In 1834, seventeen-year-old Martha Powell, who had emigrated to the Cape with her younger brother, Henry, under the auspices of the Children’s Friend Society (CFS), wrote back to the CFS Committee. A few years earlier, Henry had been found wandering the streets in London and had been picked up by some ‘charitable persons’, who, upon hearing he was an orphan, sent him to the boys’ asylum at Hackney-Wick, run by the CFS. When Martha heard that her brother was to be sent as an apprenticed labourer to the Cape, she asked to be sent to the colony with him. Her 1834 letter described her employment and situation at the Cape. She was working as a domestic servant for John Fairbairn, editor of the local Cape newspaper, the South African Commercial Advertiser. Her brother was employed by a doctor, and they were able to see one another often. The other boys who had been sent out by the CFS could attend a local evening school three times a week and most of the juvenile emigrants to the Cape attended Sunday schools. While some boys were unhappy with their employment, and ‘a few ran away from their masters at first’, Martha said she would like to stay in the Cape once her contract expired in 1836. ‘My time will be out on the 28^th of March, 1836, when, if I still like the Cape, I shall not return, as the air does agree with me.’¹

Martha and Henry were just two of over 800 children who were sent by the Children’s Friend Society, a London-based philanthropic organization, to the Cape colony, between 1833 and 1841. Martha’s letter in which she described her new situation in the colony points to the continued ties between ‘home’ and ‘away’ experienced by children sent to the Cape as part of this emigration scheme. While Martha, at seventeen years old, was ‘rather beyond the usual age fixed by the Society’ for ‘juvenile emigrants’, the ‘strong affection’ that she showed for her brother and a good reference from her previous employer meant that she was considered for emigration.² For Martha, the decision to go with her brother to the Cape indicates her willingness to participate in the scheme, and an ability to use the philanthropic organization to her own ends. Her letter, although brief, highlights that Martha was making a series of complicated decisions about the best interests of herself and her brother. Whether it was the possibility for employment there, her better health, or the desire to maintain family bonds, Martha was an active participant in the CFS scheme. She would remain in the Cape, marrying locally born Jan Johannes Overmeyer shortly after her apprenticeship expired in 1836.³ Henry, who had emigrated to the colony aged fourteen, also remained there, marrying locally and working as a brewer and canteen keeper in the centre of Cape Town.⁴

Studies of the CFS have been preoccupied with the motivations of the organization’s founder, Captain Edward Pelham Brenton, situating the work of the Society within the context of nineteenth-century ‘child rescue’ and philanthropy.⁵ This chapter, by contrast, puts the experience of children at the centre of the analysis. It traces individual cases of children sent to the Cape, showing how they experienced the scheme, and how they made sense of the distance between ‘home’ and the colony. Their experiences and perceptions of the colony were decidedly mixed: while some were able to flourish in the young settler colony, others were seen as a replacement for the labour of recently emancipated slaves.⁶ Some, like Martha Powell, were active participants in the scheme; others reported abuse and neglect at the hands of their employers and hoped to return to England as soon as they could.

The young emigrants’ responses to their situations ranged from acceptance and compliance to rebellion and outright protest. As Susan Miller has argued, children’s agency is best understood as existing on ‘a continuum from opposition to assent’.⁷ In other words, agency should be read not only through deliberate acts of rebellion, but also through children’s (active) choice to consent or comply when their needs and those of adults aligned. Mona Gleason suggests the use of ‘empathic inference’ to move past trying to uncover children’s agency: to ‘deeply engage their ability to imagine and interpret the world as if from the point of view of the least powerful’.⁸ Agency, instead of being thought of as the actions of an individual, should be thought of as ‘relational and complicated’,⁹ emerging out of the interactions between children themselves, adults, families, and their context (local, national, global). The cases discussed in this chapter highlight individual acts of agency within a structure that children often had little power to alter radically.

The archive of the Children’s Friend Society itself has not survived, but, because of the scale of the emigration scheme and its uniqueness at the time, there were numerous descriptions of the Society printed in the local and metropolitan press, as well as letters from children that were sent back to their families and sponsors in England. Genealogical tracing of the individuals sent to the colony is particularly challenging: not all of the children’s names are correctly recorded, and their parents’ names or occupations are seldom published in letters or in the press. However, the traces of children’s voices and experiences in this material remains worthy of study because of the diversity of responses to the scheme that do not map neatly onto other intersections like age, location or gender. This chapter highlights how children’s agency was expressed in multiple, sometimes contradictory, ways. It also shows that using fragmentary source material – sometimes a single letter or snippet of testimony from a child – can still provide important nuance in histories of children’s welfare.

This chapter draws on three main sets of sources. First, children maintained connections to home through writing letters to families and guardians, thus preserving emotional bonds with those in England. Often, these letters would connect unfamiliar aspects of life in the Cape with experiences and ideas about England. These letters were sometimes reprinted by the CFS as part of their promotional literature. The children therefore actively contributed to a narrative about what the Cape offered to young emigrants. Children were able to shape narratives of life in the colony in these letters, even if their letters had not been intended for that purpose. The children’s perceptions of their own happiness and well-being were fundamental to the functioning – and indeed, the ultimate demise – of the scheme. Second, newspaper reports published in both the metropolitan and colonial press are useful ways into understanding children’s experiences of the scheme. Third, it draws on an enquiry conducted into the activities of the CFS at the Cape in 1840, which collected testimony from the ‘juvenile emigrants’ on their treatment at the Cape, some of which appears to have been printed verbatim. This is in line with newer studies that draw attention not only to the perceptions of families who came into contact with welfare systems and organizations, but also to children as ‘recipients’ of this ‘care’.¹⁰ The letters, press reports and the Commission of Enquiry each give a different picture of how the ‘welfare’ of children in the Cape was conceptualized, and how the children themselves conceptualized their own welfare.

Taking note of the experiences of children affected by this emigration scheme is important when discussing child welfare in Britain more broadly, as the colonial context loomed large in the imaginations of welfare reformers in Britain and the Cape, even before the period of large-scale child emigration later in the nineteenth century. The insights from documents created by and about children who were part of this scheme indicate how these geographies were imaginatively and discursively connected at the time, by both adults and children. As Catherine Hall argued more than twenty years ago, British history has been an international story for centuries, and cannot be understood without reference to the interconnected metropolitan and colonial experiences.¹¹ While earlier studies of welfare tended to focus on the founding of institutions in the metropole, insights drawn from Swain and Hillel, among others, indicate just how mobile child rescue discourses were in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. They argued that the idea of child rescue was intimately tied to peopling the settler colonies with white children, and that childhood vulnerability was distinctly racialized. Needy white children could be sent to the colonies, which were constructed as ‘empty’ through the deliberate erasure of indigenous and other colonized people’s presence.¹² Harper and Constantine characterized the discourse of child migration in the British Empire as the ‘child problem and the Empire solution’, saying there were both ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors encouraging child migration.¹³ It is striking that the CFS activities, and the widespread criticism of the Society, discussed below, did not have more of an enduring impact on later nineteenth-century child emigration schemes, despite their following such similar principles.

The CFS posited that children in care, a new problem category, would be reformed in the colonies. At the same time, the colonies, at least in the eyes of those organizing the emigration schemes, needed their labour or their presence as part of an (imagined) white settlement. Ellen Boucher’s work on child emigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century has shown how these schemes constructed the ‘settler empire as a redemptive space for the British race’.¹⁴ Unlike these later schemes that transported far more children to the colonies, the CFS has received relatively little attention in the literature. The concerns of CFS organizer Brenton foreshadowed those of later nineteenth-century philanthropists who promoted child emigration. For Brenton and those involved in the Society, there was no clear boundary between child welfare at home and child emigration activities which aimed to resettle children in the colonies. The welfare of the nation and the welfare of the empire were deeply intertwined, and this had important implications for the welfare of individual children and their families. As this chapter shows, the unique context of the Cape in the 1830s allowed the scheme to be adopted there, but also led to complaints against the Society, and the ultimate demise of the scheme. The chapter begins by briefly outlining how colonial emigration was imagined as part of British child welfare, before introducing the activities of the CFS at the Cape. It then examines individual cases of children’s experiences at the Cape, showing how they experienced this scheme that was designed to reclaim and reform. It highlights the young emigrants’ multiple and complex responses to the scheme.

The Children’s Friend Society and the Cape colony

Edward Pelham Brenton founded the Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy in 1830. Brenton had long been interested in child welfare: his career as a naval captain had exposed him to the harsh realities of life for young sailors, whom he believed to be vulnerable and exploited.¹⁵ He began to write about their plight, before broadening his sights to urban poor children, primarily in London. The CFS initially advocated for the removal of children from London’s slums and their relocation to model communities in rural England where they would practise agriculture: a system known as ‘home colonization’.¹⁶ Within a few years, however, the idea of home colonization was abandoned, and the Society, now renamed the Children’s Friend Society, decided to send children to the colonies. When the Colonial Office agreed to pay half of the cost of sending the children out to the colonies, Brenton proposed to send groups of children out to the Cape, Swan River Colony, Mauritius, the Canadas, Cape Breton and Newfoundland. The thinking behind this scheme of emigration to southern Africa, north America and Australia was twofold: first, the children would have a better life away from poverty and crime in England’s growing cities. They would be trained as skilled labourers by settlers, giving them an opportunity for advancement in later life. Second, their presence would meet the demand for labour in the settler colonies. Brenton’s scheme fits into a longer history of child rescue attempts in London. For example, Thomas Coram established London’s Foundling Hospital, which admitted the first infants in 1741. Like Brenton, Coram was concerned about children’s neglect in urbanizing London. It had also been common to apprentice young boys to trades in the capital from at least the 1600s.¹⁷ The CFS scheme aimed to combine these pre-existing concerns by removing children from immoral environments and apprenticing them so they could acquire a trade.

Between 1833 and 1841, over 1,000 children were sent by the CFS to the colonies, the majority to the Cape. Geoff Blackburn estimates that 843 children were sent to the Cape, and of these only 149 (eighteen per cent) were girls, as the Society had initially focused only on boys.¹⁸ The ethos of the Society was Christian but non-denominational. Brenton favoured treating children with kindness over the use of corporal punishment, and in the Brenton Asylum at Hackney-Wick, where boys lived before they were sent to the colonies, and the Chiswick Girls’ Home, which housed the girls, solitary confinement was the harshest form of punishment used.¹⁹ In these homes, the children were to be taught to read and write, and introduced to some trades in order to prepare them for apprenticeships in the colonies.

The Society referred to the young emigrants as children, or sometimes as ‘juvenile emigrants’. Brenton spoke about them in terms of their vulnerability, and need for childhood with ‘innocence’, which he believed was being denied them in overcrowded London.²⁰ He believed children should not be imprisoned or sent to workhouses, but rather, treated with care during their early years, when a child was ‘a curious and a learning animal’.²¹ The Society preferred to send children aged between ten and twelve to the colonies, particularly after some commentators at the Cape complained that older boys had ‘not only objected to being bound, but having endeavoured to induce the younger boys to object also’.²² The majority of the emigrants were over twelve and younger than sixteen; the youngest that I have found were nine years old.²³ Although the Society claimed that all children, and their parents, if living, had consented to the scheme, there were cases in which parents claimed their permission had not been sought. Observers also questioned the ability of children to consent to the scheme, saying that they could not fully comprehend what the move to the colonies would entail.²⁴ The parental metaphor was used often in the correspondence about the Society, and in some cases, the young emigrants were constructed as ‘imagined orphans’, in spite of their continued connections with parents and families at home.²⁵ As George Greig, merchant and publisher, who had four apprentices working for him in Cape Town, put it, ‘Speaking generally, it may be safely said that the masters and mistresses of these youths consider them not alone as apprentices, but as it were orphans, or at least as the children of misfortune, who have a claim on their generosity and sympathy, as well as on their legal protection.’²⁶

By the time that the CFS began to send children to the Cape in the early 1830s, their labour was seen by Cape politicians, philanthropists and settlers as a welcome addition to the young colony. As the local newspaper put it, the children had the potential to become a ‘large and valuable portion of the community here’.²⁷ The Cape was colonized by the Dutch in 1652, and enslaved people were transported to the colony from 1658. Indigenous Khoe and San people were dispossessed of land, and were coercively brought into the settlers’ labour force. Britain occupied the colony in 1795, in the context of the French Revolutionary Wars. After a brief period of the colony being ceded to the Dutch once more between 1802 and 1806, Britain finally reannexed the colony in 1806. British settlement in the colony had increased in the 1820s, as colonial politicians called for assisted emigration to the colony, aiming to bring out mixed groups of settlement party leaders and labourers who could recreate the perfect conditions of pre-industrial England in the Cape. Although the 1820s settlement scheme largely failed to attract the correct distribution of labour, it was central to positioning the Cape as part of England’s settler empire. There were tensions between the Dutch and English-speaking populations in the colony, spurred by Britain’s Anglicization policies that included replacing Dutch with English as the official language of the colony. While some members of the Dutch elite supported the new British regime, many resented the interference in the colony’s politics, and particularly saw the abolition of the slave trade, and slave emancipation in 1833, as out of touch with the colony’s labour needs.²⁸ In 1834, a four-year period of apprenticeship began in the Cape and the other British colonies, designed to ‘prepare’ formerly enslaved people for freedom and to allow former masters to ready themselves for new forms of labour relationships.²⁹ There was broad social panic that formerly enslaved people would leave their masters’ employ, and thus, the CFS scheme was welcomed as a potential source of new labour. The Society nonetheless apprenticed children to both English and Dutch settlers, so long as they were of a ‘respectable’ class.³⁰

Letters home

One of the major sources for accessing children’s experiences of the CFS scheme is in letters that were published by the Society or its supporters. The analysis that follows is based on ten letters from children in Cape Town that were reprinted in Brenton’s own tract on the Society and its ethos, The Bible and the Spade, and a further fourteen published in Amelia Murray’s Remarks on Education. Murray was a supporter of the girls’ branch of the Society, and had been a member of the CFS since its founding. These letters are useful not only for giving a sense of young people’s experiences in the colony, but also because they show how the children themselves were thinking about the meaning of ‘home’. These letters are likely edited and are used to illustrate particular kinds of relationships between families and children, masters and children, and children and their new countries. The Society did not print letters that included outright critiques of their scheme, as the letters most often appeared in promotional material that was used by the Society to gain subscribers. Brenton reported having received 130 letters from children abroad by 1837, so those printed were carefully selected to tell a particular story about the Society.³¹ As Boucher argues, letters printed by emigration societies often ‘touted success stories and centered publicity drives around tales of boys’ and girls’ extraordinary upward climbs’.³² Regardless, the letters allow children’s experiences to come into focus. While there is an instinct to read these letters ‘against the grain’, given that the idea of child emigration goes against twenty-first-century understandings of children’s vulnerability, many show the young emigrants’ compliance with the emigration scheme, including their outright statements that they were better off in the Cape than in England.

Two boys’ letters suggest the possibility of their families joining them in the Cape, indicating their contentedness with their new situations, but also a desire to remain close to their families. William Stone was apprenticed to Dr John Atherstone, the district surgeon of Graham’s Town. Stone had come to the Cape on board the Bolton with fifty-four other boys, all of whom were apprenticed in the area around Algoa Bay (now Port Elizabeth). He wrote home urging his parents to join him, saying that his mother would be able to find work as a housekeeper, cook and seamstress, and his father as a stonemason and groom. He assured his parents that he was well taken care of in the Cape: ‘There is plenty of fruit, and I am very comfortable; my master is a doctor, and I can get books to read if I want them.’ His parents would fit in well, too, as ‘there are churches and chapels in Graham’s Town, the same as there are in England and at Portsmouth’. Here, William was attempting to recreate home in this new colony, by bringing his parents over to work in Atherstone’s house with him. It seems that the invitation for his parents to join him had in fact come from the doctor himself, who annotated the letter, saying that ‘he cannot find a better spot in the world than Southern Africa for emigration; any honest industrious man and woman who may come out, will be sure to find immediate employment and good wages’.³³ Eighteen-year-old George Bottomley, who had arrived in the Cape on the same ship as William, wrote to his uncle in 1836, saying that his cousin and family should come to the colony, ‘for we have not half the number of carpenters that we should have. It will cost him bout thirty pounds to bring him to this town’. Bottomley sang the praises of Graham’s Town, saying ‘Things are so cheap here, that he could live here and the whole of his family upon two shillings a day, and get five; it is a fine country, and only wants to be industrious: they can make money.’³⁴

Familiar kinds of people and places in the colony were subject to observation. James Baines was apprenticed to the influential missionary Dr John Philip, who resided at Church Square in the centre of Cape Town. Baines wrote that he was happy in his position, where he was learning to perfect his writing in his daily schooling. Comparing life in the Cape to London, he wrote ‘while the poor Londoners are glad to get almost any thing to eat, we have nothing but the best joints, which ought to make us most grateful’.³⁵ Peter Seaward’s letter included prices of food and other items at the Cape, so that his mother could compare these to the same at home. Peter mentioned two sisters, but not his father, so it is likely that his mother was caring for the girls alone, which may have aided her decision to see Peter apprenticed in the colony.³⁶ William Everson wrote that the connections between home and away were important to his sense of well-being. He was based on a farm with the master Lieutenant Daniel, where he was working as a farm labourer. He wrote to his parents in 1836 saying, ‘I like the place, I wish you were both here. I feel happy as there is English people here who wish me well. I hope I shall be a good boy the remains of my life.’³⁷ Here, Everson used the language of childhood, referring to his hopes of being a ‘good boy’.

Even though the Society encouraged children to write letters home, maintaining communication was challenging. For example, Everson remained in the colony without his parents. In 1845, his father wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies, asking what had become of his son. Everson wrote that his son had been sent to the colony in 1833, and that he had not heard from him for eleven years.³⁸ In spite of enquiries made to the Colonial Office, his child was not located. The last that anyone associated with the Society had heard was that his brother, Francis Everson, who had also been sent out by the CFS, was planning to join him in the eastern part of the colony.³⁹ While the Society claimed to encourage contact between the children and their families in England, in practice this occurred sporadically, and many children reported receiving letters that they did not reply to, or never having written home at all.⁴⁰

Some of the letters reflected how the young apprentices were thinking about the Cape as their current and future home. In a letter to his parents, written when he was aged sixteen in 1835, William Campbell said that his treatment by his master and mistress had been encouraging, and that all of the servants in the household knew their duties and performed them happily. His letter spoke to this remaking of family life in the colony: ‘I wish, when it shall please God to put me in such a station, that I may carry myself just such as my master does, and if I should ever marry, have such a wife as my mistress, and then, by God’s blessing, I shall be happy as they are, and as you, Sir, and my mother have always been.’⁴¹ James Gosling was apprenticed to Lieutenant Daniel, with William Everson, and worked his way up to the position of head butler. He reported to his parents that he was in good health and did not want to return to England – only to see them.⁴² Even though both of these boys, in their teenage years, were imagining marrying and living in the Cape, they maintained an emotional connection to their parents and families in England.

Charles Phelps, who had been sent to the Cape aged sixteen in 1833, was apprenticed to the Cape Town baker, William Hart. He wrote back to the CFS institution at Hackney Wick:

This letter illustrates continued ties (literal and emotional) between ‘home’ and the new home in the colony. Here, in a letter saturated with feeling, Phelps recognized that he was a burden to his mother who was unable to cope with his ‘wild and wicked’ behaviour. He tried, while apologizing for this, to set her mind at ease, saying that he was well fed, clothed and paid. He even thanked his benefactor for sending him to this new place, which, interestingly, he did not refer to as ‘home’, reserving that label for the place where his mother was, and which he left.

Most of these published letters come from boys in their teenage years, which could indicate that they were more likely to have positive experiences of the scheme, or increased levels of literacy. The letters sent home and reprinted, in spite of their likely being edited, and representing the more positive experiences of the scheme, nonetheless give a sense of some emigrants’ experiences in the Cape. Most continued to have England as a reference point. They tied their experiences in the colony to those they had – or imagined they would have – at home. Their letters show different levels of engagement with the emotional aspects of being separated from family and loved ones. What the letters have in common is a reflection of the emigrants’ compliance with the scheme: while they might have longed for their families, they did not openly question the activities of the CFS itself.

In a newspaper article published in the Cape in 1837, the young emigrants were publicly warned not to send critical letters about the scheme back to England. The article, almost certainly written by John Fairbairn, the humanitarian editor of the newspaper and supporter of the CFS, reminded the youths that they had been sent away because they were cared for, and that they were ‘warned against the sin and wickedness of sending home false accounts of your treatment and condition in this colony’. They were told they should ‘consider the pain you occasion to your relatives and friends in England, while your story is believed, and the shame with which your relatives are overwhelmed when, by rigid investigation of the case, the baseness of your conduct is exposed!’⁴⁴ In spite of the warning, there were nevertheless ways for less favourable stories to be shared, as the section below shows.

Scandals and silences

In spite of the overwhelmingly positive gloss of the published letters, some children reported cases of ill-treatment at the hands of their masters to local magistrates.⁴⁵ Until 1839, the cases were generally dismissed by the local press, with the Commercial Advertiser reporting that even if the children faced some harsh treatment in the Cape, this was no worse than what they would have suffered had they remained in England.⁴⁶ I have found evidence of seventeen apprentices running away from their positions: notices printed in the newspaper and government gazettes called for their return in exchange for a reward.⁴⁷ The most scandalous case, however, related to one boy who had managed to return to England from the Cape, where he complained that he had been sold into slavery at the Cape. This case was widely reported in metropolitan and colonial newspapers, and sparked an investigation into the general functioning of the scheme.

Ten-year-old Edward Trubshaw came to the Cape in 1835 and was apprenticed to the farmer Giet de Wet in Stellenbosch. His mother had asked Brenton to send him to the Cape: according to his mother, he was ‘of a notorious bad character’ and she hoped that sending him to the Cape would instil discipline and a stronger work ethic.⁴⁸ Trubshaw, who went by the aliases Edward Trubway, Edward Johnson and Edward Shaw, escaped from his master, and returned to England in 1839. Shortly after his return, he was in trouble again: he was brought before the police in Marylebone for stealing a purse from a local apple seller. While he was being questioned, Trubshaw admitted that he had recently returned from the Cape, and proceeded to lay out his grievances against the Society. He reported that he had ‘been very ill used, that he had been sold with others for ten Guineas each to a Dutchman’.⁴⁹ Trubshaw’s reports made it into the hands of the press, with The Times outlining Trubshaw’s charges against his master in great detail. Exactly how these reports made it into the press is unclear, but the story of white children being sold into slavery was certainly salacious enough to sell newspapers. It was a particularly potent charge in the context of slave emancipation in the British Empire.

Although Trubshaw was dismissed as a poor informant by the CFS, the police and later the press, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Lord Normanby, nonetheless wrote to Governor George Napier to inform him that a ‘full enquiry’ should be made into the claims of ill-treatment at the Cape.⁵⁰ The scandalous claim that the Society had been practising a form of slavery, and that it had been partially funded by the government, meant that a swift investigation was essential. That the complaints and actions of the young apprentice led to a full-scale inquiry into the activities of the Society at the Cape highlights an exceptional display of agency in the context of this scheme. Trubshaw’s complaint about de Wet resonated with growing concerns about child welfare in the metropolitan context. Unlike Martha Powell, Charles Phelps and others who appear in the records because their experiences were congruent with the Society’s mission, Trubshaw’s rebellion enabled him to subvert the ‘official’ narrative being constructed by the Society in their promotional literature. The Society had not planned for children to return to England after their period of apprenticeship. Given that this discourse of child rescue and removal constructed the colonies as fertile spaces for the reinvention of poor white British children as wealthy land-owners and professionals, their return was seen as counter to its aims. However, Trubshaw’s case shows that permanence was not guaranteed, and indeed, that those affected by the scheme had the ability, in rare cases, to speak about its failings.

Proceedings for the inquiry began very shortly after the complaints about the Society had reached the Cape. Four local commissioners were appointed to interview both masters and children about their experiences. They conducted interviews in Paarl (Henry Piers), Cape Town and Stellenbosch (George Longmore), Caledon (James Barnes) and Malmesbury (J. M. Hill). These commissioners had been appointed as special justices under the Abolition Act and were given oversight of the children’s treatment as well. The role of these commissioners in the protection of formerly enslaved people did little to assuage concerns in England that English children had been sold into slavery. The resulting report presents information from 298 masters and 595 child apprentices about their work. In some cases, the testimony of children to the commission was recorded verbatim, while in others commissioners rephrased or summarized the testimony of the children. The reports, collected by the commissioners who travelled to individual homes and farms, included information on the apprentices’ work, living conditions, health, education, morals, ability to attend religious services, treatment and punishment, diet, the ease with which they could communicate with friends or relatives, and if there had been any change in their treatment since slave emancipation in December 1838. Masters were asked about the apprentices’ conduct. The commissioners then reported on the apprentices’ employment prospects, and if they were well-treated both during their voyage to the Cape and upon their arrival.

The young apprentices’ welfare was thought of in both physical and mental terms. The commissioners commented on their size, diet and living conditions, but also on whether they could attend religious services and appeared to be happy. The majority of those included in the report (434 children) lived in Cape Town and Stellenbosch, and the report for this district by Longmore appears as a summary rather than verbatim testimony from the emigrants themselves. There were significant differences between the kinds of information reported by each commissioner – while Piers’s report on forty-one children indicated that twelve were unhappy in their positions, neglected, or wanted to return to England, Barnes’s report on sixty apprentices did not comment on their emotional state. He concluded that all except three of the apprentices would be able to earn a living when they finished their apprenticeships, in spite of the fact that the majority were working in farm labour. These differences in reporting make it difficult to draw bold conclusions about differences in children’s perceptions of their own welfare based on location, age, gender or occupation.

Overall, the commissioners reported that masters were kind, did not use excessive corporal punishment and gave children enough to eat and drink. There were concerns that the children were not receiving education or attending church, which the commissioners largely dismissed due to the scattered nature of the Cape population.⁵¹ Given the long distances between farms and schools and churches, many Cape farmers did not attend church or send their own children to school. The positive views of the commissioners were confirmed by some of the children’s interviews. Thomas Grimes and Edgar True, both fifteen or sixteen years old, both apprentice shoemakers, were happy with their situation. Grimes said he was ‘very kindly treated; and I like my situation’, and True agreed that he was ‘very happy and contented with my situation’. Their master, B. G. Heydenreich, said they were both ‘good boy[s]‌’, while the commissioner reported they were in ‘perfect health’, despite being small for their age.⁵² Others reported they had ‘no complaints to make’.⁵³

Nevertheless, more complicated accounts also appeared in the report. For example, children reported receiving corporal punishment, which went against the CFS’s ethos of avoiding this form of discipline. Thirteen-year-old Margaret Watts was apprenticed to Thomas Barry, influential Cape trader in Swellendam, and worked looking after his children. Although she reportedly had a living mother, she chose not to correspond with her. She was described in the commissioners’ report as ‘idle and very disobedient, moral habits fair, but tells lies sometimes’. She had been disciplined by both her master and mistress, and reported that this was ‘never without giving some cause of offence or neglect of duty’.⁵⁴ She saw her punishment as legitimate, justified and resulting from her actions, rather than an unjust will of her master or mistress.

There were also a number of children who wanted to return to England, citing reasons including homesickness, lack of skills training and the alien environment. For example, William Evett was an orphaned boy who had been apprenticed to a baker in Cape Town. He said that he wanted to learn a trade or to return to England, where he had an older brother. George Platt also wanted to return to England, saying that he was not learning anything in his apprenticeship that would enable him to be more than a farm labourer in the future.⁵⁵ As George Stephenson put it, explaining that he wanted to return to England, ‘what I am learning now will be of no use to me then’.⁵⁶ Michael Gibbens, an illiterate and orphaned boy of sixteen, also wanted to return home, saying ‘I do not like the black people here.’ The CFS promise of apprenticeships of the type practised in England, where the young emigrants would learn a trade at the hand of a master, were not always put into practice.⁵⁷ Over a third of the emigrants ended up working as farm labourers, which would have seen them working alongside indigenous and formerly enslaved people.⁵⁸ The majority of the girls worked as domestic labourers. The commissioner described Michael and his fellow apprentice at S. J. du Toit’s farm as ‘evidently unhappy, and anxious to change their condition’.⁵⁹ Charles Boyce had received a letter from his mother, which his master had answered on his behalf, and said ‘I wish to get back to her.’⁶⁰ Thomas Perry reported that he had written to his father, saying that he was badly treated and wished to go home.⁶¹ Thirteen-year-old Benjamin Vickers, described as ‘very diminutive, and not happy’ by the commissioner, said that he ‘would rather learn a trade’ than continue as a farm labourer.⁶² These examples speak to an imagined future or ‘then’ at home, where the young emigrants would be able to reunite with families or gain skilled work. The imagining of the colony and England were thus paralleled by images of now and then – a sense of time in the future in which children who had perhaps not quite fitted in in England, or had been unable to be cared for appropriately, would achieve a sense of being ‘at home’. These responses indicate the on-going connections that the young apprentices were making between ‘home’ and ‘away’ – even when it was unlikely that they would return to England, they still imagined their future there.

The children’s reports of mistreatment or unhappiness needed to be corroborated by adults, including their masters and the special magistrate. This chimes with Constance Backhouse’s observation about legal cases in Australia and Canada, where there was a belief that ‘women and children were inherently untrustworthy when they testified about sexual assault’.⁶³ The reports of mistreatment in the commission were largely about physical rather than sexual assault, but the reports nevertheless needed to be made credible by adults. Robert Whitehead who was about eighteen years old and apprenticed in Paarl wrote that his master ‘beats me frequently with his walking stick unjustly’. However, his master said that he was ‘very obstinate and disobedient’ and the commissioner concluded that he ‘shows no appearance of ill-treatment’.⁶⁴ The commissioners in Malmesbury and Caledon chose to write descriptions about the children in their districts, rather than record the children’s words. These were likely a combination of the commissioner’s observations and questions asked of their master and mistress. One such child was Caroline Morris, who arrived at the Cape in March 1835, aged eleven.⁶⁵ She worked as a domestic servant and nursery maid for Arthur Nitch in Caledon. In the 1840 report, Caroline was described as follows:

This brief biography speaks to Caroline’s desire to find a better home, and her connections both to the Cape and to England. She first deserted a master in 1836, as the local Cape newspaper included a notice calling for her return. She had, according to her master, William Collins, ‘repeatedly left her Master’s service without reason, and has amused the credulous with dismal stories of ill-usage, — all false and differing from each other’.⁶⁷ In 1837, she ran away from another employer.⁶⁸ It is difficult to know why she did not return her sister’s letter, when many of the other children maintained at least some contact with family members. Her running away – a rare but not unheard of form of resistance from CFS apprentices – indicates a lack of attachment to her employer’s home, and the desire to seek out a new home elsewhere.

Sometimes children’s testimony was dismissed out of hand. For example, there were children who had apparently lost the ability to speak English in the six years they had lived with Dutch masters and formerly enslaved and indigenous people who likely spoke a combination of Dutch and other languages. It is unlikely that the emigrants had altogether lost their ability to comprehend English, but this was reported as ‘deception’ and was ‘clearly proved to have arisen from some wantonness on the part of the children, or with a view to excite compassion’.⁶⁹ Even though these reports were dismissed, they nonetheless indicate the young emigrants’ diverse responses to the enquiry. Being unable to answer the questions of the commissioners could have been an act of resistance, but it could also have indicated some trauma. Speaking English was associated with being civilized, both in the Cape and in the empire more broadly.⁷⁰ The idea of the children losing this language was a sign of their being unprotected in the colonies, possibly assimilating with the wrong parts of the Cape settler society. The anxiety here was that the children had remade ‘home’ too successfully in the colony, failing to keep England, and English, as their home language, and their connection to home.

The resulting report is unusual in the recording of the children’s perspectives on their situations, but there were questions at the time about how much the children were able to say in front of their masters, and the methods used in the investigation. Reverend James Sanders, who had been sent to the colony to see to the spiritual needs of the young emigrants, was a vocal critic of the report. Given that he did not want to be seen as meddling in the investigation, he had ‘remained a quiet spectator during the whole of the Enquiry’. Sanders identified other problems with the investigation: the special justices had been asked to investigate cases covering large districts of land, often beyond their original jurisdiction. This meant they were unlikely to have ‘previous local knowledge of the parties’. He also worried that masters had taken the opportunity of buying the apprentices new clothing and had tried to ‘correct anything that was amiss’ before they were visited by the commissioners. His biggest concern was that ‘the enquiry was conducted in the presence of the masters, and that lads very soon forget however much they may have suffered, and when I know very well that many of them are too much stupified to tell their own stories’.⁷¹ The ability of the children to express themselves, and to have their ‘true’ voices heard, was called into question. In contrast to some of the masters, who spoke of children distorting their stories for their own benefit, Sanders worried about children distorting things in order to protect themselves from potential repercussions from their masters. Given these concerns, the reports that children gave about their mistreatment and unhappiness are even more remarkable, and perhaps reflect the children’s belief that reporting these issues would result in their being removed from their current positions.

The commission found that, in general, the children were well-treated. This included dismissing Trubshaw’s claim against his master as false: indeed, Longmore wrote that on visiting de Wet’s farm in Rustenburg, the eleven juvenile emigrants present were ‘amongst the most cheerful, contented, well-clothed and well-trained whom I examined, and his system towards them altogether the best regulated’.⁷² This went against previous complaints against de Wet from other apprentices, who had reported that he was cruel and used excessive force in his punishment of the children.⁷³ Nevertheless, the governor at the Cape said that the CFS should stop sending children to the colony, because of the ‘evident disposition, if not a settled determination, on the part of many persons in England to pay implicit belief to every foolish report or misrepresentation to its [the CFS’s] discredit’.⁷⁴ The Times had written the activities of the Society off as a form of white slavery at worst or ‘kidnapping’ at best.⁷⁵ At the same time, the investigation into the scheme had put strain onto Brenton’s health, and he died of a heart attack in April 1839. At the time of his death, he was dealing with accusations about the Society in the press, including Trubshaw’s claims that he had been mistreated at the Cape.⁷⁶ Trubshaw was not able to stay out of trouble himself, however, and was transported to Australia for stealing in 1839, after the Society’s dissolution.⁷⁷ Trubshaw’s character, as someone who was, according to Brenton ‘addicted to lying and theft’, was confirmed, but the details of his subsequent transportation were not reported in the press.⁷⁸

Conclusion

The activities of the CFS and its subsequent demise highlight the connected welfare histories of the British Empire. The colonies were approached as a space for solving the welfare needs of a constrained metropole where issues of juvenile delinquency, overcrowding and urban poverty were seen as increasingly pressing concerns. What this case shows, however, is that conceptions of welfare shifted across colonial territories, and the children’s welfare in the Cape was not approached in the same way as Brenton had intended. In other words, while the Cape might have been imagined as a space for children to achieve their potential as future settlers, the reality of labour conditions at the Cape, as well as the positions in which the children found themselves, challenged this assumption. The colonial context therefore profoundly affected and shaped the metropolitan emigration scheme, to the extent that reporting on the Cape led to the Society’s dissolution. As Hall and others have argued, this indicates the necessity of studying metropole and colony in the same framework: the situation and circumstances in both spaces could influence and change each other.⁷⁹ The CFS scheme illustrates how the welfare of a nation and empire could be tied to the welfare of individual children: the need to solve problems in the metropole, and to settle and provide labour to the colonies, meant that this scheme could be positioned as in the best interests of the young emigrants.

The cases referred to in this chapter of individual children’s reported experiences of the CFS scheme must be read in a broader context. Although these sources are remarkable in that, in some cases, they give us a sense of children’s own words, they nonetheless focus on a small but very visible group of children within the colony. There are not similar records of other child labourers – particularly indigenous or formerly enslaved labourers – on farms and in homes in the Cape. It was through the CFS emigrant children’s connections to England, and through tapping into a set of ideas regarding their welfare, that they were able to have their voices heard. The outcome of the 1840 Commission of Enquiry indicates the level of agency and influence that individual children could have in this context. Through Trubshaw’s reporting on the scheme, it was ultimately investigated and shut down. However, the ability of these children to shape their own destiny should not be overstated. While some wrote home, maintaining their connections with family and friends, the records suggest that very few returned to England. Moreover, even when directly asked about their experiences in the 1840 Commission of Enquiry, many apprentices’ responses said little about their own understandings of their welfare. They mentioned living relatives with whom they had lost contact; others spoke about punishment, lack of sufficient food and insignificant training in a professional skill which would allow them to gain employment when they left their current positions.

The records relating to individual children affected by the CFS scheme show that for some, their welfare was intimately tied to being ‘at home’, but what this idea of home meant varied between individuals. Some found masters that taught them useful trades, where they were provided for and treated well. Others felt displaced in a colony increasingly divided along racial lines, vulnerable and unable to communicate easily with their masters and other workers. The young apprentices expressed agency in different ways, and this also reflects the diversity of experiences that the children had once they were placed in their situations in the Cape. Working in a trade in the centre of Cape Town, like Henry and Martha Powell, was quite different to being placed on a rural farm and conducting agricultural labour. The diversity of experiences and responses to them indicates how these young people lived on a continuum between powerful and powerless, both neglected and subject to an enormous amount of care as expressed through this welfare scheme.

Given that the commissioners approached their reporting using different methods, sometimes recording children’s words verbatim, at other times collapsing the experiences of hundreds of children into a single paragraph or conclusion, we must be wary of concluding that there were monolithic experiences of the Society’s activities based on age, gender, occupation or location. Similarly, the published letters reflect a generally positive account of the scheme but represent the views of a very small minority of children sent to the Cape. The utility of this case study is in its reflection of the great diversity of responses from young people, from compliance and happiness to resistance and rebellion. It is worth keeping this in mind in studies of children’s welfare more broadly – while children might seem very similar on paper, their responses to an intervention could differ remarkably. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile to trace these fragments of children’s experiences as they allow us to think beyond simple binaries of children being either victims or successes in these schemes. Each snapshot points to a complex and individual engagement with the Society’s aims.