Child migrant to hear UK apology

PATRICK HAMILTON/Nelson Mail

REPRESENTATIVE: Pat Brown, of Nelson, is one of those chosen to represent New Zealand at the British Government's official apology to 'child migrants'.

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Child migrant Pat Brown can recall vividly the last words her father said to her as he gave her a cuddle and said farewell.

As the tears began to flow, he told his frightened 11-year-old daughter: "Come on, Pat; big girls don't cry."

This weekend Mrs Brown, now 70, will travel to London to join child-migrant representatives from New Zealand, Australia, Zimbabwe and Canada to receive a rare apology from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown at the Palace of Westminster on Wednesday.

New Zealand received 549 child migrants from Britain between 1948 and 1954, often orphans or those living in poverty shipped elsewhere in order to provide "good British stock".

In 1950 Mrs Brown, her older brother Bill and younger sisters Sheila and Alma were bound for Nelson, after being told they were escaping a life of poverty in Southall, Middlesex.

After his wife ran away just after the war, Pat's father was left to look after six children alone.

The youngest was adopted out, but for the next four years the rest were cared for by the timber yard foreman. They were dirt poor, but happy, Mrs Brown recalled.

Then the authorities came to visit.

Their father was given the choice of sending four of his children to New Zealand, or to an orphanage, Mrs Brown said.

Bill, aged 14, Pat, Sheila, 10 at the time, and Alma, 7, arrived in Nelson on January 2, 1951.

The children were split up, with Pat and Sheila living with an elderly couple, Mr and Mrs Goulton, on Waimea Road, while Bill and Alma were sent to a couple in Richmond.

Mrs Brown said while she and Sheila were well treated by the Goultons physically, there was no love or affection shown. Many years later Mrs Goulton revealed she had never wanted the children but felt it was her religious duty to take them in.

Bill and Alma did not fare well with their foster parents, with Bill only lasting a year before moving on to board privately.

"They were hard on him. Just a few nights after they arrived there, Alma got homesick and was crying in the night, and she went and got into bed with Bill. In the morning the foster parents found Alma in his bed and they told Bill off, told him he had a dirty mind and he was filthy. From then on they put him in the shed in the backyard."

However, Mrs Brown said she and her siblings were lucky compared with some of the other child migrants she has since met.

"Some had wonderful homes, just treated like their own children. Others were worse than us, because there was sexual abuse as well as physical abuse."

Mrs Brown said that given the choice, she would not have come to this country.

"People say to me, `But you're so much better off here than you would have been there', but how do they know? I have got a husband I love, a family I love and I absolutely love Nelson, but who knows what my life would have been if I had stayed? I always say, `God, I could have married Prince Charles or something'," she joked.

This trip will be Mrs Brown's third to England, but she was unable to return in time to see her father before he died in 1977, although she had written and received letters over the years.

"In some ways, what's an apology now? It will never bring my Dad back, I'll never see him again.

"In other ways I think it will just put closure to everything now that they have realised maybe they did do wrong."

She believes the New Zealand Government, which has failed to follow Australia's lead in making an apology, ought to say sorry, too.

The New Zealand Government has maintained that child migrants in this country were largely treated well.

- © Fairfax NZ News