The Peggy Gibson Story

By Eamonn McCann

On Monday (November 16^th)
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the thousands of surviving
“orphans” from the Child Migrants Scheme, under which up to 150,000 children
had been brought in batches from Britain and Ireland to stock the continent
with white Christians. The trade only ended in the early 1970s. A large
majority of the children were not orphans at all, but the children of the
poorest of the poor. In the main, they were exported to the other side of the
world without their families’ knowledge, much less consent. Many who survived
continue to bear the scars of the cruelties they endured. The main organisation
involved in the operation in  Ireland was the Catholic Church.

Peggy Gibson was taken
from Derry when she was six.

“I remember him so
well. I remember him looking after me when I was out playing in the street. I
remember when I was in the Nazareth House and he was in Termonbaccca {girls’
and boys’ homes in Derry run by the Sisters of Nazareth], the way I would wait
for him on Sundays to come and take me out. He would take me on a walk out the Letterkenny Road and lift me up and sit me on a wall, a wall that is there to this day, and
we’d laugh together. He had bright red hair.

“And then they took me
away and sent me to Australia. They never told me why. They never told me why
they took me and not him. All my life ever after I kept it in my mind that I
would find him again. I searched and searched but nobody would tell me where to
find him. Nobody would tell me anything.”

Peggy Gibson was born
Margaret McFadden. Her mother was also called Margaret. Her father was Patrick
McAllister, nicknamed “Heavy”. Her father and mother never married. She doesn’t
know why.

She says that, “My
early childhood was very happy, as I recall.” She lived with her mother and her
mother’s parents and Pat, who was four years older, in Quarry Street in the
Brandywell. “It was a real extended family, warm and full of affection. But
then I was separated from my family when I was six.” She was taken to live with
the nuns at Nazareth House. Pat, 10, went to the boys’ home at Termonbacca.
Until many years later, she believed that this had happened because her mother
died.

“Then I found out that
I was taken from my family five and a half months before my mother died.
Neither my brother nor myself was brought back to the house to see her before
she died. Nobody told us.”

They still hadn’t told
her by the time they sent her to Australia. She doesn’t remember the detail of
being told where she was going, only about a country where the fruit grew in
thick clumps on the trees and the sun always shone. She remembers that on the
way out a nun told her that she had no brother.

“We were taken to London and then to Southampton and onto the ship. There were several hundred children on
the ship: Irish, English, Scottish, from Catholic homes, Church of England
homes, the Salvation Army, from every welfare agency in the UK as far as I
could see, all us so-called orphans, except that many of us weren’t orphans at
all.”

She recalls that almost
as soon as they had set sail she was told that she was no longer to call
herself “Peggy”, that her name was now “Margaret Theresa”. No one had ever
called her that.

When the ship docked at
Freemantle she was taken with the other Catholic girls to the Nazareth House in
Geraldton, which she says at least had a bit of a coastline, unlike Tardun
where most of the boys from Derry went, which was like a desert. She says that
the regime at Geraldton was “not kind – institutional life had a harshness at
that period.

“I won’t say much about
the people in charge there. They weren’t qualified. They didn’t know us. Maybe
they could have related to the aged or the infirm. But we were children. What
I’ll say is that because of the way we were treated we bonded together, and
that when I left I never went back.”

She says that, when she
was “tipped out of the orphanage at 16”, she had it firmly in mind to start the
search for her brother.

“I knew that I was
Irish and that I was from Derry and that I had a brother. I wrote to the
Children’s Welfare Department to ask them to help me find him. I have the
answer here. It’s all yellow now, with the date on it, 10 August 1956,
promising to do all they can to help me find my brother. But that’s the only
thing they ever did, write that letter.

“I would cry myself to
sleep and look forward to dreaming that my brother would come and find me in
this foreign country and take me home. It’s hard to explain now. But it did
take a grip on me. I suppose it was a sort of obsession. It was the main thing
I knew about myself, that I wasn’t alone, that I had a brother, who had also
been taken away from the family at the same time as me, who must be in the same
situation with me.”

After leaving the
orphanage, she was sent to work as a “domestic” for a prominent Catholic lawyer
in Perth. She was expected to work hard for long hours for little pay, and
slept in an outhouse. She wanted to get as far away as she could get, and saved
all she was paid until she had the boat fare to Melbourne where she has lived
ever since. She is married and has two sons.

“But I kept trying. I
was speaking to the welfare authorities all the time, trying to get somebody to
help me to get answers.”

She began writing to
any name she could discover in Derry, asking about her family, mainly about her
brother. And as a result, to her great disbelief, she found out in 1978 that
her father, who she had long assumed to be dead, was still living in the Long Tower area in Derry. The following year she came back to Derry with her husband, Bill, and
met her father for her first time in 32 years.

He had had a serious
alcohol problem. He hadn’t been told where she had been taken, and knew nothing
of the whereabouts of Pat. But, being in Derry, Peggy went to the Nazareth
House in Bishop Street and rang the bell and asked if they could help her in
her search.

“They turned me away.
All they told me was, ‘We have no information to impart’.”

She came back to Derry two years later and tried again. “And they just turned me away for the second time.
It was disheartening, but I wasn’t going to stop.”

Encouraged by a new
stirring of interest through publication in 1989 of Lost Childrenof the
Empire by Australian
journalists Philip Bean and Joy Melville - the book which cracked the wall of
silence around the story - Peggy
traveled to Western Australia to a Nazareth Girls’ reunion, to compare notes,
and discovered that the Catholic Welfare Officer in Perth was holding the
immigration papers of the 1947 emigrants.

“I went there in
October 1991, and it was then that somebody put into my hand the papers that I
had traveled on, that had brought me here. And there was my birth certificate,
and my school records. I was 51, and for the first time had something setting
out my identity. I stood there in the office and sobbed and sobbed.”

Buoyed up by the
breakthrough, and by the sense that the child migrant scandal was now bursting
out into the open and couldn’t be covered up much longer, Peggy and her husband
scraped enough money together to contact a professional researcher in England and to send him, in March 1992, to Derry armed with the new information. He discovered that,
in 1953, her brother Pat had been sent from Termonbacca to work for a farmer
called Daly in “Ballybofey, County Monaghan”.

She wrote to the Church
authorities in Derry to ask if now they could help trace him. A few weeks were
wasted, then it was realised that “Ballybofey” referred to Ballybay, County Monaghan. A few weeks after that, Peggy had a letter from Derry Bishop Edward Daly
telling her that her brother had died in Ballybay on 4th August 1990. She
collapsed from grief in the street in Melbourne and had to be carried by her
husband into her home. Pat hadn’t really been difficult to find. Shee knows he
could easily have been found sooner.

Peggy came back in Ireland in August the following year to attend a memorial mass at the Church of the Holy
Rosary in Tullycorbett, Ballybay. Pat had been buried in the little graveyard
outside. He had never married, lived alone and seemingly had a reputation of
not allowing anybody come close to him emotionally.

“I still find it hard
to come to terms with the fact that he is dead. He was very real and alive to
me in my sense of loss. I had held onto him because I had no immediate family
on my side in Australia to share my sons with. He was their uncle and a
brother-in-law to my husband. The sense of isolation was tremendous, 12,000
miles away.

“My brother suffered
tremendously too. I know he felt the same way about me. People have told me
that he mentioned me, spoke my name frequently. I had all these papers to show
him, all the letters I’d written and records of the people I’d spoken to, to
try and find him.

“I wanted to be able to
show him that I’d never forgotten him. I wanted to be able to say ‘Look, see,
there, I never gave up on you.’ He was entitled to know that.”

Peggy Gibson says that
she deserves a letter from somebody in the Church, admitting that she was
grievously wronged. “I want some recognition of what I have been made to endure
and what I am still suffering. I find the grief I feel for my brother terrible
to withstand. I want somebody to tell me why all this happened.”