Description:Introduction to resources for schools
The records reproduced here are a sample of the archive material about Birmingham Children’s Homes, held by Birmingham Archives & Heritage. They have been put together to provide an overview of the records that exist to tell the story of Birmingham Children’s Homes over the last 120 years. There is no specific order to the material but each image, with context and questions, is designed to support the exploration of different themes such as public health and living conditions, photographic evidence and its reliability, official records and personal oral testimonies.
All of the material shown here is available to see at Birmingham Archives & Heritage, Central Library and group visits for schools can be arranged through
Digitisation and Outreach Team
Archives and Heritage, Central Library
Chamberlain Square, Birmingham, B3 3HQ
Tel: 0121 303 4620 or 0121 464 1619
digital.lab@birmingham.gov.uk
Overview of the material
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries poor children whose families were not able to take care of them in the family home could be placed in a range of institutions. Until the middle of the nineteenth century poor or destitute children tended to be housed in the “workhouse” alongside adult paupers who were too poor to take care of themselves. However from the 1850s onwards it was felt that children should be kept apart so that they would not be “corrupted” by adult paupers. Charities like Barnado’s and the Waif’s and Strays Society began to establish children’s homes and orphanages. In Birmingham the first homes for children were opened by rich men who established the homes as a charitable gesture so Josiah Mason opened his first orphanage in Erdington in 1858 and John Middlemore opened the Children’s Emigration (or Middlemore) Homes in 1872.
Middlemore Homes was called an “Emigration Home” because it took poor children from the slums of industrial Birmingham and sent them to the rural “wilds” of Canada and later Australia. Many of these children were not orphans but had been removed from their families due to poverty, and sometimes because of neglect or cruelty. Many of these children never returned to Britain and although for some it was a healthy new start, for many others it meant a very hard life far away from their homes and families, and some were treated very badly in their new homes.
The local authority for taking care of the poor was called the Poor Law Guardians and they ran the workhouse. In the 1870s they decided to open separate special homes to take care of poor children which were known as “cottage homes” because each home was made up of a complex of individual houses or “cottages”. Birmingham had some of the first cottage homes in Britain. In 1879 the Birmingham Poor Law Guardians opened Marston Green Cottage Homes in which children were grouped in 14 cottages each housing 30 children. This was followed by Shenley Fields Cottage Homes which were opened by Kings Norton Poor Law Guardians in 1887 and Erdington Cottage Homes which were opened by Aston Poor Law Guardians in 1899.
Children who had committed crimes such as stealing or “vagrancy” (that is living as a homeless “vagrant” moving from place to place stealing or begging to live) were sent to “reformatories” or “industrial schools”.