Sharp practice in the orphan trade: The dodgy Dr Barnardo

Mary Hannity, in the new London Review of Books, reviews a work on the social care of children between 1870 and 1920.

In the process she reminds us that Thomas Barnardo ('Dr Barnardo') was not all be purported to be - and not just because he never qualified as a doctor. 

Barnardo opened his first children’s home in Stepney in 1870. Children were not "taken out of the gutter" but most often accompanied to the institution by a parent who used it as a last resort, having "drifted downward" after illness, had an accident, or suffered the death of a breadwinner. They had probably already appealed to extended family and neighbours for support. 

By 1877, hundreds of children were being brought up in homes operated by the association. In the same year, Barnardo was reprimanded at a court arbitration hearing for what were described as "fictitious representations of destitution" (among other things). He had established a photography studio at the Stepney home in 1874 and over the next three decades commissioned around fifty thousand photographs of children admitted to his homes. 

The earliest of these – the photographs discussed at the arbitration hearing – were 'before and after' images that claimed to show the transformation on offer at a Barnardo's home. Filthy boys and girls, looking sullen or sad and dressed in rags, emerged clean, healthy and properly dressed. But the pictures, it turned out, were staged, with both photography sessions taking place on the same day. 

Samuel Reed told the hearing that Barnardo tore his clothes with a penknife for his 'before' photo, and then put him in new clothes and told him to smile for the 'after' photograph.

As Hannity emphasises, care for poor children was often motivated more by a fear of the threat they posed to polite society than by a concern for the children themselves.

Still, the voice of the child does penetrate the review:

One letter ... written by a nine-year-old boy, tells readers that "we have a live rabbit, and we keep a pig and he is growing such a big one, and we went picking up leaves for it, and he romps and rolls in them because he likes them so ... we have got a cat, and she follows us to church, and waits for us till we come out".