Seven thousand British children were sent to Australia last century, told they were orphans or unwanted. It wasn’t true. Now facing old age, 1,400 are still searching for their families
It wasn’t until he was 71 that Michael Lachmann found out what a different life he might have had. He had always believed he was an orphan. But, already an old man, he discovered he was never an orphan. He had been loved and wanted. During the second world war his mother had left letters at a residential nursery saying she was only placing him in care while she was working and until “daddy gets home from Japan and we will be making a home for little Michael”. There was no childcare then, unless you were rich.
Instead of being collected by his mother at the war’s end, at the age of five he was shipped to Australia and placed in the Castledare Boys Home, run by the Christian Brothers, where numerous boys were starved, beaten and subjected to sexual abuse. He was told his mother was dead.
