The continuing story of one children’s charity, from its foundation in 1870 to the present day.Like many of the those organizations involved in the welfare of young people the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge migrated children to Canada, but it stopped in 1914.
That for anyone involved in the study of British Home Children makes it interesting, but its story after that date and through the last century into the present is equally interesting and reflects the changing policies and attitudes to child care on the part of the State and the children’s charities.
The extension of the Welfare State after the war brought local authorities in to partnership with the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuge.
For over half a century the State had been broadening its responsibilities to care for the citizen from
“the cradle to the grave”, and in 1948 building on the recommendations of the Curtis Report the Government passed the Children’s Act which set out that local authorities should assume control for children under 17 who had been
“abandoned by their parents or guardians, or were lost, or whose parents were incapable of providing proper accommodation, maintenance and upbringing”.In pursuance of this new responsibility local authorities had to set up a Children’s Committee with a Children’s Officer.
The Curtis Report had been established to look at the provision of children
“who are deprived of a normal home life with their own parents or relatives and to consider what measures should be taken to ensure that these children are brought up under conditions best calculated to compensate them for the lack of parental care.”The report was critical of the poor conditions it encountered in some institutionalised homes along with a general lack of training given to carers.
It recommended that where possible young people should be adopted as a first choice and fostered as an alternative, but if they were placed in a home, these homes should contain a maximum of twelve children and ideally have no more than eight.
It also proposed that everything should be done to maintain contact with relatives, develop friendships outside the home and that siblings be kept together. Finally it recommended that children should be entitled to a religious upbringing which was appropriate to its background.
The Curtis Report had found some child care wanting and looked to serious changes, while the Children’s Act altered the relationship between all those charities working with young people and brought them into a national system of child care overseen by the State.
The upside for our charity was that it now received higher levels of funding which reduced the need to rely on generating its own income.
It also embraced the Curtis Report and from 1957 into the ‘60s embarked on a programme of creating a Family Group of Homes, known as the Belmont Group.
This was in accomplished in part by converting existing properties in the Children’s Village in Cheadle and by the purchase or construction of new homes across south Manchester.
Other properties which the charity had acquired through mergers and which were past their best were also sold off and the money used to fund the Family Group Homes project.
Location; Manchester & Cheadle
Pictures;
from annual reports of the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’s Refuges, courtesy of the Together Trust, https://www.togethertrust.org.uk/*
A new book on the Together Trust, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20the%20Together%20Trust**
Children Act 1948, Part 1 Duty of a local authority to provide for orphans, deserted children etc
