‘I closed my eyes and tried to disappear’: British child migrants speak of their abuse

Stories of suffering of children sent to Australia after the war prompt call for compensation

The experiences of two former child migrants sent to Australia from Britain after the war feature in detail in the first report by the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, which recommends that 2,000 or so survivors of a child migration scheme be paid compensation by the government for their suffering.

“I have lived a lifetime without identity”

Michael O’Donoghue, who was born in 1942, had been taken into care at Nazareth House, in Hampshire, as a toddler. In 1953 he was sent on a ship to Clontarf, an institution in Western Australia run by the Christian Brothers.

On his second day there, the report says, he was beaten for wetting his bed. He recalled being beaten by Brother Doyle for not working hard enough. Animals, he told the inquiry, were fed better than the children, who scavenged for scraps in bins. On one occasion a group of nuns who had come from England saw children roasting a cat.

Doyle, he said, had been obsessed with “fiddling”. O’Donoghue said he was given electric shocks to his penis. He was later raped by Brother Murphy, the inquiry was told. “I was so scared of him. I used to close my eyes and try to disappear.”

O’Donoghue said he was too frightened most of the time to report the attacks but on one occasion when he did he was not believed.

He told the inquiry: “My mother died earlier this year, in her 90s, without any answers as to why her son was treated with such cruelty by those we are supposed to be able to trust. We could have had a lifetime together but instead we both endured the terrible loneliness and pain of the loss of family.

“I have lived a lifetime without identity and borne the terrible legacy of being a British child who was abandoned by my country.”

“I wanted to wake the British up to what happened to us all”

Marcelle O’Brien was born in Worthing, Sussex. Her father had been a French Canadian serviceman and she was placed in a foster home at the age of two. When she was four she was sent out to Australia by the Fairbridge Society.

She was sent to the Fairbridge Pinjarra school, in Western Australia, where she said she was slapped, made to have cold showers and locked in a cupboard. The cottage mother hit her with a rule; others struck her with a cane.

O’Brien told the inquiry she was call a bastard, a bitch and a guttersnipe. She was told her parents were dead, which was not true. The food was so bad she always felt hungry and sometimes stole handfuls of grain meant for pigs, or apples from the orchard. If she was caught she was “chucked in the cupboard” as a punishment.

She said she was sexually molested by the deputy principal at Pinjarra. After leaving the institution she was sent to local farms, where she was raped by three young men. She subsequently married but the relationship broke down and she suffered a mental breakdown.

“Having stuffed up my childhood,” she told the inquiry, “they then wrecked my early adult years.”

At the end of her evidence to the inquiry, O’Brien, who had travelled from Australia, said she had made the trip “to wake up the British government, the British people, to exactly what happened to us all”.