Margaret Humphreys

Margaret Humphreys, CBE, OAM (born 1944) is a British social worker and author from Nottingham, England. In 1987, she investigated and brought to public attention the British government programme of Home Children. This involved forcibly relocating poor British children to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the former Rhodesia and other parts of the Commonwealth of Nations, often without their parents' knowledge. Children were often told their parents had died, and parents were told their children had been placed for adoption elsewhere in the UK. According to Humphreys, up to 150,000 children are believed to have been resettled under the scheme, some as young as three, about 7,000 of whom were sent to Australia.

Saving money was one of the motives behind this policy. The children were allegedly deported because it was cheaper to care for them overseas. It cost an estimated £5 per day to keep a child on welfare in a British institution, but only 10% of that, ten shillings, in an Australian one.

Humphreys' investigations led to the exposure of the child migration scheme in two major articles by Annabel Ferriman in the Observer newspaper in July 1987 and to the establishment of the Child Migrants Trust, initially financed by Nottinghamshire County Council, her employer, and later by the British and Australian governments, and constituted as a registered charity under English law. The Trust was later established as an incorporated body to comply with Australian regulations and opened offices in Melbourne and Perth.

The primary aims of the Trust are to enable former British child migrants to reclaim their personal identity and reunite them with their parents and relatives. A key feature of the work of the Child Migrants Trust has been a sustained attempt via the mass media to develop public awareness of this previously obscure chapter in the social history of all the countries concerned. Humphreys took part in the British television documentary 'The Lost Children of the Empire' screened in 1989 and later broadcast in Australia. A popular history book with the same title was published to coincide with the documentary. Its description of child migration policy begins with Britain's early involvement which started in the 17th century when children were sent from London to boost the population of Virginia — the first British outpost in America. Child migration continued over the next 350 years across three continents, including North America and Africa, ending in Australia in 1970.

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