Church of England Boys' Home

The Church of England Boys’ Home was for boys aged 3 to 18 years. It was established by Church of England Homes in 1918 in a rented house in Cronulla, before moving in 1920 to Carlingford occupying the building ‘Minden’ at 216 Pennant Hills Road, the site that had previously housed the Carlingford Children’s Home. Boys from the Havilah Home were sometimes transferred to the Church of England Boys’ Home upon reaching the age of 9.

Minden initially had capacity for approximately 30 boys, but it was extended the following year to enable the Home to accommodate 60 children with the addition of the No. 2 Home, which opened on 7^th May 1921. According to local newspapers this addition featured “Large airy dormitories, together with wide verandahs and balconies, afford plenty of sleeping-out accommodation. Provision has also been made for rooms for the matron, a sick room, and large linen room and stores” (‘New Home for Boys’, The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrower’s Advocate, 11 May 1921). The expanded accommodation was quickly filled, and the following year the Home received another grant to extend the No. 2 Home, creating space for a further 30 boys. This work was completed in early 1924, with two new dormitories and an isolation hospital ward opened on 16th February, increasing the capacity of the Home to 96.

In December 1925, The Sydney Morning Herald reported that 81 boys lived at the Home in Carlingford. As part of a Christmas appeal for gifts it noted that children were “either orphans, destitute, or needy children…[and] numbers of them are children of men who made the great sacrifice in the Great War” (‘Christmas Appeals Church of England Homes Glebe’, 10 December 1925).

Boys at the Home attended the local state school, and received religious education from the rector of the local parish. All boys were expected to keep their dormitories spotlessly clean, and assist in general household duties. They played sports including cricket and soccer, often in local leagues, and also did gymnastics and drill training. They sang in the Home’s choir, and were trained in handcrafts such as basket weaving and woodwork, as well as basic farming including animal husbandry and growing fruits and vegetables. Some of their produce and handcraft items were sold at the Home’s fundraising events, which the Home relied on to support its activities. As reported in The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, the Home was known for their annual December prize giving ceremony which focused not on scholarly achievements but on other qualities such as “making the garden grow”, “quiet and thoughtful behaviour”, “being a good sportsman”, and “consistent looking after the cows and horses” (‘Prize Giving, Church of England Boys’ Home, Carlingford’, 31 December 1930). In 1931 one boy received one of these prizes for “cheerfully and willingly cutting the hair of 100 boys all the year”, and another received an award “just for being himself” (‘Novel Awards’, The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, 24 December 1931).

The boys grew crops such as pumpkins, maize, cotton, and turnips on a 46 acre block of land called the Ebenezer Training Farm, named after Ebenezer Vickery whose family donated most of the farm’s land to the Home. This site was situated approximately 1km north of Minden along Pennant Hills Road, and from at least 1924 plans were in motion to develop the farm into a much larger Boys’ Home. The proposal for the new site consisted of 6 cottage buildings and one larger residential building with capacity for a total of 250 boys, plus additional buildings such as a chapel, gymnasium, school, staff quarters, and workshops.

By late 1927 the first buildings at the Ebenezer Training Farm site at 754-762 Pennant Hills Road were completed, and the first boys moved out of Minden. The first Home at the new site, the Buckland Memorial Home, opened on 17th December 1927 with capacity for 40 boys as well as the superintendent’s quarters. The next two cottages were both opened on 14th April 1928 and were situated on either side of the Buckland Memorial Home. They were named Vickery Cottage and the Frank Johnstone Home (although this was later renamed Broad Cottage), after the two donors of the land that the homes were built on. The cottages were also furnished through donations, and brass plaques were placed in the cottages naming those who had provided or paid for furniture. The opening of these two homes allowed for the remaining boys to move from Minden to the new site, and the Church of England Girls’ Home began to move into Minden from mid-1928.

The Boys Hostel was the next to open in 1929 in the old Church of England St Paul’s Rectory, which was also located at 754-762 Pennant Hills Road. The Hostel, which was also known as the James Stuart Memorial Hostel, was for older boys at the Home who had finished their schooling, and who were undertaking apprenticeships or going out to work. It was intended to transition them into independence so they would be more prepared when they left the Home. It had capacity for 10 boys at a time. Boys living at the hostel were expected to pay board based on their wages, as well as contribute to the housework.

By 1929 there were 100 boys living at the Home. A newspaper article from that year reporting on fundraising efforts stated that the boys did not wear full uniforms, but did wear a blue Winter blazer with gold trimmings, and a matching skull cap. They each had a personal locker in which to keep their clothes and personal belongings, though they were not provided with keys to their lockers. (‘Carlingford Boys Home, Big Effort to Raise Money’, The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate, 18 April 1929).

Eric McGraw, who lived at the Home in the 1930s, recalled his life at the Home in an oral history interview with The Hills Shire:

We were part of the community. We weren’t segregated, so that’s probably why we know nearly as much about the district as the locals did, if not more, because we all had inquisitive minds – lots of “free spirits”. We went to the local schools, we went to the local church. As we got older we joined the local Boy Scouts. We played cricket in the Northern Districts Saturday morning cricket competition in the Summertime. In the Winter time we played soccer in the Granville Districts competition. We were pretty well regarded in the sporting field. Maybe because we slept in the dormitory alongside each other and were more like brothers and we stuck up for one another. You had to rely on yourself and your mates. We were pretty much our own community, but at the same time we were still part of the community.

Quite often boys used to… we went to school… the boys and the girls from the Church of England Homes, and the girls and boys from Dalmar, the Methodist Home which is now where the Alan Walker Retirement Village is. And then there was all the children from their own homes. And there was three categories… we were from the Church of England Home. We were called “Churchies”. The Dalmar children were called “Dallies”. And if you came from your own home you were called a “Schoolie”. And if you had any sense you got on with us because we were the strength – we had more.

There was a hundred boys there when I was there and we grew up in a cottage atmosphere. We had two cottages when I was there, I think. There was Noller, which held 30 boys. We had a staff member in charge. Most of them were single, older women. She had her own quarters in that cottage and we had our dormitories, seven and eight to each dormitory. We had to have a cold shower every morning – Winter or Summer. There was hot water but we didn’t use it. We never got sick… I don’t remember anybody that got that sick there. I can’t remember if there was. You stayed in that one until you were probably about eight, I think, and then you moved up to a cottage called Victory. Miss Upton was the staff member in charge of Noller. You went up to Victory where Miss Thornton was the staff member – the House Mother, for want of a better term, although we didn’t call her that. You were there until you were about 11 or 12, and then you moved up to Buckland. Both Noller and Buckland are still there to this day.

In 1935 a new cottage, Spurway Home, was opened, increasing the capacity of the Home by another 30, up to 140 boys. In 1939 further additions were made to the Home with the opening of a new dining hall, and kitchen which could seat 180. According to an article published in The Sun, the boys themselves helped with the groundwork and building of the block, with one boy stating that he had carried 1500 bricks in a single day (‘Boys Sing at Foundation Stone Ceremony’, 18 June 1939). In 1941 Trigg Annex was opened as part of the hostel, followed by the Trigg Home in 1947, which brought the Home’s capacity up to 170 – both additions had been funded by Mr E. S. Trigg. In 1942, Terrigal Holiday House, at Wamberal, was donated to the Boys’ Home to allow the boys to spend some holiday time at the seaside.

A former resident of the Home, Ben, shared his memories of his time at the Church of England Boys’ Home in the early 1940s as part of a submission to the Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (submission number 329). Although Ben was very young during his time at the Home, he clearly remembers his time at Carlingford, which he recounted to an interviewer who published it on his behalf:

One of his strongest memories is of the food that was served at the Home. Ben admitted that the food rationing of the time may have been to blame but he can clearly recall that every meal of porridge that he ate, and there were many, contained weevils. He has strong memories of being served plates of little else but boiled cabbage or silverbeet and being forced to eat those meals or go hungry. Ben stated that to this day he is unable to eat either vegetable. He laughed when he said, “Imagine a fifty-seven year old man who cannot eat his vegetables.”

Ben recalls the regime in the Home was very strict, with no compassion or motherly caring for the children. Ben found it difficult to talk of this time without the emotion showing in his voice. He told how he felt when first placed in the Home and he spoke of his “most dreadful fretting” for his mother. Ben told of recognising the same feeling many years later when his only son died of a drug overdose and he considers that what he felt at the Home was a type of grief. He remembered his mother visiting the Home and when it came time for her to go he recalled clinging tightly to her, feeling that if he held on to her hard enough she would have to take him home with her.

Ben commented that at the Home boys as old as eleven or twelve were there with boys as young as two or three. Ben claimed that it was pretty much a case of being tough enough to survive a system where all ages were lumped together. He was too young to attend school but can remember that he and the other younger boys accompanied the older boys when they marched quite a distance through the streets to school. On occasion, where the route passed behind a bakery Ben (who says he was always hungry) stole a warm loaf of bread. It was the first time he can remember stealing and he can clearly recall thinking that stealing could not be so wrong if the result was so good.

Another former resident shared his experiences in a submission to the Inquiry about him, his brother, and other boys being physically and sexually assaulted by staff while in the Home during the 1960s.

Gwen Pearce shared recollections from her time in the Church of England Girls’ Home and how she interacted with her brother who was in the boys Home as part of a submission to the Inquiry into Children in Institutional Care (submission number 352):

My first home was a Church of England Home in Carlingford, we used to go out to school there. My brother Ken was in the Boys’ Home and we would see each other on the way to school. We would try to talk to each other but would be stopped and get into trouble for talking to the opposite gender even though we were brother and sister as this was not allowed…Ken remained in this Home till he left to go to work on a farm.

John Ingersole who grew up in the Boys’ Home has written about the history of the complex in his book Memories of a rural village : Carlingford Church of England Children’s homes, 1930s-1940s-1950s.

Throughout the 1950s the number of children at the Home began to decline, from 163 in residence in 1949 down to 120 by 1961. Due to this decline, as well as to shifting attitudes to institutional-style out of home ‘care’ for children, and the cost of maintaining the old large buildings, the Church of England Homes started to establish smaller family group homes as an alternative living situation for the children in its care. The first family group home to open on the site was Killara Composite Family Home, which had capacity for 10 children plus house parents. It opened in 1965 in what had, until that time, been the Boys’ Hostel. It ran until December 1968, when the children moved to the newly opened Crecy Group Home at Marsfield.

Following the removal of children from the Killara Composite Family Home, the building reverted to being used as a Boys’ Hostel in early 1969, and was renamed to the Trigg Working Boys Hostel. The Boys’ Hostel closed in 1977 when it was temporarily moved to the Molly-Trigg Cottage on the site of the Church of England Girls’ Home, before opening as the Trigg Hostel at its final location at Granville in 1979.

Throughout the 1970s the numbers of children at the Church of England Boys’ Home continued to decrease, and from May 1976 the phasing-out of the large Homes began. In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald in 1978 the CEO of the Church of England Homes stated that it wasn’t unusual for children who had grown up in the large institutional-style Homes to be unprepared for life after the Home, and to get in trouble with police, ending up in a “home institution, jail institution” cycle. For this reason, as well as the increasing number of temporary placements over permanent placements, the Church of England Homes had decided to close the large Boys’ Home and Girls’ Home at Carlingford and focus their efforts exclusively on Family Group Homes and Foster Care. The Church of England Boys’ Home at Carlingford was finally closed and sold to developers in 1979.

According to research done by the staff of the Northern Territory Department of Health, children from the Northern Territory were sent to the Church of England Boys’ Home. The Home was also mentioned in the Bringing Them Home Report (1997) as an institution that housed Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children removed from their families.

The Church of England Boys’ Home was mentioned in the Lost Innocents Report (2001) as an institution involved in the migration of children to Australia.