Fairbridge
The school was named after Kingsley Ogilvie Fairbridge
(1885-1924), was the founder of a child emigration scheme to British
colonies and the Fairbridge Schools.
Fairbridge was born in Grahamstown, South Africa, and educated there
until the age of eleven when the family moved to Mutare, Zimbabwe where
his father was a surveyor. They first lived in the Fort Hill settlement
by the Umtali River, then moved six miles to the present Old Umtali, and
finally took their possessions over the Christmas Pass when the Beira
railway came near and present-day Umtali was started.
At thirteen he became a clerk in the Standard Bank of South Africa at
Mutare, and two years later tried to enlist for the Boer War, failing
because of poor health from malaria. Fairbridge then took up market
gardening as he observed the contrast of malnourished and impoverished
children living in the London slums with the under-populated open spaces
of Rhodesia. He educated himself and went as a Rhodes Scholar to Oxford
in 1908. In 1909, at a meeting of 49 fellow undergraduates at the
Colonial Club at Oxford a motion was carried that those present should
form themselves into a society for the furtherance of child emigration
to the colonies. They formed the "Society for the Furtherance of Child
Emigration to the Colonies", later the Fairbridge Society. Two years
were spent trying to interest people in the project and raising funds.
He was awarded a diploma in forestry at Exeter College (1911) and a
boxing blue as a middleweight and in December of that year married a
former nurse, Ruby Ethel Whitmore, who had been encouraging and helping
him for some time. He planned to initiate a series of farm schools for
orphaned and underprivileged children, which would relieve overcrowded
English slums and, within an agricultural setting, provide training in
the underpopulated areas of the world. Fairbridge was rebuffed by the
British South Africa Company, which informed him that they considered
Rhodesia too young a country in which to start child emigration.
They arrived in Perth, Australia in 1912 with idealism, but little
financial expertise or practical agricultural knowledge. They acquired a
small mixed farm near Pinjarra where they built accommodation, initially
in tents, for the first thirty-five orphans who arrived in 1913, the
Western Australian goverbment agreeing to pay £6 for each child towards
the cost of the passage money.
World War I stopped further migration and dried up most of the society's
funds. The State government helped with a subsidy and in 1919 Fairbridge
went to England where he raised the funds for a 3,000-acre (1,214 ha)
property near Pinjarra. This farm was laid out and separate cottages
built for the boys and girls, each family-sized group with its own
garden. The government provided a formal school, and by 1924 there were
200 children being educated, gradually raised to 400.
The struggle had been justified and the farm school was a success, but
Fairbridge, weakened by malaria, died of a lymphatic tumour in Perth on
19 July 1924 and was buried at his school. The farm school continued
under a principal, but whilst Fairbridge's orphans were undeniably given
a happy, kindly start in life, for various reasons their training was
inadequate and led to their being fitted for only semi-skilled
occupations.
He wrote Veldt Verse (1909) and an autobiography which was published in
1927. The story of the farm school, Pinjarra, was published by his widow
in 1937. A painting of Fairbridge hangs in Rhodes House, Oxford, and
there was a statue of him as a boy at Christmas Pass, Mutare, which was
removed in 1982 to a site in the grounds of Utopia, the Fairbridge
family home in Mutare.
The memorial to Kingsley Fairbridge was proposed about 1947 and a
committee formed. The statue of young Kingsley Fairbridge, his African
companion, Jack, and his dog, Vic, was unveiled by Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth, the Queen Mother on 8 July 1953. Mrs. Fairbridge, the widow
of Kingsley Fairbridge, was present at the ceremony and presented the
Queen Mother with a copy of his autobiography. The rear view of the
statue was taken when it looked over Mutare from Christmas Pass. It was
from a similar view-point on a spur of the Inyamatshura range of hills
that Kingsley Fairbridge had the vision which led to the Fairbridge Farm
Schools for British child immigrants in Australia and Canada and the
Kingsley Fairbridge Memorial College in Rhodesia. The statue is now at
Utopia House, Mutare.
After his death six other schools were established by the Child
Emigration Society, including the Prince of Wales Fairbridge Farm School
on Vancouver Island, Canada in 1935, as well as schools in Australia at
bacchus Marsh, Victoria and Molong, New South Wales in 1937. A similar
scheme was started in Bulawayo during the Second World War and was named
Kingsley Fairbridge School.
With the establishment of the University College of Rhodesia and
Nyasaland (UCRN) in 1957, the Kingsley Fairbridge Trust set up a bursary
fund to provide finance for suitably qualified students to attend the
college. In 1958 three British students were awarded bursaries, and
thereafter the number was increased to four per year. This continued
until 1965 when Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) declared independence and the
scheme terminated.
By the 1970's only the original school at Pinjarra survived, a result of
reduced demand through improved economic and social conditions in
Britain and changed laws that had reduced the flow of unaccompanied
children. During World war II, a ship carrying child emigrants from
England to Canada was torpedoed with large loss of life, and this in
part had caused the British Government to start bringing the practice to
an end.
"Redress WA" was a scheme established in 2008 to financially compensate
children abused in State care and applications for ex-gratia payments
under the scheme closed in 2010. Payments of more than $1.1 million were
made to 205 child migrants who went to Fairbridge Farm School between
1930 and 1981.
Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College
Rhodesia Fairbridge Memorial College (RFMC) was set up in a disused
airbase outside Bulawayo. The ‘barracks’ became the dormitories and a
primary school was run in the old RAF Operation Rooms. From the age of
11, the children attended high schools alongside local students.
RFMC differed from other Fairbridge institutions and the focus was on
education. They were equipped with the skills to fill positions of
authority, in a country where unskilled farm labour was generally done
by low paid black workers. Between 1946 and 1962, 276 children had been
sent there. They experienced mixed fortunes at a time when the country
was undergoing major political change culminating in the Unilateral
Declaration of Independence of Southern Rhodesia in 1965.
Between 1949 and 1954, New Zealand received 549 child migrants. The
majority of these children were sent to foster homes rather than
institutions but even then these situations were rarely permanent and
the children were not monitored adequately.