St Barnabas' Home For Girls, New Brighton, Cheshire
The St Barnabas' Home For Girls was opened by the Waifs and Strays Society in 1898 at 19 Montpellier Crescent, New Brighton, at the northern tip of the Wirral peninsula. It provided accommodation for up to 30 girls aged between 6 and 12.
The property had been donated to the Society by Misses Lambert and Whitshaw. It was ready to receive children in June of that year, with the official opening and dedication taking place on November 8th. Among the first residents were twenty girls transferred from the Society's small Home of the Good Shepherd at Stockport, whose premises had proved to expensive to maintain.
The location of the New Brighton home is shown on the 1935 map below.
The home received many small donations and gifts such as parcels of clothing and toys. Following its opening, two local ladies had offered to clothe a child each for a year.
The girls at St Barnabas' were taught useful domestic skills such as sewing.
In September 1930, 19 children at the home were taken ill after eating bags of sweets given to them by a member of the home's supervisory committee, Mr Hugh Winstanley. The sweets, bought as a treat for the children from a refreshment room in Liverpool, were discovered to be part of a large batch contaminated with arsenic that had been distributed across the north of England from a warehouse at Stoke-on-Trent.
In 1927, two long-serving staff, Miss Joyce and Miss Wildash, resigned after 21 and 15 years respective service at the home.
Like thousands of others from the Society's homes, some St Barnabas' children — those with no relations in England or whose relatives were considered 'undesirable' — were emigrated to begin new lives in Canada.
Being situated close to the industrial areas of Liverpool and Birkenhead, the home was closed at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and the girls were evacuated to a safer location at Tarporley. In 1945, they moved to the St Monica's Home at Ashbourne in Derbyshire.
The New Brighton building no longer exists.
Records
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- Index of the Society's first 30,000 children's case files ordered by surname.
- Index of the Society's first 30,000 children's case files ordered by date of birth.
- The Children's Society Records and Archive Centre is at Unit 25, Springfield House, 5 Tyssen Street, London E8 2LZ (email: archives@childrenssociety.org.uk). Files for children admitted to its homes after September 1926 were microfilmed in the 1980s and the originals destroyed. Some post-1926 files had already been damaged or destroyed during a flood. The Society's Post-Adoption and Care Service provides access to records, information, advice, birth record counselling, tracing and intermediary service for people who were in care or adopted through the Society.
- The Society has produced detailed catalogues of its records relating to disabled children, and of records relating to the Children's Union (a fundraising body mostly supported from the contributions of children).
Bibliography
- Bowder, Bill Children First: a photo-history of England's children in need (1980, Mowbray)
- Church of England Waifs and Strays' Society [Rudolfe, Edward de Montjoie] The First Forty Years: a chronicle of the Church of England Waifs and Strays' Society 1881-1920 (1922, Church of England Waifs and Strays' Society / S.P.C.K.)
- Higginbotham, Peter Children's Homes: A History of Institutional Care for Britain's Young (2017, Pen & Sword)
- Morris, Lester The Violets Are Mine: Tales of an Unwanted Orphan (2011, Xlibris Corporation) — memoir of a boy growing up in several of the Society's homes (Princes Risborough, Ashdon, Hunstanton, Leicester) in the 1940s and 50s.
- Rudolf, Mildred de Montjoie Everybody's Children: the story of the Church of England Children's Society 1921-1948 (1950, OUP)
- Stroud, John Thirteen Penny Stamps: the story of the Church of England Children's Society (Waifs and Strays) from 1881 to the 1970s (1971, Hodder and Stoughton)
Links
- Hidden Lives Revealed — the story of the children who were in the care of The Children's Society in late Victorian and early 20th Century Britain.
- The Children's Society
Except where indicated, this page () © Peter Higginbotham. Contents may not be reproduced without permission.