Professor Gordon Lynch, from the Department of Religious Studies, is to be the academic curator of an exhibition at London’s V&A Museum of Childhood, which will run next year for nine months from October 2015.
The touring exhibition, entitled ‘On Their Own – Britain’s Child Migrants’, will draw on Professor Lynch’s research on child migration schemes that sent around 100,000 unaccompanied children from the UK to Canada, Australia and other Commonwealth countries from 1869 until the early 1970s.
Despite a widely held belief that these children’s lives would be improved by migration overseas, the schemes often failed to take account of its emotional impact on children. In some cases children were sent to institutions in which there was widespread abuse and obstacles were put in the way of them maintaining contact with their birth families.
This resulted in formal apologies from the Australian and British Governments in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Many former child migrants and their families are still coming to terms with their experiences.
Professor Lynch’s research focuses on the moral justifications for child migration that led national governments, churches, major charities and members of the Royal Family to give their support to it. His work also examines how these moral convictions, and the political influence of supporters of child migration, led the schemes to continue long after their short-comings had become increasingly recognised.
The exhibition, which expects to attract more than 350,000 visitors, will draw together new material that shows why child migration schemes were set up, how they operated, and their effects on children’s lives.
The V&A Museum of Childhood is the final stage of the exhibition tour and will build upon its current home at the Merseyside Maritime Museum .
For more information contact Professor Gordon Lynch via G.Lynch@kent.ac.uk