On the eve of the Second World War, a new children's charity, the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial Association, announced its establishment. The society was dedicated to child emigration, a uniquely imperial form of social welfare that resettled poor British children, aged between five and thirteen, in the dominions. The practice originated in the seventeenth century, when local authorities in London began sending orphaned “apprentices” to the North American colonies.Footnote ¹ Periodic and short-lived schemes continued through the nineteenth century, but it was not until the later Victorian and Edwardian years that child emigration became a coordinated, mass movement. In the 1880s, bolstered by public concern about domestic child poverty, coupled with a more general fervor for empire building, emigration initiatives expanded rapidly. At the turn of the twentieth century, all of Britain's leading child welfare organizations, including Barnardo's Homes, the National Children's Home, the Church of England Waifs and Strays Society, and the Catholic Crusade of Rescue, were sending children to Canada, a massive effort that by the mid-1920s had channeled roughly eighty-seven thousand boys and girls into the dominion.Footnote ²

By the inception of the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial Association in late 1939, therefore, the established system for resettling children had been in place for close to seventy years. Yet the organization proposed to take the movement in a different direction. Rather than concentrate on the traditional “white dominions” of Canada and Australia, it would expand into a new region of the settler empire: the southern African colony of Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). As the society outlined its project in a publicity brochure, the young migrants would live in small, cottage-style group homes located on a central site outside the city of Bulawayo. They would attend local schools, receiving a top quality education while “unconsciously assimilating the new atmosphere” of this “invigorating and bracing … white man's country.” The brochure emphasized the scheme's imperial and social benefits, claiming that it would both increase the “strength and numerical superiority of the British element in Africa” and offer children with “little chance of a suitable career in the crowded cities of the British Isles” an opportunity to build a “life of health and promise.” Resettlement in Southern Rhodesia, the association enthused, would open new doors for Britain's disadvantaged youth, enabling “even the humblest child, if he has the ability, to get to the top.”Footnote ³

With this final claim, the brochure implied that the scheme was open to every British child in need. In reality, however, the organization had already imposed a number of selection restrictions. In addition to the dominion-administered medical tests required of all child migrants, those sent to Southern Rhodesia would need to pass a home evaluation by a social worker, participate in an oral examination in front of an interview panel, and demonstrate an IQ score in the triple digits. Even as the association publicity touted that the venture would uplift the “humblest” children, its directors intended these tests to exclude Britain's poorest boys and girls and to confine the applicant pool to the better-off families of the lower-middle and working classes.

The Rhodesia Fairbridge scheme was a minor episode in the history of British philanthropy, yet its origins provide a lens to illuminate the intersection between the politics of empire and the ideology of modern child welfare during the first half of the twentieth century. In recent years, scholars of child welfare have done much to demonstrate how the expansion of imperialism and the development of child-centered social assistance went hand in hand. Following Anna Davin's pathbreaking lead, they have illustrated the ways in which the empire's need for fresh generations of soldiers, workers, and settlers amplified the political value of Britain's poor children and spurred the growth of initiatives like infant care clinics, “mothercraft” centers, and school meals.Footnote ⁴ Empire building, in this respect, played an essential role in the creation of a new cultural vision of the working-class child, defined less as a “worker pure and simple,” whose social worth was measured in terms of “current physical toil,” than as an imperial citizen-in-the-making, who could be specially trained and adapted to sustain the empire.Footnote ⁵ Less understood, however, is how the changing context of empire during the twentieth century affected both dominant conceptions of poor children and the structure of individual social policies. To begin this work, this essay explores how the distinct, class-based definition of white racial membership in the mid-century settler empire forced proponents of child emigration to question their long-held beliefs about the malleability of the young and the potential of every British child for improvement.

The essay begins by situating the origins of the modern emigration movement in the new ideas of childhood and empire influencing social welfarism at the turn of the century. The growth of child emigration represents a particular moment of optimism in the history of British child welfare when confidence about the uplift and reform of poor children overshadowed older notions about the fixity of class. Reformers’ faith in the pliable natures of the young bolstered their broader argument that all British children were equally worthy of investment. With proper guidance and the right setting, they claimed, the most destitute boy or girl could grow up to be an ideal representative of modern imperial manhood and womanhood.

As the second section details, this optimism proved short-lived, the victim of the empire's shifting racial politics, on the one hand, and the development of a new, psychological understanding of child development, on the other. My analysis builds on the insights offered by the recent expansion of critical whiteness studies, which have not only illustrated the fluidity of racial categories but also explored how different white identities have been tied to and “decisively shaped by the exercise of power.”Footnote ⁶ “The colonial measure of what it took to be classified as ‘European,’” writes Ann Stoler, “was based not on skin color alone but on tenuously balanced assessments of who was judged to act with reason, affective appropriateness, and a sense of morality.”Footnote ⁷ To be white and European in the settler empire, in other words, meant acquiring the attitudes and behaviors that distinguished civilized from uncivilized and, by extension, legitimated European power and imperial authority. These colonial attributes of whiteness, moreover, tended to be “class-specific,” aligning more strictly with bourgeois ideals of conduct and civility than in the metropole.Footnote ⁸ Stoler's work, alongside a new study by Elizabeth Buettner, has shown that this distinct understanding of white racial identity focused particular attention on the “intimate domain” of child rearing.Footnote ⁹ Settler regimes and concerned parents alike sought to ensure that European boys and girls growing up in the colonies learned “both their place and their race” and did not slip into the hazy cultural realm that lay between colonizer and colonized.Footnote ¹⁰ It also, as this essay illustrates, raised the challenging question of whether children of a “lower” class could meet imperial standards of white comportment and fully assimilate into the ranks of the “master race.”

The case of the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial Association demonstrates how a growing awareness that the cultural ideals of whiteness in the African empire differed from those in Britain—that Southern Rhodesia required not simply settlers of British stock, but ones who would abide the colony's strict racial hierarchy—led reformers to reevaluate the period's standard assumptions about the malleability of poor children. In their quest to understand more precisely whether it was possible to socialize destitute children to the racial strictures of an African settler colony, the association turned to the emerging discipline of child psychology. The result was both a narrowing of the conceptual boundaries of poor children's potential and a reassertion of older notions about class difference. How they came to those conclusions, and what it suggests for the broader history of British child welfare, is the focus of this article.

Modern child emigration first arose as a branch of the mid-Victorian child rescue movement, a wave of charitable activity dedicated to improving the lives of Britain's homeless, exploited, or neglected youth. This expansion of child-centered activism in the nineteenth century was both inspired by, and helped further constitute, a modern concept of childhood as a distinct stage of life, characterized by the traits of innocence, vulnerability, and dependence.Footnote ¹¹ The majority of these reformers came from the middle and upper classes, and they tended to define a “proper” childhood in terms that most closely approximated their own experience. They argued that children required education, nurturing, and freedom from most forms of labor. Although this conception of childhood had been widespread among the upper reaches of British society for several generations, the novelty of the child rescue movement lay in its intent to extend these ideals to the laboring poor as well.Footnote ¹² The effort to standardize the care of children across the boundaries of class achieved a number of nineteenth-century milestones, including the regulation of industrial child labor and the establishment of compulsory schooling.Footnote ¹³ By the end of the century, philanthropists’ concern had turned to the plight of ragged, orphaned, or abandoned children in Britain's poorest urban neighborhoods, whose numbers appeared to have risen dramatically during the economic downturn of the 1870s through the 1890s and whose mores seemed most out of line with contemporary bourgeois standards.Footnote ¹⁴

Alongside the idealization of Victorian childhood, a second factor motivating the development of the child rescue movement was the period's widespread anxiety about the fitness and efficiency of the population.Footnote ¹⁵ The main concern was Britain's supposed “residuum” of urban poor, whose stunted bodies, degraded living conditions, and high rates of unemployment created fears of racial degeneracy and national decline.Footnote ¹⁶ Many reformers viewed the destitute as a “distinct class and race apart” and used imperial tropes like “urban savages” or “street Arabs” to signify paupers’ lack of domesticity and marginalization from civilized society.Footnote ¹⁷ Although a debate would continue into the twentieth century about whether severe poverty was the product of inferior heredity or external factors associated with urbanization and the modern capitalist system, by the later Victorian period the tenor of the discussion had swung toward the environmental interpretation. The majority position, officially sanctioned by the 1904 Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, was that while the stock was sound, decades of living an unnatural city lifestyle could produce a startling decline in body and mind.Footnote ¹⁸ The solution was active social intervention targeted especially at the young. Although it was almost impossible to reform adults after years spent living in immorality, vice, and idleness, child savers claimed, the young were less “tarnished” and thus more easily converted from rabble to respectability. Poor children deserved the bulk of philanthropic and state assistance, the argument went, both because they were vulnerable dependents in need of care and because they were most likely to reap the benefits of social intervention.

Underlying the expansion of child rescue, therefore, was a fundamental belief in poor children's malleability. Destitute boys and girls, philanthropists touted, held the potential to improve beyond their social origins and to grow into productive, law-abiding citizens. It is important to note, however, that this optimism only went so far. Child saving was a deeply conservative movement—it aimed to preserve rather than uproot the traditional social hierarchy—and reformers’ goals for poor children remained marked by the period's conventions of class. Few believed, for instance, that they would find the next prime minister in the back alleys and tenements of the nation's slums. Rather, the vision was more restricted: success meant uplifting Britain's poorest children into the respectable working class.Footnote ¹⁹ Local authorities and charities concentrated on turning their wards into independent artisans, and the educational program of most turn-of-the-century orphanages and Poor Law schools emphasized lessons in discipline, deference, and hard work, as well as practical training in class-appropriate occupations like blacksmithing, carpentry, and domestic service.Footnote ²⁰

Despite this class-bound emphasis, the child savers’ insistence on the flexible nature of youth helped position poor children as distinct social assets who could be molded to fill specific niches in the national economy. As Lydia Murdoch notes, reformers frequently used the verb “to individualise” to express the idea that “individuation did not come from within”; instead, a child's values, work ethic, even their likes and dislikes, were all imposed from without and could be carefully attuned to produce the best product.Footnote ²¹ One main result of this view was that it concentrated attention on the spaces in which “rescued” children were reared. Centralized institutions appeared most effective at bringing about lasting improvement, for they segregated children from the conditions of urban poverty as well as the influence of pauper parents and allowed for a more controlled, moralized upbringing.Footnote ²² As Barnardo's Homes, Britain's foremost child rescue organization of the time, proclaimed, placement in one of its group homes “cut boys and girls clean adrift from the evils of the past” and redirected them toward “a useful, clean and worthy life.”Footnote ²³ A donation to its work was thus a sound national investment, which served to “prevent the pauper and the criminal, and … create the honest workman—often out of very unpromising materials!”Footnote ²⁴ During the mid-nineteenth century, most children went to large, barrack-style orphanages, some of which accommodated several hundred boys and girls at a time. From the 1870s, however, a new generation of predominantly women reformers critiqued these homes as overly strict and regimental, arguing that children salvaged from the wilds of the slums needed the taming influence of more domestic spaces. Accordingly, children's charities began to shift to a new design: rural, cottage-style residences that housed between fourteen and forty children under the direction of a matron or “cottage mother.” While local authorities were slower to implement the change due to limited funding, they eventually followed suit, and in the first decade of the twentieth century, close to 40 percent of Poor Law children and more than half of those in private charities lived in cottage homes.Footnote ²⁵

By the Edwardian period, the basic tenets of child saving were firmly established. The redemption of poor children required, first, separation from their former lives and, second, a closely regulated upbringing in more “wholesome,” domestic spaces, preferably in rural environments. Philanthropists claimed that this model maximized a child's potential, transforming them from budding delinquents and ne’er-do-wells into honest laborers and self-reliant citizens. The children of the slums were, again in the words of Barnardo’s, “seed-pods of success,” who yearned for someone to “cultivate” them—to “pat and press, smooth and mould the material”—until the “little germs of usefulness” were ready to “stand on steady healthy stems, upright, bringing forth their fruit.”Footnote ²⁶ Agricultural metaphors like this one were popular among child-saving organizations, for they seamlessly conveyed both the malleability and latent promise of destitute boys and girls. Pauper children, social campaigners maintained, could be developed to meet any of Britain's future needs. They were excellent raw material for advancing the national agenda.

The child emigration movement, which developed out of the same social and philanthropic circles as child rescue, took this ideology one step further by linking it to an organic vision of the empire. Advocates argued that if slum children could be improved in the rural, domestic spaces of Britain, their prospects for reform were even greater in the dominions, where they would find a hearty, outdoor lifestyle and ample sources of honest work. In advancing these claims, emigration proponents relied on a wider public faith in what Stuart Ward has termed the “sameness” of the settler empire: the idea that the “white dominions” comprised a realm of ethnic and cultural homogeneity, occupied by “kith and kin” and strongly connected to Britain in tradition, outlook, and spirit.Footnote ²⁷ As younger offshoots of the motherland, the dominions appeared to contain the finest aspects of British culture without the negative consequences of industrialized modernity. Writing in 1909, Alfred Owen, Barnardo's director of emigration, stressed that “if a boy should lose his situation through some misdemeanour, or a girl … show a disposition to ‘run wild,’” their odds of recovery were stronger in Canada than in Britain, for the dominion lacked the “dark and noisome places in which the rank weeds of vice and evil bear their most deadly fruits.” Although he admitted that “all the bacteria of moral disease” were present in Canada, he stressed that the atmosphere was “unfavourable” to their “germination and growth.” The young were not, therefore, “enervated and emasculated as they are under the conditions of squalor and overcrowding … in the old country.” In this purified setting, Owen suggested, child migrants would progress farther and faster than their peers in Britain.Footnote ²⁸

This confidence in the redeeming power of the rural empire enabled emigration proponents to expand the definition of poor children's potential beyond the customary boundaries of class. Owen, for example, issued a promotional brochure in 1908 that envisioned a parade of the twenty thousand child migrants Barnardo's had settled in Canada since the 1880s. These formerly destitute children, he noted, now occupied an array of social classes and occupations in the dominion. There were handfuls of doctors, lawyers, and ministers “who have pushed themselves through College … by sheer hard work and unremitting self-denial,” a “large phalanx of railroad men,” solid numbers of “rugged, hard-muscled” firemen, scores of “married ladies” and “young schoolmistresses,” and finally the “great bulk of our family—the farmers and farm boys and girls.” “Taken as a whole as the output of a great Institution, and the immediate result of a great system of training,” the migrants were “undeniably and unquestionably a fine body of young lads [and lasses] and a noble asset to any country.”Footnote ²⁹ Although Owen, like most emigration proponents, assumed that child migrants would primarily enter agrarian work, he stressed that in the healthy, “classless” atmosphere of the dominions, many would soon rise above waged labor to become independent professionals or property-owning farmers.

This ideology of imperial reform, based on the transformation of slum children into yeoman pioneers and autonomous empire settlers, reached its most coherent form in a new type of emigration initiative, the imperial farm school, promoted during the early twentieth century by an idealistic young imperialist and social reformer, Kingsley Fairbridge. The precocious son of colonial farmers, Fairbridge was a true child of the settler empire: he was born in South Africa, raised in Rhodesia, and educated at Oxford, and he spent most of his working life in Australia.Footnote ³⁰ He decided from a young age to dedicate himself to the development of the empire. In Fairbridge's view, the main dilemma confronting Greater Britain was a misdistribution of population: too many people were crowded into cities at home, while overseas millions of acres were bare. This imbalance created excessive pressure for resources in Britain while leaving large expanses of Australia, Canada, and Africa unpopulated, uncultivated, and open to foreign invasion. The solution, Fairbridge stressed, lay in a modernized system of child emigration. As he noted, the nation contained a wealth of “Imperial assets” in the form of poor and neglected boys and girls, who with proper training could become hearty primary producers.Footnote ³¹ Furthermore, sending these children overseas would safeguard the cultural identity and harmony of the settler empire. Like many social imperialists of his generation, Fairbridge worried about the gradual influx of Europeans of “inferior” racial stock into the dominions and argued that child emigration would help fill imperial demands for labor with pure Britons rather than with Italians, Greeks, Afrikaners, or Jews.Footnote ³² For Fairbridge, the only settlers who were culturally and ethnically “white” enough for true integration into the empire were those of Anglo-Celtic or “British” stock.Footnote ³³ In these ways, Fairbridge closely connected the empire's demographic needs with the plight of Britain's impoverished boys and girls: not only would the empire offer refuge to poor children, but children would provide for the deliverance of the empire.

Inspired by this vision of the mutual social and imperial benefits of child emigration, Fairbridge founded a London-based charity, the Child Emigration Society, in 1909. Entering an already full field, he set his organization apart from the existing schemes to Canada by proposing a centralized training institution in the still untapped dominion of Australia. Rather than place boys and girls with individual families—a method he dismissed as haphazard and liable to abuse—Fairbridge opted for a more regulated system and proclaimed his desire to found “great Colleges of Agriculture … in every man-hungry corner of the Empire.”Footnote ³⁴ In these schools, rescued children would receive a standard primary education and practical lessons in agricultural and domestic science as well as moral coaching. They would live in small, segregated cottages on site in order to cultivate their sense of domesticity and to allow the staff to shape their characters. The farm school was, in this respect, more than a training institution; it was an advanced method of social engineering, which aspired to remake children's bodies, minds, and spirits. Fairbridge's expectations for the children, it is worth emphasizing, were solidly middle class. As he noted, the main objective of the farm school was to create independent and skillful imperial farmers, instilled with the values of “self-reliance, self-help, and self-respect.”Footnote ³⁵

In 1913, Fairbridge established the first Australian farm school outside the town of Pinjarra in the heart of Western Australia's wheat belt with an introductory class of thirty-three boys selected from charities and workhouses across the United Kingdom.Footnote ³⁶ Starting from scratch, they led a hardscrabble existence, building their own living quarters and bathing facility, and spending months clearing the land with rudimentary farming equipment. The boys soon fell into a routine that emphasized discipline and outdoor labor.Footnote ³⁷ They drilled regularly, learned to pray, took lessons in boxing, and worked daily on the farm and in the laundry, all of which was designed to make them “capable and responsible.”Footnote ³⁸ Although Fairbridge barely managed to keep his small operation afloat during the lean years of the First World War, a successful fund-raising campaign in 1920 provided the organization with a firm foundation from which to expand. By the late 1930s, the society had established two more schools on the same model, one in New South Wales, the other in British Columbia, and had enlarged the original farm at Pinjarra to accommodate over three hundred children at a time.Footnote ³⁹

In comparison to earlier proponents of child rescue in Britain, Fairbridge offered a more wide-ranging conception of poor children's potential that extended beyond the conventional class boundaries. He held that if destitute children were correctly trained and reshaped, they would contain unlimited political value. As his organization's publicity literature claimed, the farm school system transformed “what is almost a waste product (and even worse) in our great cities … into sturdy, self-respecting farmers,” “good British Australians,” who were “a credit to the Motherland.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In the years following the First World War, this expanded definition of rescued children's societal value, which centered on their promise to become successful pioneers, caught the eye of an active imperial lobby that was seeking to increase both the population and agricultural capacity of the dominions.Footnote ⁴¹ Child emigration, and the farm school model in particular, seemed an excellent means to accomplish these goals, for it extended the reach of British settlement into less occupied rural hinterlands and accustomed settlers to the land from a young age. The policy thus improved the likelihood that the migrants would remain willing primary producers throughout their lives. To the Colonial Office's newly established Oversea Settlement Committee (OSC), child emigration appeared the “most valuable” form of settlement. Accordingly, the OSC began awarding substantial grants to emigration charities and announced their desire to relocate between ten thousand and fifteen thousand underprivileged boys and girls to the dominions every year.Footnote ⁴²

By the interwar period, advocates of emigration had successfully joined the Victorian child rescue movement's faith in the malleability of the young with the political aims of early twentieth-century imperialism. The merger reflected reformers’ confidence in the capacity of British boys and girls to improve above their social origins. It also contributed to a widening of the established definition of poor children's social and political worth. Prominent supporters like Leo Amery, the Conservative MP and chair of the OSC, frequently remarked that the schemes changed destitute boys and girls beyond all recognition, turning out loyal young settlers who were “physically and morally sound, … the best type of folk in Australia.” Poor British children, as Amery noted, were not fixed by their class background but, rather, were “intrinsically good” and inherently redeemable. “I do not know any piece of work on the lines of regeneration,” he enthused in 1931, commenting on Pinjarra, “that is better done or more worth the money spent on it.”Footnote ⁴³ Amery's point was clear: within the wider imperial setting, destitute children were a sound political investment, both in terms of the future of the empire and the global spread of British values. In a more blatant example of this ethos, Fairbridge once had the local Australian Bureau of Commerce and Industry appraise the boys at Pinjarra in the hope of publicizing just how dramatically the farm school system transformed Britain's slum children into valuable assets. They were priced at £1,000 a head.Footnote ⁴⁴

This assessment of needy children in stark economic terms remains an uncomfortable reminder of the politicization of social welfare, of how investment in children is often undertaken not as an end in itself but as a means to further a particular political, ideological, or social agenda. Yet it is also an indication of the extent to which interwar social reformers believed in the transformative nature of childhood. For Fairbridge, the appraisal illustrated that all British children, even the most impoverished, were worth trying to save. Yet this basic principle of the child emigration movement—the idea that every British child could progress beyond their station to take on the mantle of imperial citizenship—increasingly came under challenge in Southern Rhodesia.

Through the early twentieth century, philanthropists occasionally floated proposals to expand child emigration into the African empire, yet lacking either funds or government support, none had moved beyond the initial stages of development.Footnote ⁴⁵ The situation changed in 1936, when the Reverend Arthur West, an Anglican minister from the East End of London and longtime member of Fairbridge's Child Emigration Society (recently renamed the Fairbridge Society), visited Southern Rhodesia to investigate the possibility of founding a farm school. West spent five weeks in the colony, traveling to potential sites and meeting the political elite, and he returned to London a champion of the plan. As he wrote to the society's Executive Committee, an emigration scheme to the land of Fairbridge's youth would be a fitting tribute to the association's late founder and the next logical step in its work. “Being now established in Australia and Canada,” he argued, “we should add Africa to our sphere of influence,” a move that would ensure that each of the empire's “three English speaking Continents” was “furnishing outlets for our children from the home Island.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Despite West's confidence that the society could easily incorporate Africa into its “sphere of influence,” a number of factors clearly distinguished Southern Rhodesia from the other settler regions in which the organization operated. First, it was not, strictly speaking, a dominion, but a self-governing colony. In 1922, its small European community of nearly thirty-five thousand had rejected union with South Africa to remain under imperial authority, and in exchange it had received a high degree of political autonomy. Southern Rhodesia fell under the purview of the Dominions Office, which effectively treated the territory as a dominion, yet the local state was younger and less firmly established than its counterparts in Canada and Australia. A second contrast was the colony's large African majority. Whereas decades of violence and disease had marginalized the indigenous populations of Canada and Australia, in Southern Rhodesia, Africans still outnumbered Europeans by twenty to one. Combined, these factors created a settler society marked by political and cultural insecurity, a vulnerable “island of white in a sea of black,” in Rhodesian Prime Minister Godfrey Huggins's famous phrase.Footnote ⁴⁷

In light of these concerns, the interwar Rhodesian state embarked on a two-pronged approach to reinforce local authority and protect settler power. On the one hand, it began clamping down on African social and economic mobility, using policies like land alienation and the pass system to limit African commercial farming and market competition.Footnote ⁴⁸ As Carol Summers has demonstrated, the period witnessed a shift in Rhodesian social ideals from an earlier multiracial and mission-based notion of civilization that encompassed African assimilation toward an ideology of separate development, which culminated in the 1933 election of Huggins's strict segregationist Reform Party.Footnote ⁴⁹ On the other hand, the government sought to increase the size and “quality” of the European community by encouraging British immigration and extending social welfare. These measures clearly illustrated the assumptions about ethnicity and class that defined white racial membership in Southern Rhodesia; the “right type” of settler was not only British but also independently wealthy or a self-made man.Footnote ⁵⁰ The colony, for instance, had long maintained a capital requirement for incoming migrants in order to restrict the entry of European paupers, and in the mid-1920s the new state also started offering targeted land grants and other immigration incentives in an effort to augment its primarily lower-middle-class settler population with more elite newcomers.Footnote ⁵¹ Moreover, it took pains to counter the spread of the “poor white problem” that plagued neighboring South Africa by limiting Afrikaner immigration and investing heavily in settler education. Consequently, by 1930 Southern Rhodesia boasted one of the most advanced educational systems in the empire, offering every white child free secondary schooling, extensive university fellowships, and preparation for a range of careers.Footnote ⁵²

West acknowledged this context of settler anxiety in this report, remarking that the African majority posed a “complication of conditions which has to be most firmly faced.” His biggest concern was that migrant children would be compromised by the close proximity of African servants and laborers. Echoing contemporary Rhodesian social commentators, he judged that the “rising generation of White Rhodesian” had been “enervated and morally lowered by contact with cheap black labour in their houses and homes.” In particular, the custom of leaving most manual work and chores to Africans had resulted in “palpable” personality flaws among settler youths, such as “domineering selfishness, lazy slackness and dependent inefficiency.”Footnote ⁵³ In making these comments, West reflected a concern connecting settler regimes throughout the European empires that the malleability of the young cut both ways. While it meant that children's characters were pliable and open to reform, it also made them particularly susceptible to the “debasing” influence of overly indulgent indigenous servants.Footnote ⁵⁴ As West noted, at a time when the boundaries of white prestige needed rigorous enforcement, it seemed young Rhodesians were failing to maintain the standards of civilized behavior that set them apart from their supposed African inferiors.

Nevertheless, West's imperial nostalgia and deep esteem for Rhodesia's first pioneers convinced him that this decline was temporary, the result of cultural leniency and overpermissiveness. The colony's racial strictures were no real obstacle to the movement, he claimed. On the contrary, the establishment of a child migrant school was exactly what settlers needed: a didactic institution that would take in children of solid British stock and carefully train them to uphold the values of white Rhodesia. As he argued, the Fairbridge “model of domestic training would be a boon to the young country,” providing a strenuous “effort, and example” to the rest of the European community in “refusing to let young life be sapped by debilitating ministrations.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Like Fairbridge before him, West insisted that child emigration was a means of reforming not only children but the empire itself. The scheme would harness Britain's resource of impoverished yet malleable boys and girls to reinvigorate the spirit of endurance, courage, and fortitude along the imperial frontier.

Back in London, the other members of the Fairbridge Society were not wholly convinced. Few had visited the colony, and they remained unsure of how the “peculiar conditions” of Africa might influence the welfare of the children.Footnote ⁵⁶ Adding to their unease was the scheme's lack of precedent. The society's prior work had concentrated exclusively on training boys and girls to be rural workers in Australia and Canada, countries that were less ambiguously “white” and that seemed to contain boundless opportunities for youths to establish themselves in later life. It had never before attempted to suit poor children for racial leadership or for elite, managerial positions. The proposal soon provoked questions about whether poor children were prepared for such challenges. As one member of the Executive Committee acknowledged, the association's foundations in “rescue work” meant that its wards “came from families which had been used to being led and not from those who had been accustomed to leadership.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Charles Hambro, the committee's chairman, added that while 96 percent of the society's wards were “normal,” the majority came “from stock which had not had experience of control.” He therefore wondered if such children could succeed in a society where most settlers were “used to controlling natives and … accustomed to that since birth.”Footnote ⁵⁸

These concerns turned what had been a discussion about the opportunities the African empire could offer British boys and girls into a broader debate about the nature of child development and the potential of destitute children. The committee's recognition that their Rhodesian migrants would need not only to direct Africans but also to abide new and seemingly heightened standards of behavior led them to reevaluate the emigration movement's long-held tenets regarding the adaptability of the young. Were poor children really “blank slates” who could be reshaped to fit the requirements of Greater Britain? Or were their personalities and characters permanently affected by their “lower class” backgrounds?

Indeed, the society had already started examining this issue in relation to its work in Australia, prompted by statistics showing that none of its farm school alumni had succeeded in becoming independent farmers and property owners. Instead, the bulk had drifted into casual positions in the cities or remained in low-paid, “dead-end” agricultural and service jobs in the countryside.Footnote ⁵⁹ There were, of course, two ways to interpret this evidence: either the society had failed to provide children with the education and support they needed to move up the social ladder, or the migrants themselves had somehow been unable to take advantage of their opportunity and were destined for semiskilled, menial work. Although in the later 1940s and 1950s emigration proponents would increasingly admit that their interwar training programs had focused too narrowly on the primary industries and had denied boys and girls the “possibility of obtaining higher education and getting high skilled situations,” during the 1930s, this acknowledgment was by no means widely accepted.Footnote ⁶⁰ On the contrary, throughout the interwar years, it was more common for members of the society to view a child's inability to “make good” as an indicator of a deep-seeded moral or mental flaw, which in extreme cases justified the return of the boy or girl to Britain.Footnote ⁶¹

To investigate the proposal further, the society's executive board appointed a subcommittee in 1937, whose members launched a two-year inquiry. The group began by soliciting firsthand accounts of the type of life child migrants would find in Southern Rhodesia. These reassured them that the colony's climate was healthy and that its hearty, outdoor lifestyle was conducive to children's fitness. One member who visited Bulawayo in 1938, for instance, reported spending “considerable time at the large open-air Swimming Pool,” where he had noted the “more than average size of the girls and youths, their appearance of good health,” and the fact that “less than 2% wore glasses.”Footnote ⁶² Having satisfied themselves that physically, at least, the region offered no obstacle to children's development, the subcommittee next sought clearer insight into its race relations. They read extracts of the Carnegie Commission's mammoth 1932 inquiry, The Poor White Problem in South Africa, and consulted with specialists like Margery Perham, Oxford University's first lecturer in colonial administration, and Prime Minister Huggins.Footnote ⁶³

This second stage of the inquiry proved inconclusive. As the subcommittee soon realized, their experts held opposing views as to how the colony's racialized regime might affect child migrants. Perham, a proponent of indirect rule and the gradual devolution of the empire, was frankly critical of the proposition. She cited “her own recent studies … which shewed that South Africa and Southern Rhodesia had grave difficulties to face” and stressed that “in view of the problems looming on the horizon these Fairbridge children ought not to be allowed to start life in Southern Africa.”Footnote ⁶⁴ Under the existing conditions, she suggested, the colony's racial tensions would only worsen, and children of any social background would struggle to build a lasting and secure livelihood for themselves. In contrast, Huggins emphasized the growing prosperity of the settler community, which he argued “opened up possibilities which could never exist in any other part of the Empire.” His support for the proposal stemmed from his belief that the young were malleable political assets. As he stressed, the colony's need for “more white population” was best met by introducing settlers “at a fairly tender age and bring[ing] them up in local conditions.” Child migrants to Rhodesia would not, he assured, “remain on the lowest rung of the ladder”; rather, “for intelligent boys there would be opportunities for them to take a leading part in the future of the Colony” and for the “less fortunate ones” there were good careers in the railways, farming, mining, or police. “There was no altruism about the thing,” Huggins concluded. The state “wanted a larger white population … to bring on the natives and to develop the country,” and he preferred to accomplish this goal by importing “pure bred youngsters than by starting a school for ‘poor whites.’”Footnote ⁶⁵

Huggins's contention that with careful tutelage any British child could assimilate into settler society was in line not only with the principles of the emigration movement but also with the commonly espoused view of Europeans in interwar Southern Rhodesia. After all, it affirmed the myth of white racial homogeneity that provided the ideological foundations of settler cultures throughout the empire—the idea that civilization was somehow intrinsic to white Britons while remaining just beyond the reach of Africans, Asians, and Coloreds.Footnote ⁶⁶ At the start of the decade, the Carnegie Commission had endorsed the idea that “poor whiteism” was caused by environmental factors such as urbanization and inadequate education. Although some of its members continued to assert that inferior heredity played a part in sustaining white poverty, the commission's final report declared poor whiteism a social, not a racial, matter.Footnote ⁶⁷ By the late 1930s, Rhodesians were more likely to agree with this conclusion. The solution was, therefore, an expansion of social services targeted to uplift the young before they developed the habits and behaviors of their destitute parents.

The prime minister's confidence notwithstanding, the subcommittee in London wanted firmer assurance than Huggins's word that children sent to Southern Rhodesia would become successful long-term settlers. The group thus turned to the advice of an authority not on Africa but on children: Dr. William Moodie, director of London's Child Guidance clinic. Moodie was a well-known psychiatrist who had presided over the work of the clinic since it opened in 1928. In addition to his stature as a leading specialist on children's mental and emotional development, he was thoroughly familiar with the organization's aims and methods. Unlike most interwar children's charities, the Fairbridge Society had been immediately receptive to the scientific study of children's minds and emotions.Footnote ⁶⁸ It first began testing the IQ of prospective migrants in the early 1920s as a means to guarantee their mental fitness to dominion officials and had consulted with the Child Guidance clinic on cases of “difficult” children throughout the 1930s. By late October 1938, when the association solicited Moodie's opinion, its members had long since accepted that the care of the young required attention to the mind as well as the body.

The subcommittee asked Moodie to consider how the altered conditions of the African empire might influence the development and psychological well-being of the children. Moodie, however, took the issue in a different direction; instead of commenting on the impact the new atmosphere would have on growing British children, he concentrated on the psychological background of the children themselves and the potential injury they could inflict upon the colony. He argued that, typically, deprived children came from “broken home[s],” where they had suffered the “violent emotional distress caused by divorce, insanity, drunkenness, etc.” These early experiences, Moodie claimed, were likely to cause permanent psychological damage, giving rise to a temperament that was “aggressive, hostile to society, easily upset, touchy, unable to give and take, and not easily educable.” While it was possible for some children to escape this fate if removed from these conditions at a very young age, such transformations were rare. Fairbridge children, he further pointed out, tended to have “such a background to their lives” and were thus highly unlikely “to develop into good, just people, who would command respect.” The chances were greater that they would become “delinquents, who formed gangs with others of their kind, always suspicious and resentful of those outside their set.” “Only a small proportion,” he warned, “would turn out really well.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Essentially, Moodie asserted that rescued boys and girls would carry the emotional scars of their prior destitution with them whether they went to a dominion or an African colony. Yet in Southern Rhodesia, there was no hope for reform. The racial situation would bring out the worst characteristics of deprived children, creating a dangerous and mentally unstable class of outcasts. The proposed scheme, Moodie concluded, would only succeed in further destabilizing the existing tensions between black and white in the colony.

Although in retrospect Moodie's claims may appear extreme, he was firmly in line with the main currents of British child psychology at the time. Interwar mental science remained an emergent discipline, and the specialty of child psychology was younger still. It only became a distinct field in the mid-1920s, when scientific concern shifted from the identification of mental deficiency in children to the treatment and prevention of emotional imbalance.Footnote ⁷⁰ As a number of scholars have demonstrated, this still fluid profession was greatly informed by the imperial context and, in particular, by the growth of anthropological theory.Footnote ⁷¹ The connection led mental experts to accentuate the role played by culture, especially in terms of myth, ritual, and societal traditions, on the shaping of the mind. At its core, British psychology of the 1930s was a “science of social contentment,” founded on the study of individuals within social situations, which aimed to adjust a subject's inner drives and instincts to the norms and strictures of their specific cultural environment.Footnote ⁷²

In relation to psychological understandings of race and childhood, this emphasis had two implications. First, it helped reconfigure psychological theory away from notions of essential biological difference between races and toward a model of mental development that portrayed ostensibly innate distinctions as the product of cultural experience. “The mind of the ‘savage,’” Mathew Thomson writes, “was therefore not wholly different to that of the ‘civilised’; indeed ‘primitive’ mental types would be found in the most developed of societies.”Footnote ⁷³ Moodie, in this respect, had identified the savage, irrational mentality that lay within the modern British population. Destitute boys and girls were indeed white on the outside, yet they bore the hidden weight of early poverty on their minds and as such were akin to other “primitives” on the inside. Second, although the prioritization of culture over biology should have implied a greater capacity to change, it tended in practice to reify notions of difference.Footnote ⁷⁴ “Savage” brains may have been similar in structure to “civilized” ones, yet they were adjusted to fit only their own cultural background. Brought too rapidly into contact with a more advanced society, these individuals would suffer severe mental stress and psychological collapse, lashing out at a civilization that they could not possibly understand. In this vein, Moodie argued that British pauper children, placed suddenly in the African empire, would develop pathologies similar to those of other “primal” mentalities. Interwar mental professionals like Moodie, it should be stressed, were not the first to characterize destitute children as uncivilized savages; indeed the trope extended back to the Victorian period.Footnote ⁷⁵ The difference, however, was that Moodie's representation of these traits as a permanent mental pathology left little possibility of reform. Like colonial subjects, poor children would need to be strictly controlled and could not hope to handle the responsibility of advancing modern civilization for many years, if ever.

Moodie's testimony, coming as it did from a well-known expert on children, was a serious blow to the project. He left the subcommittee with two choices: either they could abandon the proposal completely, or they would need to overhaul the existing emigration system. Given the amount of time and energy that members had already invested in the plan, as well as a generous offer of financial support they had attained from the Rhodesian government, the group opted to proceed with the scheme. They agreed, however, that the conventional farm school model, which had been designed for the “predominantly White Dominions” was ill suited to the conditions of an African settler society and was not in the “best interests of either the children or the Rhodesian Government.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Justifying this decision in its final report, the subcommittee called attention to the “extremely important colour problems” in the region. Members disclosed their finding that the type of child the society sent to Australia or Canada “might prove incapable of assuming the social, political and economic position necessary for the White man in his relations with the African native.” Their suggestion was that the children of the laboring poor, if sent to a less racially stratified environment like Australia or Canada, could become respectable members of the working class. They would be able to hold down a job, follow orders, and attain a measure of success through diligence and hard work. Yet placed in the African empire, where they would be called upon to defend white prestige, destitute children would undoubtedly fail. Their malformed psychology would prevent them from attaining the heights of white civilization and hinder their long-term assimilation. As the subcommittee stressed, a childhood spent in “psychologically and morally disturbed and distressing conditions,” such as an urban slum or a negligent household, was liable to produce permanent psychological defects, including a “petty minded and aggressive attitude of dominance towards a subordinate, which in this particular instance would be a Native.” In the interests of both children's mental health and the stability of imperial rule, therefore, the scheme would require a different class of child, one “whose early home life has been reasonably secure and happy … and who [is] also sound both in intelligence and temperament.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Finding these migrants, the subcommittee noted, required new methods of selection. They recommended a number of structural changes to the scheme, which were implemented when the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College first opened in 1946, following a lengthy delay due to the war. For instance, they advocated using newspaper advertisements or personal referrals to recruit boys and girls directly from their families rather than through charity homes and local authorities. This provision would allow a professional social worker to examine each child's home life, relationship to their parents, and mentality. If the social worker reported any misgivings, there would follow a “consultation with a child guidance clinic” before final approval.Footnote ⁷⁸ They further advised increasing the established IQ requirement and urged that following the standard mental and medical tests, the Rhodesian candidates should also pass a “written and oral examination before a panel much the same as the entrance interview for Dartmouth.”Footnote ⁷⁹ The group justified these changes as a means to ensure the success of the scheme and the health of its migrants. As the school's directors later stressed, it was of no “benefit to children who do not possess a high standard of intelligence to go out to Africa where, after leaving school, they would not be able to hold their own.”Footnote ⁸⁰

These new principles of selection signified the widening gap between the Rhodesian scheme and the child emigration movement's foundational faith in the potential of all British children. Bolstered by the emerging authority of child psychology, the subcommittee redefined destitution as a class-based pathology, one that inflicted not only an older generation of paupers, criminals, and social mavericks but children as well. As such, the example of the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial Association demonstrates the wider impact of the “new psychology” of the interwar period on the structure and ideology of British child welfarism. Nikolas Rose has influentially argued that the discipline was intimately connected to the extension of modern forms of governmentality in that it allowed for the categorization of children, the definition of developmental norms, and the management of individual behavior.Footnote ⁸¹ More recently, however, these claims have been countered by historians who point out that there is little work that traces precisely how psychological ideas shaped child welfare policy and practice.Footnote ⁸² Indeed, the few studies that exist suggest that the discipline's influence on educators remained minor through the 1930s.Footnote ⁸³ Although the case of the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial Association will not end these discussions, it does suggest that the emergence of child psychology provided interwar reformers with a powerful new tool not only to measure and quantify the potential of individual children but also to articulate, in a modern, scientific form, a number of long-standing preconceptions about class difference. It persuaded reformers to reverse their earlier beliefs regarding the adaptability of poor children and to conclude that British boys and girls who lacked a “wholesome,” middle-class family upbringing were not “white” enough for membership of the African settler empire.

More broadly, the example reveals the ideological tensions that arose at the intersection between child welfare and imperialism. At the turn of the twentieth century, the requirements of imperial expansion played an important role in justifying the investment of philanthropic energy and state funds on poor children. The youth of the slums were not hopeless objects of pity but, rather, future bulwarks of empire, made valuable by their malleability. Yet this vision of destitute children as unique “imperial assets” that came through most clearly in, but was not particular to, child emigration, also connected reformers’ goals for the young to the shifting political and cultural terrain of the empire. In terms of the extension of child emigration to Southern Rhodesia, it bound reformers to accommodate the colony's class-specific definition of whiteness and ultimately forced them to retreat from their original goals of social uplift. Previously, the Fairbridge Society had justified its work as an imperial investment in Britain's neediest children. Now, its directors had to legitimate their redirection of funds to boys and girls from higher up the social scale, many of whom already possessed relatively stable home lives. To do so, its chairman, Charles Hambro, prioritized the imperial benefits of the project, explaining that the Fairbridge charter did not necessarily oblige them to help only the “lowest class child, the most depressed product of poverty and harsh conditions.” Rather, the “real object of its work was to produce the most useful Empire Emigrant from the most promising material that the Society could find.”Footnote ⁸⁴ As a result, the organization was free to modify its aims, abandoning a strict focus on child rescue and broadening its intent to the provision of better opportunities for the “secondary school type” or, as the Dominions Office neatly summarized, the “children of the ‘new poor.’”Footnote ⁸⁵

From 1946 until it closed in 1962, the Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College aspired to be an English boarding school transplanted to southern Africa. Throughout its sixteen-year history, slightly less than three hundred child migrants attended the college, which was located on a disused airbase on the outskirts of Bulawayo. The boys and girls lived in gender-segregated groups of twelve to fourteen under the direction of British matrons. They attended local schools and had the choice of an academic, modern, or technical secondary education once they had passed through the primary school curriculum. Yet the association's ambition to prepare thousands of British children for managerial and professional positions in the colony was consistently thwarted by inadequate funding. Despite regular grants from the British and Rhodesian governments, the organization could never afford renovations to the site and had to forgo its plan to build new cottage homes, an assembly and dining hall, and a church.Footnote ⁸⁶ Former migrants to the college remember the oddly disjointed nature of their upbringing, in which they performed the rituals of an elite public school while living in sparse barracks made of corrugated iron.Footnote ⁸⁷ By 1956, the financial difficulties led the association to cease recruitment in Britain and to begin winding down the operations in Rhodesia.

The Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College was a short-lived initiative, yet the debates and discussions that preceded its origin illustrate a larger reinterpretation of the meaning of child welfare during the interwar period, exemplified by the Fairbridge Society's shift away from an earlier optimism about the reform of poor children in favor of the view that some children were, in frank political and economic terms, more valuable than others. Throughout the last century, justifications of child welfare policy have often been couched in a rhetoric of universalism, with the common refrain that every boy or girl is worthy of investment, that no child should be left behind.Footnote ⁸⁸ Lingering beneath these noble ideals, however, is the less spoken, but arguably more widespread, assumption that not all boys and girls are equally destined for success. For some, the argument goes, there are intrinsic limitations on their development, which stem, if not from heredity, then at least from the social and cultural atmosphere into which they were born. In this respect, the origins of the Rhodesia Fairbridge scheme disclose a persistent modern tendency to question the universal potential of children and to assign public and charitable resources based not simply on present economic need but, rather, on more variable judgments as to their future value to society.