‘Riders Of The Orphan Train’
preserves the unforgettable stories of unwanted children

(this seems to be a bit contrived –
 No-where can any of these ‘unforgettable stories’ be found.
It seems that this re-homing was some kind on official incentive but reading on it appears to be much more ad-hoc.
Many children was used for nothing more than cheap labour by their new ‘parents’ – or worse.
Not one child has ever come forward with a report of how their life was so much better with their new families.
In fact there seem to be no stories whatsoever from 250,000 children who was, presumably, found new homes.

There are reports that children world-wide were re-housed, yet there seems to be no additional information about other countries experience.

An excuse for re-homing these children was loss of parent(s) because of ill-health or disease.

Is this the only relatively brief period in history that this became such a problem that it was deemed children needed to be separated from their families and re-homed?

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Two Texans travel the U.S. presenting the history of 250,000 children who were taken west by train, in search of families.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, New York City had a problem – tens of thousands of homeless children.

Widespread poverty and disease lead to a city overrun with orphans and unwanted children.

That is until a minister had an idea: send them west.

So began the “orphan train.”

At the time it was called “the placing out system” and it utilized any passenger train going in any direction, that offered reduced fares for children.

(note: Any train going in any direction – that seems to be ad-hoc).

At stops along the way, farmers and shopkeepers would come to the station, inspect the children and decide if any would be a good match for their families – or businesses.

It’s a shocking story and one that’s remained largely untold. But Texans Alison Moore and Phil Lancaster have been doing their best over the past several years to change that.

They live in the central Texas city of Wimberley but travel around the country presenting stories of the 250,000 orphans who rode on trains to find families.

Moore first heard of the trains from one of her creative writing students at The University of Arizona.

Those two words – orphan train – enticed her so much as a writer that she “jumped the tenure track to ride the orphan train.”

When she met Lancaster, the two found that he lived five miles away from the Orphan Train Heritage Society of America.

The two now travel as presenters of history, combining the stories of children into a multimedia, musically-enriched collaborative performance.

“Orphan trains is actually a misnomer,” Moore says.

“About half of the children that rode these trains had one living parent.

And many of these were children of immigrants who had left extended family in Ireland, Germany or Italy and so if one parent died, then the children would have nowhere to go and they would be put in orphanages.”

Thus, the trains evolved as an economic solution for the city of New York.

Those who started the “place out program” felt that this was the best solution for children.

It relied on the kindness of strangers at train stops as an alternative to raising children in institutions, or kicking them out into the streets.

The outcomes were a mixed bag.

At orphan train reunions, riders of the portable foster care system recounted their experiences to one another.

For some, being chosen from a crowd and taken into a family was the moment their life began.

For others, the only purpose they served for their new “family” was labour, not even allowed to sleep in the house.

The last known orphan train survivor, Beatrice Flanagan Foztik, lives in Eagle Lake, Texas.

She was 14 months old when she was adopted in Sealy almost 93 years ago.

An largely unknown element of the orphan train story was follow up.

Agents from New York checked up on the adopted children annually.

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Another oddity.
What ‘agents’ checked up on the children – who paid them and their expenses?
Where are their ‘reports’.
What was they reporting on? given that many children lived in squalor.
How long did they ‘check up’ on the children for?
How did they know where the children ended up? given that the children was placed on any trains going in any direction – with no record or checking of the people who ‘adopted’ them.

Many of these children was still babies when they was ‘re-homed’.

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Though their own city remembered them, not many others in the United States have.

The history of these children’s lives has been largely left out of books, as well as the stories they themselves pass along.

“When we had the opportunity over the years to meet these orphan train riders, one of their crying songs was that they don’t want to be forgotten,” Lancaster says.

“Late in life they found this connection with this community and found out they were part of a huge part of American history that they themselves don’t know much about.”

Moore says many kept their own story a secret because of shame.

But she and Lancaster hope to keep it alive through their traveling program, “Riders of the Orphan Train.”

Written by Sarah Yoakley.

Everything you
were taught is a lie.

Babies were grown in incubators
and sent out West to repopulate
abandoned Tartarian cities.

The “Cabbage Patch Kids”
were sent on orphan trains
and distributed as free labour
to farms and factories.

  Video: Tartarian Babies

Operation:
Pied Piper

The evacuation of around
three million people (children)
to rural locations during WW2

The only information we can find is
from the ‘official’ reports and videos
produced by the government.

You’ll have to decide for yourself
their authenticity.

Seems if 3 million children was re-located
there’s few, if any, reports
from any of them about their real experiences.

One would think if it was such a successful
operation governments would be
 broadcasting details everywhere
and parading successful evacuees
in front of every camera.

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Operation Pied Piper was
planned long before war was declared.

Seems the operation had little to do
with the safety of the children and
more to do with allowing mothers
to be available to work in war factories.

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The evacuation of around three million people to rural locations beyond the reach of German air attacks deeply affected the nation.

This was the first time an official evacuation had ever been deemed necessary and the experience of mass evacuation – the biggest and most concentrated movement of people in British history – remains uppermost in the minds of those who lived through the war.

The majority of people who were evacuated were children and, for that reason, the operation was codenamed Pied Piper, fittingly named after the rather menacing German folk character.

Planning the evacuation

The scheme had been planned before the outbreak of war.

A committee led by Sir John Anderson was set up and met for three months from May 1938, consulting railway officials, teachers and the police.

Local billeting officers were appointed to find suitable homes for evacuees and they set about interviewing possible hosts.

Following selection, a host was compelled to take an evacuee; those who refused faced the threat of a fine.

In return, hosts could expect to receive payment via the Post Office.

A Phenomenal Undertaking

The organisation required to undertake the task of moving three million people around the country was phenomenal.

For four days the country’s major train stations provided a route out of cities.

Operations were coordinated by teachers and volunteers.

Children were tagged and allowed to carry a stipulated amount of luggage along with their gas masks.

They did not have an allocated foster family to meet them and were hand-selected on arrival, which led to the agonising experience for some of being chosen last.

Evacuation didn’t just take place from major cities, nor did all evacuees stay in the UK; some travelled abroad.

Britain also feared invasion from the sea and the eastern and south-eastern coasts were particularly vulnerable.

Heavy-Handed Propaganda

The first day of the evacuation was portrayed in the national press was a great success and an example of the people’s optimism, strength and commitment to the war effort.

But many witnesses remember only chaos and confusion, and parents were heartbroken to see their families divided.

And the process wasn’t always the answer to securing children’s safety.

In the same account of an evacuation from Norfolk, it was recorded that: ‘[The children] sailed from Scotland and, after a week, we were awakened early one morning by the telephone to say that the ship had been torpedoed, but that our girl had been taken by a tanker to Glasgow.’</span

A life-Changing Event

For some children this was their first taste of living in the countryside or abroad; not all of them found the change easy to adapt to.

Some children were treated badly.

Others, however, found new friends and enjoyed new experiences and, when the war came to an end, the return to city life was equally emotional.

A short documentary was produced in 1939 called ‘These Children Are Safe’ which showed how Operation Pied Piper was helping to settle children into their new safer homes.

This documentary as a piece of research cannot be trusted entirely, whilst it gives details of the exact events that occurred, it goes to great lengths to persuade us that these children were living happy lives.

This is clearly a piece of war propaganda
designed to ease concerns of parents
who’s children had been sent off
to the countryside areas.

This second documentary titled ‘Operation Pied Piper – Evacuee Stories’ supplies us a much better view of what this time period was like for the civilians involved in the evacuation.

The piece has several accounts of events during the war from the children of the evacuation, it tells us more about the terror suffered during the beginning of the aerial raids and the reality of how children and women were treated in their various accommodations across the countryside.

Not all evacuees had it bad though during Operation Pied Piper, and the youthful optimism of children prevailed through this trying time. They would find pleasures in the little things in life.

In one account of a girl named
Enid’s tale of her time as an evacuee she states:

“We lived on the flat part of the valley and had small mountains both sides.

Evacuees had never seen such scenery before so after school we would race over the railway lines, through a broken fence and up the mountain.

The best part was running as fast as we could downhill, often falling on the grass until we reached the road.”

 Enid’s story
click image or see below

“Torpedoed as they clutched their teddies:

The harrowing story of how Nazis sunk a ship carrying 90 children from the Blitz to America.”

During the beginning stages of the Evacuation our interviewee was due to be transported away to Canada but before they could get there the boats were blown out of the water by German U-boats.

This was a key moment in our interview as we established from previous conversation that Maurice found telling this particular story was quite saddening for him.

‘Enid’s:
story

Three new sisters

I was born in 1934 and lived with my aunt and uncle in a valley in Wales.

I knew my uncle had an important job because we were the only people in the street who had a telephone.

My uncle Tom was a Relieving Officer for our area; this means that when people got into trouble with money, or they would go barmy, they would come to our house to ask him to help them.

So one day my aunt told me that there would be three sisters coming to stay with us from Hanwell, just outside London because England was at war with Germany.

She called them evacuees – I never heard the word before

It was my Uncle’s job to meet these children and teachers at the station and one by one show them the houses they were to stay in.

I remember looking down the street at these strangers walking towards us clutching their gas masks, suitcases and food bags, looking very tired.

They had left their mothers at Paddington Station in London to travel down to our village…

I felt very excited about having girls my age living with me.

Can you imagine what they felt like?

They walked into the living room and stood looking at a big coal fire burning in the grate.

I remember wondering why they stared at the fire but after getting to know each other, they told me they had never seen such a fire before and Diane, the youngest said when she felt the warmth, it made her feel very happy after such a long journey

Diane the youngest was a year older than me, Audrey, two years older and Jil about ten, known as the Aylott family

In the beginning I found their accent hard to understand and they said we talked funny!

This difference in accent -although we were all English – became a problem at school because one day I was in a class of thirty – the next sixty!

Can you understand what it felt like to my school-friends to try learning with accents in a very crowded classroom

We lived on the flat part of the valley and had small mountains both sides.

Evacuees had never seen such scenery before so after school we would race over the railway lines, through a broken fence and up the mountain.

The best part was running as fast as we could downhill, often falling on the grass until we reached the road.

The girl’s mother worked full-time so they had been brought up to carry out tasks for themselves and around the house; polishing shoes, making their own beds, laying out the supper-table.

I found this very strange as our mothers never worked so we never had to do any jobs at all

The girls stayed with us for about a year and went back to London but returned a couple of years later when the bombing became bad.

Diane and Audrey came back with their friend Gretchen who lived across the road from them in London.

I didn’t like her because she was jealous of our friendship.

I also didn’t like her mother who was not very nice to my aunt, but I did like Mrs Aylott.