Hear the touching story of Marjorie's journey as a 10 year old girl from her home at Whitley Bay, in north east England, to the Prince to Wales Fairbridge Farm School near Cowichan Station on Vancouver Island. Included are images of the day-to-day life at the farm school.
Learn about the 350 year history of British child migration through to present day, with the recent lawsuit between Former Fairbridgians and King Charles.
Patricia Jane Skidmore is the daughter of Marjorie, a British child migrant. She was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, and spent most of her childhood growing up in the Vancouver suburb of Coquitlam. Patricia moved to Victoria in 1967 and has lived up and down Vancouver Island and on a number of the gulf islands for most of her adult life. She now lives in Nanaimo, BC.
Being a daughter of a child migrant was a shameful and often worrying experience. She didn’t feel that she belonged. There was no sense of family and no roots to ground her to her place of birth. Her mother Marjorie’s background, her past, her childhood, and her family, were missing, and her mother would not tell her why. It worried her deeply.
Her mother rarely spoke of her five years at the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School on Vancouver Island or why she was sent there as a little girl. It took Patricia well into her adult years to confront the issue — child migration and the role her family played in it — and try to understand it.
Patricia began searching for her mother’s past in the late 1990s. During her final year (returning in 1996 to complete a degree started in 1969, as a ‘mature’ student at UVic,) she was introduced to the BC Archives. There she found records for her mother while at the Cowichan Station Fairbridge Farm School and that was the start of the hunt for her mother’s lost childhood. Over the next few years, she explored various archives across the UK and Canada. Finally, the pieces of her family’s puzzle were taking shape – and at the same time, she discovered that British Child Migration had an astonishing 350-year history: 1619-1970s.
Two books were produced from this research, and a third one is underway on the history of British Child Migration, with a focus on the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School off Koksilah Road, near Cowichan Station.
Pat Skidmore is the President of Fairbridge Canada Association and the Fairbridge Alumni Bursary Society, as well as the Editor of the Fairbridge Gazette.