Author Chris Mapp will present a talk about The British Home Children.  The talk covers a little known, and some would say shameful part of our social history, in which he has a particular interest. From the late 1860s until 1939, around 100,000 British children from pauper backgrounds were sent to Canada where they were put to work, mostly on farms or in domestic service. They are known as the ‘British Home Children’. Orphaned, abandoned, or otherwise ‘rescued’ from the slums and workhouses of Britain, they were shipped across the Atlantic by a plethora of individuals and organisations. In doing so, they were aided and abetted by the British Government, to the extent that in 2010 Prime Minister Gordon Brown issued a formal apology for the Government’s involvement.