‘I couldn’t love her’: the last UK child migrants to Australia on the long, lonely search for their mothers

Seven thousand British children were sent to Australia last century, told they were orphans or unwanted. It wasn’t true. Now facing old age, 1,400 are still searching for their families

It wasn’t until he was 71 that Michael Lachmann found out what a different life he might have had. He had always believed he was an orphan. But, already an old man, he discovered he was never an orphan. He had been loved and wanted. During the second world war his mother had left letters at a residential nursery saying she was only placing him in care while she was working and until “daddy gets home from Japan and we will be making a home for little Michael”. There was no childcare then, unless you were rich.

Instead of being collected by his mother at the war’s end, at the age of five he was shipped to Australia and placed in the Castledare Boys Home, run by the Christian Brothers, where numerous boys were starved, beaten and subjected to sexual abuse. He was told his mother was dead.

Between the 1910s and 1970, 7,000 children aged between three and 14 were transported to Australia as part of Britain’s child migrant program. Promised a better life and loving families waiting to adopt, most were instead delivered into institutions where large numbers suffered abuse. Often their names or birth dates were changed, erasing their links to their families of origin. Very few were adopted or fostered.

One thousand and four hundred of those children are still looking for their birth families. Searching for any family who remain. Now old men and women, time is running out for these children to piece together who they are – while they still can.

Even in their 70s and 80s all people want is to find their mother, to know who she was.

Two years after he was sent to Australia, Lachmann was adopted by a middle-aged Catholic couple.

“They were lovely people but they didn’t make up for the loss of my mother,” he says. “She was always in my heart.”

Now 80 and living in Perth, 10 years ago, after reading a newspaper article, he contacted the Child Migrants Trust. “I had no identity for my own children. It is terrible not having a family history, it is like being in the universe alone.”

Thirteen years ago then British prime minister Gordon Brown gave a heartfelt apology to the former child migrants. “Your cries for help were not heeded.”

The apology came after decades of work by Margaret Humphreys AO, founder and director of the Child Migrants Trust, in advocating for and reuniting family members after a lifetime of separation. In addition to forensic work in finding mothers who had often kept illegitimate births secret, she took on governments, the power of churches and the establishment to uncover the injustice suffered by these children.

Humphreys had been a social worker in child protection in Nottingham in 1986 when she received a letter from a woman in Australia. “She said that at four years old she was put on a boat with lots of other children. She said ‘my parents are dead, I have no birth certificate, I don’t know who I am. Can you help me find my mother?’” Humphreys thought it was “preposterous” but investigated it, “as social workers should do”. She found the mother was “very much alive” and had been told her child was dead.

When Humphreys placed an ad in a Sydney newspaper to find other such children the letters had come flooding in.

Many of them were from single mothers who had put their children into care until they could get back on their feet. When they arrived to collect them, the child was gone.

Humphreys has spent the decades since reuniting children with the remnants of their families or piecing together their true history. Her story was the subject of the film Oranges and Sunshine. Now, time is running out and funds are running low in her long campaign to restore people to their families.

Now, says Humphreys “it is a changed conversation, we need a new conversation with governments. Time is of the essence”.

“Everybody needs to know who they are, who they belong to,” she says. “I think that helps with the feelings of shame, it is our shame, not theirs.”

Adevout Catholic all of his life, when Lachmann went to the Child Migrants Trust he discovered the enormity of the lie he had been living with. His mother had not died when he was shipped out to Australia. She had never abandoned him. And he was Jewish.

“Being lied to was a terrible thing,” he says. “Because it took away my identity.”

His mother, Ilsa, was a German Jew who had escaped Nazi Germany just before the second world war. There had been layer upon layer of grief for Ilsa. Her parents and brother died in the Holocaust. Michael was placed in care because she was working full-time for the ministry of defence.

“I believe she was working in intelligence,” he says. “She was very smart.” His grandfather had been an ear, nose and throat specialist. “On the grandmother’s side the family had a business to do with silk and clothes.”

Ilsa had come to Australia in 1950, two years after Lachmann did, looking for him. His name had been changed and she couldn’t find her son.

“I was quite surprised,” the newly Jewish Michael says. “And then I thought well I have got two identities now, not one. And I understood that if you have a Jewish mother you automatically became Jewish. So I embraced that, I think it is wonderful to know people from the Jewish community.”

For a time Lachmann and Ilsa both lived in Melbourne, but they never met. She died before he even began his search for her. “I was devastated by the fact that I couldn’t meet her, couldn’t see her and couldn’t love her. Put my arms around her, hug her, do all the things that a son would do to his mother. I never got the opportunity. No one can replace your mother, you have only got one mother in your life. ”

Patrick McGowan was put into an orphanage in Northern Ireland when he was three years old. When he was 11 he came to Australia and was dispatched to the notorious Bindoon Boys Town, an isolated institution 60 miles (95km) north of Perth, run by the Christian Brothers. The boys were put into hard labour on treacherous building sites, starved into stealing food from the pigs, and some sexually abused.

McGowan always believed he was an orphan. “I just took it for granted that was the case.” When he was 17 he wrote to the nuns in Ireland asking if they knew anything about his mother or any relations. “I got a letter back saying sorry we don’t have any information. I gave up for a while because it was a dead end. I just sort of accepted it.”

Britain's child migrant programme: why 130,000 children were shipped abroad

Read more

“If you tell a child their parents are dead, you are an orphan, nobody wants you, they are never going to ask,” says Humphreys. “There was no one to protect them or comfort them. They knew no one was coming to rescue them.”

A blanket policy of concealing a child’s history was part of the cover-up.

“When I was younger it hit me very hard. I have been bitter at times and gone off the rails with alcohol. I thought I wasn’t worth anything because my mother didn’t think I was worth enough to find me.”

But he has managed to have a happy marriage. “I married the right woman, and have been married for 43 years.”

Since 1997 he has been working with the Child Migrants Trust and has found relatives in Ireland. “I was accepted with good favour and got on well with all of them,” but nobody knew anything about his mother, Mary Angela.

The Trust discovered that in 1949 she went to America and worked in her aunt and uncle’s cafe in Yonkers, but the story goes that she was thrown out of the house when she stayed out all night.

Humphreys, now 78, has thrown everything at the 25-year search for Mary Angela, but the trail went cold in the early 1950s. There has been no marriage certificate, no drivers licence, no pension, she did not go to her parents’ funerals in Ireland. McGowan has reported her as a missing person to the police in Belfast.

In America the federation of states have different privacy laws. Accessing births, deaths and marriages information varies from state to state. In some states you have to prove that you are a family member. “It really needs cooperation between the US and UK governments to bring about a humanitarian outcome,” says Humphreys. “Patrick wants his mother found. In order to find her we need some cooperation. Under the circumstances I don’t think that should be too difficult.”

Mary Angela was born in 1918, so is unlikely to still be alive. But still, her son searches.

“I would just like to know what sort of a life she had, even if there is a grave I can visit to let me know that she did exist, that she existed in America,” McGowan says. “I have got a passport photo and that is all. I want to know if she ever spoke to anybody about me and acknowledged the fact that I existed. I am just trying to get some closure.”

Last October, with Humphreys, Michael Lachmann went to his mother’s birthplace in Chemnitz in Germany, and laid flowers at a memorial to his family murdered in the Holocaust. “I met people from the Jewish community and they were wonderful people. They welcomed me with open arms.”

Since he was transported to Australia in 1947 he has never been in a room with a family member. He is still alone in the world.

Now he just wants to visit Ilsa’s grave in Brisbane and meet a cousin in Melbourne and go to America to meet cousins there. “I don’t want anyone to forget about all the people who came out under that scheme, that suffered so tremendously,” he says.

.