Margaret Humphreys: Empty Cradles [1994] hardback

In 1986 the author, an ordinary Nottingham social worker and mother of two, received a letter from a woman asking for help to trace her parents. She claimed that at the age of four she had been put on a boat to Australia by the British Government. Margaret Humphreys replied that she must be mistaken, yet curiosity drove her to investigate the case, and she claims to have found that the woman's story was just the tip of an enormous iceberg; that up to 150,000 children, some just three or four years old, were deported from British children's homes and shipped off to a "new life" in distant parts of the Empire - the last as recently as 1967. Many had been told that their parents were dead. The parents were also often deceived, and many believed that their children had been sent to good foster homes in Britain. The reality, Margaret Humphreys says, was in many cases a life of horrendous physical and sexual abuse in Western Australia and elsewhere.
In this book she describes her investigations, how it became her mission to reunite these children with their families in Britain, and the founding of the Child Migrants Trust, funded by Nottingham County Council, which has worked to obtain recognition of the scandal and compensation for its victims.