and did not provide him with the sense of belonging for which he had hoped.

Whether or not he remained in touch with his sister Julia remains unknown – by the time of William’s death, she had herself been widowed but remarried and moved address.⁸⁵ When the Society attempted to contact her at her last known address to notify her of his death, the letter was returned to sender. The Society also wrote to Emmeline Neilson, an unrelated but local individual who had been interested in the children, helping to get Julia into a training home and supporting William’s application to the Society. Although she had not seen Julia for nearly a quarter of a century and had not remained in touch with William, she expressed her grief to hear ‘that my little friend Billy has passed away’.⁸⁶ It is probable that neither Julia nor William’s other surviving relatives attended his funeral. A local newspaper reported that several ‘Old Boys’ from the Society’s Canadian Home, as well as his former employer Mr Gee and his family to whom William had been particularly attached, were in attendance to celebrate his life.⁸⁷ While these friends were not family in a biological sense, they may well have felt like family to William. These bonds had survived for a number of decades and across great distances. It was these friendships to which William had chosen to return following his visit to England in 1911.

William’s case demonstrates the complexity of the process of constructing, maintaining and remaking family bonds for children who had spent part of their childhood in residential care. The institutional family that William may have encountered during his time in care had some impact on his sense of social and familial relationships, and very likely his sense of self and belonging in the world. While there is no evidence to suggest that he sustained affective ties with any institutional staff members, William must have kept in touch with other Old Boys and been remembered fondly by peers who chose to attend his funeral. Additionally, he turned to the institution for further assistance when he found it difficult to find work on his return to England. The WSS’s decision to support William’s emigration suggests that staff were eager to discourage familial contact, but the institution, nevertheless, aided his reunion with his sister. William’s subsequent return to reconnect with his family demonstrates the resilience of these bonds and the affinity felt by William and his sister, despite their long absence. Finally, who William thought of as his closest friends and family remains unknown. His renewed ties to his relatives may well have broken down by the time of his death, but it is clear that those who were able to mourn him, both in Canada and in England, were his friends who had known him as an Old Waifs and Strays’ Boy.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that family mattered to British children’s welfare organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Far from adopting a blanket policy of prohibiting all contact between children and their relatives, major residential institutions such as Barnardo’s and The WSS accommodated child–family contact in many cases. The relatives of children placed in institutions continued to care about, assume responsibility for, fight for and be anxious about the children with whom they had parted. Family members had a keen sense of their rights and entitlements to their relationships with children. The chapter has argued that welfare practices enacted within institutions were rooted in ideas of family life. With only minor variations, ideas about the institutional family permeated both the policies and practices of two of the largest and most significant British children’s institutions. These ideas shaped children’s experiences within the institutions in many ways. As evidence presented here shows, institutions encouraged children to imagine staff members and peers as familial figures in the institutional household. Published literature extolled their success in creating a family-like unit within the institution, even when children remained connected to relatives.

Meanwhile, individual care records and correspondence demonstrate that children and young people in care perceived ideas of family to be competing and complex. Nostalgic letters ‘home’ to the institution offer a window into former ‘inmates’’ acts of negotiating and making sense of their welfare experiences, interpersonal relationships and identity. They reveal how constructions of status, value and place in society were tied up with a sense of belonging and attachment to the institution. For many children, continued relationships with staff and peers, even when they returned ‘home’ to their relatives and friends, offered greater social capital and provided new avenues of support to master a range of difficulties encountered in later life. However, for some young people, association with the institution was a source of pain and conflict. Unpleasant and traumatic experiences within the institution meant that for some, their ability to cast off their ties with these agencies and to fashion a new identity could not come soon enough. Meanwhile, a sense of loss, desolation and confusion resound through the care records for some young people. They found it difficult to trace and emotionally reconnect with their relatives, to understand their past histories, to make sense of their self and identity, or to find their place in the world upon leaving care.