At Home - Bill Bryson [228]
Barnardo was a brilliant publicist and developed an immensely successful campaign based around striking before-and-after photographs of the children he rescued. The “before” photos showed grubby (and often scantily clad) waifs of sullen mien, while the “after” photographs showed them scrubbed, alert, and radiant with the joy of Christian salvation. The campaigns were so successful that soon Barnardo was expanding his interests in many directions, opening infirmaries, homes for deaf and dumb children, homes for homeless bootblacks, and much more. The slogan emblazoned along the facade of the Stepney home was “No Destitute Child Ever Refused Admission.” It was an unusually noble sentiment, and many people hated Barnardo for it. The problem was that taking in boys unconditionally was an affront to the principles of the 1834 New Poor Law.
Barnardo’s boundless ambition brought him into conflict with a fellow missionary, Frederick Charrington. The scion of an immensely wealthy brewing family based in the East End, Charrington had come into missionary work abruptly when one day he saw a drunken man beating his wife outside a Charrington pub from which he had just emerged, as his wife begged him for money to feed their hungry children. From that moment Charrington embraced temperance, renounced his inheritance, and began working among the poor. He saw the Mile End Road as his personal fiefdom, so when Barnardo announced his intention to open a temperance café there, Charrington took umbrage and embarked on a relentless campaign of character assassination. Assisted by an itinerant preacher named George Reynolds (who had until lately been a railway porter), he spread rumors that Barnardo had lied about his background, misrun his homes, slept with his landlady, and deceived the public through false advertising. Barnardo’s homes, he additionally hinted, were outposts of sodomy, drunkenness, blackmail, and other vices of the most depraved sort.
Unfortunately for Barnardo, an uncomfortably large proportion of this was true. Barnardo was something of a liar and made matters worse by responding with clumsy falsehoods now. When it was alleged that he was misrepresenting himself as a doctor—a fairly serious offense under the Medical Act of 1858—Barnardo produced a diploma from a German university, but it was shown almost at once to be a poor forgery. It was also proven that he had faked many before-and-after photographs of children he had rescued, making them look much more destitute than in fact they were. Many of the staged photographs depicted the children in artfully torn clothing that exposed alluring quantities of flesh, which many now interpreted as basely appealing to prurient interests. Even Barnardo’s most faithful supporters found their loyalties strained. Apart from concerns about his character and probity, many worried about his levels of debt. One of the bedrock principles of the Plymouth Brethren was a devotion to thrift, yet Barnardo borrowed freely and repeatedly in order to keep opening more missions.
In the end, Barnardo was found guilty of faking photographs and of claiming wrongly to be a doctor, but exonerated on all the more serious charges. Ironically, life in a Barnardo home was scarcely more attractive than life in the dreaded workhouses. Inmates were roused from bed at 5:30 a.m. and required to work until 6:30 in the evening, with short breaks for meals, prayers, and a little schooling. Evenings were devoted to military drills, classes, and more prayers. Any boy caught trying to escape was placed in solitary confinement. Barnardo didn’t merely recruit children, but snatched them off the streets in a spirit of “philanthropic abduction.” Every year about fifteen hundred of these boys were summarily shipped off to Canada to make room in the homes for more boys.
By the time of his death in 1905, Barnardo had taken in 250,000 children. He left the organization indebted to the tune of £250,000—a colossal sum.
III
We have spoken so far only of poor children, but well-to-do children