Empty Cradles (Oranges and Sunshine)

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Yet it offers a message of hope to all the victims of a shameful scandal that has been ignored for too long. Empty Cradles is a well-written, heart-wrenching, tragic, but ultimately uplifting, story about the child migrant scandal from the UK to Australia post WWII, and I would highly recommend it to readers interested in such shocking social issues as this. Margaret's book Empty Cradles was written to raise funds for CMT and to increase public awareness of this dark episode in recent history. We will discover many more things our Governments have done which as citizens we trust them as being Right,, And yet many things in the past and even now are far from Right… The more we discover the more we learn.

For those who might be tempted to think that this is distant history and that we have moved beyond such ugliness, it's fair to note that the last children were sent in 1967. As she began to make enquiries MH was met with institutional amnesia and flat-out hostility from the charities and church organisations.

This is just another sad example that powerful governments and powerful institutions think they can do what they like to whom they like, when they like and they can lie about it (and similar things continue to happen today), all the while it inflicts unnecessary suffering on people who deserved better. I was living in a children’s home because my parents were dead, and was put on a boat with other children and sent to Australia. The work of The Child Migrants Trust is ongoing and relies on donations to support adults, who were once child migrants, in numerous ways.

Ultimately she becomes centre-stage and she seems to not see the irony of leaving her own young children and husband in England for many months at a time, several times a year to pursue her mission in the Southern hemisphere.

In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker and mother of two, investigated the case of a woman who claimed that, at the age of four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. And the parents (probably mostly single women who thought their kids were in care temporarily while they got their lives together) were told the kids had been adopted by English families! Some children were falsely told they were orphans and some parents were shocked to find their children had been sent to the other side of the world without their knowledge or consent. Now a major film, the book that exposed the scandal of Britain's forgotten and abused child migrants. I have passed that warning to my children who are now in their 30s and 40s and they passed the same to their own children.

She jumps between the victims' accounts with historical evidence, and manages to keep the pacing of the book fairly even. My father argued with them that we were supervised at night by my aunt, who sat nearby nodding earnestly, so there was no need to take us into care.Often it is only at this time of becoming a parent that a person is reawakened to the missing pieces of their own tradition to pass along. Despite the sadness and anger at its centre, hope remains the principal message of this remarkable book. In 1986 Margaret Humphreys, a Nottingham social worker, investigated a woman's claim that, aged four, she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British government. In spite of many dead ends, lack of documentation, lack of cooperation from the governments and charities involved, and not without great sacrifices to her own personal life, she forged ahead, determined to find an answer for the grown children involved in the Migration.

Post war Britain had overflowing orphanages, so the government and "social agencies" decided to pack unwitting children off to the "colonies", Australia, "Rhodesia", South Africa and even New Zealand. Their parents, too, were often deceived; many believed that their children had been adopted in Britain.Whilst we all think that such terrible things must come to light, we often give little thought to what it may have cost the ‘whistleblower’ to pursue this path.