The Lost Children of the UK

by teejay 15 Replies latest jw friends

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  dungbeetle

  this topic may have been covered in the book called 'Empty Cradles".

  Empty Cradles

  British Children Deported

  Hardcover book with dustjacket, published 1994, 332 pages. "Empty Cradles" by Margaret Humphreys. In 1986, Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, received a letter from a woman asking for help to trace her parents. She claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. Margaret replied that she must be mistaken. But curiosity drove her to invesigate the case and she found that his woman's story was just the tip of the iceberg. As many as an estimated 150,000 children had in fact been deported from children's homes in Britain and shipped off to distant parts of the Empire - the last as recently as 1967. Many of the children were told that their parents were dead. Their parents,too, were often deceived; many believed their children had been adopted in Britain. The reality was very different: for numerous children, it was to be a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in institutions in Western Australia and elsewhere. With 16 pages of photos.

  In 1975 a crack team of publishers was sentenced to death by a judicial commiteee. They promptly escaped from the cult and now live life on the run. If you have a problem ... and if you can find them ... maybe you can contact the A--postate Team"
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  mommy

  Thanks Teejay for posting this. It is such a sad story I read somewhere that jewish children from Germany and Austria were sent to England before the holocaust. In some sort of organized effort to save their lives, many of those children were left unnaccounted for as well. Most of their parents ended up dieng. I wonder how many of these children were of Jewish decent? It appears strange thought that that country would accept so many children from a different country, yet ditch their own.

  As far as your sister goes, well ignorance is bliss. My Jw loyalist sisters don't want to hear too much about anything from me, seeing as it is tainted with apostate material. They do enjoy the jokes and URL's I send them though, as long as it is non confrontational they are fine. Wouldn't want them to think too far out of the box.
  wendy

  When I leave, you will know I have been here
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  Simon

  There was a programme on the radio about that mommy ... something to do with a train that parents put their kids on to get to safety knowing they would never see them again. Some gave their babies to children of strangers on the train or to their older siblings so that they would get to safety. It was heart wrenching stuff ... I was nerly in tears just listening to it.
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  dungbeetle

  The sad fact is, how different those people were compared to some Jehovah's Witnesses. I'm reading two books now, "Jehovah's Witnesses and the Nazi's" and "Facing the Lion", and I PROMISE to put reviews up about them as soon as I catch up on everything else.

  Some Jehovah's Witnesses seem to have thought it was wonderful for themselves and their families to suffer for 'Jehovah' and so they made little or no effort to get their children to safety even when they knew persecution was coming. And I can safely say that there was no concerted effort over here in the US on Rutherford's part to gather up these children and receive them to safety. The Watchtower's efforts these days seems to be 'just gimmee the money'.

  We shall see.

  In 1975 a crack team of publishers was sentenced to death by a judicial commiteee. They promptly escaped from the cult and now live life on the run. If you have a problem ... and if you can find them ... maybe you can contact the A--postate Team"
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  teejay

  It seems that the U.S. has its own version of this kind of story, with slightly different circumstances: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/orphan/
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  safe4kids

  What an incredibly heartwrenching story!! But it proves that no governments are guilt-free; they're going to do whatever serves their purposes at the moment. If innocent people suffer, so be it.

  Dana

  Edited to add: As an interesting side note, in my American Welfare class, the prof made the statement that throughout history, it has been our practice to throw away our children in times of economic and/or emotional difficulty. And yet we constantly pay lip service to the claim that "our children are our future"! Hypocrisy exists in many forms.