A BBC Radio 4
programme based on sources held by Sheffield Archives and Local Studies Library is to
be broadcast this week on Friday 10 April 2015 at 11am: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pr81r. In the programme, Sheffield
journalist, author and oral historian Clare Jenkins investigates the pioneering
children’s home system, developed in Sheffield in 1893 and which continued deep
into the 20th century, known as the ‘Scattered Homes’.
The Scattered
Homes system was devised by John Wycliffe Wilson (1836 - 1921), the reformist chairman
of the Sheffield Poor Law Union Board of Guardians. Under the system, rather
than ending up in the Sheffield Union Workhouse, or consigned to a centralised
children’s home, poor children from Sheffield, with no family support available
to them, would be placed in the care of ‘foster’ mothers in suburban houses scattered
around the outskirts of the city. The idea was that Scattered Homes children
would attend local schools and churches and mix with other children from
working class families spread across different parts of Sheffield and therefore
integrated into local communities instead of being institutionalised and
trapped in the perceived cycle of poverty and state dependency engendered by
the Union Workhouse.
The Scattered
Homes system aimed to prepare girls for domestic service and equip boys with
practical life skills for trades which would prevent them falling back on the
state for support (with the Sheffield Union running a farm and workshop where
boys could develop their skills). Sheffield was the first Poor Law Union in the
country to utilise the Scattered Homes system, but, upon the retirement of its
founder John Wycliffe Wilson from Sheffield public service in 1910, some 100
Unions all over the country had adopted the Scattered Homes principle,
testament to its apparent success.
Presenter,
Clare, visits Sheffield Archives and Local Studies Library where records of the
Scattered Homes are preserved. Guided by Archivist Tim Knebel, she discovers
the often tragic circumstances which led to children being admitted to the
homes. Many of the children were victims of poverty, disease and criminality which
were endemic in the dismal Sheffield city centre slum housing thrown up by
Sheffield’s rapid industrial growth over the course of the 19th
century. Scattered Homes children typically included those who had been orphaned
or abandoned or those whose parents had been confined to the workhouse or sent
to prison. Claire tries to find out what became of a selection of Scattered Homes
children, after difficult beginnings to their lives, seeking to unravel their fates
through the records held at Sheffield Archives and Local Studies Library.
Whilst many
Scattered Homes children prospered through the system, finding an escape from
the city centre slums and poverty cycle, which had blighted the lives of their
parents, for others admission to the homes could have far-reaching and
turbulent consequences. Children could find themselves separated from their families and sent
far from home, even ‘scattered’ across the globe, with the Sheffield Union
emigrating many Sheffield youngsters to Canada and sending others to boys’
training ships where they would be trained for a career and life on the ocean
waves. Many of the earliest intakes of Scattered Homes children in the
1890s/early 1900s would find their opportunities for brighter futures, which
the system aimed to create, scythed down on the battlefields of the First World
War before they had barely reached adulthood.
In the
programme, Claire tracks down direct descendants of the Scattered Homes
children today with whom she shares the poignant life stories uncovered in the
records of their parents and grandparents who spent their childhoods in the
scattered homes of Sheffield.
BBC Radio 4
Friday 10 April 2015, 11:00am
(To be repeated again over the weekend).
