Recently the country was outraged by the story of the death of a fourteen-year old boy, Dennis O’Neill, at the hands of a Shropshire farmer.
The facts are widely known. We give the barest outline here.
In the summer of 1918 John and Mabel O’Neill were married in Newport, Monmouthshire. He was 22, she 21. Both had served in France, he was lightweight boxing champion of the South Wales Borderers, she was a nurse. On the dole, the O’Neills had eleven children. One died at birth. They tried to bring up the remaining ten on £2 a week—in one room.
In 1923 O'Neill served one month's imprisonment for neglecting one of his children.
In December, 1939, Inspector Jones summoned the O’Neills before the Newport magistrates for neglect of their four youngest children.
The Inspector (N.S.P.C.C.), said their conditions were “indescribable,” though the children were fairly well nourished. Mrs. O’Neill stated that she often went without food for days that they might eat.
The magistrates fined each parent £3 with the alternative of a month in jail. They could not pay: while they served their sentence, the children were cared for at the Newport Poor Law Hospital.
Coming out of jail, John O'Neill at once joined the Army (December, 1939). While he was away in France, Inspector Jones got an order by the Newport magistrates for the removal of the four youngest children.
The O'Neills were ordered to pay 2s. a week for each child. They often defaulted.
Reginald Gongh, was the son of an agricultural worker who had a very hard life on the land.
In 1942 he was managing a farm in Shropshire. After marrying in 1942, he took Bank Farm (where young Dennis died) on borrowed money. His sole income was his monthly cheque for the sale of milk. Life on the farm was “bleak with poverty."
The Newport Educational Committee paid Gough £1 weekly for Dennis’s upkeep.
The rest of the story is well known. For a socialist the whole business is an epitome in miniature of the evils of the capitalist system. Almost every publication in the country has demanded investigations into the boarding-out system. Paradoxically enough, the Home Office, after years of agitation for the establishment of suitable institutions, issued a circular a year ago urging local authorities not to keep children in institutions, but to send them to foster-parents.
To those who might claim that the O'Neills should have “ known better” than bring eleven children into the world on the dole, we would point out that all the Governmental Authorities from Mr. Churchill downwards (or. up), have insisted on the need for more children—and have adopted a family allowance scheme to get them.
O'Neill could not have been the worst of workers— his boxing prowess shows considerable mental and physical ability. Nevertheless he remained permanently unemployed from 1919 to 1930—the period of “peace.” They could not have been the worst of parents, the wife often went without food to feed her children.
Small wonder that, harassed and persecuted by Inspectors and officials, the O’Neills dumbly and helplessly suffered the removal of their unfortunate children.
Everything that needs to be said has already been indicated by the circumstances of Farmer Gough’s life. Obviously, only a struggling poverty-stricken farmer would be interested in boarding poor town children at £1 weekly in the hope of getting some work out of them. Equally, the rapidly growing, and learning, children would resent having to work—for nothing.
Actually, it amounts to State connivance at juvenile slavery, through the local authorities.
The whole evidence at the trial of Gough for manslaughter, showed this to be the cause of the friction. In a certain sense, Gough has done a service in exposing one of the crying scandals of the age. Thousands of children suffer in misery, unknown and unheard.
Over a hundred years after Dickens’ searing and harrowing exposures of vicious inhumanity to children, “Oliver Twist,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” “Little Dorrit,” etc., after a century of all sorts of “Waifs and Strays,” “Societies for Protecting Children,” and public philanthropy and charity, we find the treatment of very poor working men’s children very little different to-day from then. O'Neill’s crime, like Gough’s—and young Dennis’s, was that he was poor, in a society dominated by money.
Socialists do not demand the “tightening-up of the boarding-out system,” or “More Inspectors of the Children’s Homes,” or “More Efficient Control,” as repeated ad nauseam in the public press. They organise politically to abolish social system which makes Poverty the worst of crimes.
Horatio.
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