#childrenshomes — Public Fediverse posts

Nearly all care homes closed for endangering children and vulnerable adults were profit-driven, study finds | Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/nearly-all-care-homes-closed-endangering-children-and-vulnerable-adults-were-profit

#CareHomes
#ChildrensHomes
#ForProfit
#Safeguarding
#Children
#Disabled
#Elderly
#MentallyIll
#Vulnerable
#CareQualityCommission
#Ofsted
#KeepOurNHSPublic
#DeptOfHealthAndSocialCare

BBC News: Unlawful care homes ‘profiteering’ from at-risk children - BBC

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crlrl0rkjr6o

#ChildrensHomes
#AtRisk
#AtRiskKids
#Ofsted
#UnlawfulChildrensHomes

Revealed: hundreds of vulnerable children sent to illegal and unregulated care homes in England | Children | The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/13/vulnerable-children-illegal-unregulated-care-homes-england

#Children
#ChildrenInCare
#UnregulatedCareHomes
#ChildrensHome
#ChildrensHomes
#IllegalChildrensHomes
#CareStandardsAct2000
#Ofsted
#DeSouza
#FamilyCourt
#TogetherTrust
#CouncilFunding
#CouncilFundingCuts
#Hunt
#EducationDept
#AssociationOfDirectorsOfChildrensServices

'One in 10 biggest #English #councils risk #bankruptcy over #ChildProtection bill

Many #CountyCouncils and #UnitaryAuthorities are “running out of road” to avoid #insolvency as they grapple with high #inflation, increases in children being taken into care, and massive bills for [Privatised, highly profitable] #ChildrensHomes the #CountyCouncilsNetwork (#CCN) said.'
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/01/england-councils-risk-bankruptcy-survey-child-protection-spending
#ToryPoliciesInAction #UnderfundingPublicServices #PrivateProfitPublicCost
#MoneyBeforePeople

'One in 10 biggest #English #councils risk #bankruptcy over #ChildProtection bill

Many #CountyCouncils and #UnitaryAuthorities are “running out of road” to avoid #insolvency as they grapple with high #inflation, increases in children being taken into care, and massive bills for [Privatised, highly profitable] #ChildrensHomes the #CountyCouncilsNetwork (#CCN) said.'
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/01/england-councils-risk-bankruptcy-survey-child-protection-spending
#ToryPoliciesInAction #UnderfundingPublicServices #PrivateProfitPublicCost
#MoneyBeforePeople

'One in 10 biggest #English #councils risk #bankruptcy over #ChildProtection bill

Many #CountyCouncils and #UnitaryAuthorities are “running out of road” to avoid #insolvency as they grapple with high #inflation, increases in children being taken into care, and massive bills for [Privatised, highly profitable] #ChildrensHomes the #CountyCouncilsNetwork (#CCN) said.'
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/01/england-councils-risk-bankruptcy-survey-child-protection-spending
#ToryPoliciesInAction #UnderfundingPublicServices #PrivateProfitPublicCost
#MoneyBeforePeople

'One in 10 biggest #English #councils risk #bankruptcy over #ChildProtection bill

Many #CountyCouncils and #UnitaryAuthorities are “running out of road” to avoid #insolvency as they grapple with high #inflation, increases in children being taken into care, and massive bills for [Privatised, highly profitable] #ChildrensHomes the #CountyCouncilsNetwork (#CCN) said.'
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/nov/01/england-councils-risk-bankruptcy-survey-child-protection-spending
#ToryPoliciesInAction #UnderfundingPublicServices #PrivateProfitPublicCost
#MoneyBeforePeople

Escaping “a gulf of sin and misery”: the thread about the Edinburgh Emigration Home for Destitute Children

This thread was originally written and published in August 2020. It has been edited and corrected as applicable for this post.

Looking up something else in a Post Office Directory, my eye was caught by a rather sad sounding listing for the Canadian Home for Friendless Girls in Lauriston Lane, Edinburgh; a street long since built over. The Home was formed at a public meeting in December 1871 in Queen Street Hall which was organised by the Reverend and Mrs Blaikie. Its goal was establishing a mission to send “poor homeless and destitute girls” to the “rescue homes” in Canada of a Miss Macpherson. Annie Macpherson was an evangelical Scottish Quaker who, moved by the poverty she saw in the East End of London in the late 1860s, had set up the Home of Industry in Spitalfield. She organised a scheme of assisted emigration for destitute children from London to new and better lives in Canada. After education and training they would be placed with a suitably Christian host family as a domestic servant. To this end she set up “reception” and “distribution” homes in Canada and made arrangements with a network of children’s homes back in Britain and Ireland who would provide the “recruits“.

Annie Macpherson addressed the meeting in Edinburgh to testify to the success of the scheme; 800 children had already sent abroad to Canada. The Reverend William Garden Blaikie stated that premises had already been secured for the new venture in Edinburgh and a matron – Miss Tait – appointed. Margaret Blaikie, the minister’s wife, was to be secretary of the society and it was she who was the driving force behind the Home in Edinburgh. A Temperance advocate and long-time president of the Scottish Christian Union (a women’s Temperance society), it was during a visit to Canada in 1870 that she had met Annie. She was so impressed with the work that she resolved to get involved when she returned home. Finding that there was no existing organisation in Edinburgh to become involved through, she decided to set one up of her own and invited Annie back to Scotland to speak in public at its formation.

The Home in Edinburgh took in “young women who have fallen from virtue and desire to redeem their character” or “young girls who have lost one or both parents or have living parents… of loose character.” (Boys were sent to Mr. Muir’s homes in either Yardheads in Leith or Musselburgh). Those girls admitted to the Home would be “clothed and taught and cared for” and “brought up in the ways of godliness and industry“. Ultimately they would be sent, suitably reformed and trained, to be placed in domestic service in Canada.

We are therefore as thoroughly convinced as ever that our scheme presents a merciful opening for many destitute children who would not otherwise escape the gulf of sin and misery on whose borders they have been born and reared.

Margaret Blaikie, writing to the North British Agriculturalist, May 1875

The name of the Home had quickly been changed to the Edinburgh Emigration Home for Destitute Children. In 1874 it reported that it had 16 girls resident, awaiting the journey to Canada. In 1875 it was 31. It was run by voluntary donation and fund-raising; Margaret Blaikie made it a point of founding principle to never make public appeal for funds. It obviously prospered as in 1880 the Home bought its premises at Lauriston Lane, and briefly closed them to refurbish and enlarge them, adding an additional wing with 4 extra bedrooms. It reopened in November 1881.

In its 20-or-so years of existence, some 700 children were removed from the homes of destitute and drunken families, and some 300 were “assisted” to emigrate, others were adopted or found relatives or positions in Scotland. Most of the girls sent from Edinburgh went to Annie Macpherson’s Marchmont Distribution Home in Belleville, Ontario,

An 1892 publication noted that of the girls sent to Canada from Edinburgh, “at least ninety five percent have done well, and less than five percent have been unsatisfactory“. Its success was put down to distributing the girls widely over the country in family homes, rather than keeping them massed together in a central institution. The expansion of the Royal Infirmary in 1889 saw a compulsory purchase impending for the Home; advancing in age and noting that there were now larger organisations in Scotland carrying out work such as her own (in particular Quarrier’s Orphan Homes of Scotland), she decided it best to wind up her institution and retire. The proceeds of the sale and the remaining funds of the Home were gifted to the Society for the Protection of Children.

It was while minister of the Pilrig congregation of the Free Kirk that the Rev. Blaikie had commissioned both the original church building (the second purpose-built church for that Kirk) and its replacement by a more lavish and permanent building on the opposite corner. It remains a landmark to this day on Leith Walk, even though it has long since been within the established Church of Scotland.

Margaret publicly wrote that she and her husband had become “total abstainers” in the 1870s and “always worked in conjunction with [eachother].” As well as sharing a zeal for Temperance with his wife the Rev. Blaikie was also a prolific writer and pamphleteer and advocate of improving conditions for working people. He formed a society which commissioned the Pilrig Model Buildings to provide model workers housing, one of the first such instances in Edinburgh. They are now known as Shaw’s Buildings or Shaw’s Street / Terrace / Place and were a sort of progenitor of the later Colonies housing.

Around the same time that Mrs Blaikie stepped back from her work with the Home, the Reverend resigned as minister at Pilrig and took up a chair in theology with the Free Church’s New College, rising to become Professor of Divinity. He resigned in 1897, aged 77, and the couple retired to North Berwick where he would die in 1899 and Margaret in 1915, aged 92. Annie Macpherson died in 1904.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
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These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.

The house that pens built: the thread about the many lives of Waverley House

There is a building in Craiglockhart in Edinburgh that frequently comes up in property listings with the romantic and ancient sounding name of Perdrixknowe .

The name is straightforward enough in its etymology, Perdrix- is the French for Partridge, –knowe is the Scots for a hillock or a mound (from the English Knoll), often specifically in the context of a gathering place for fairies. James Steuart, in his history of Colinton Parish, records that the Partridge Knowe, or Patrickes Know (Perdrix frequently became Patrick in Scots placenames) was the rise in the ground to the north of the Craiglockhart and Craighouse hills.

There are a couple of other –knowe place names in the general area, e.g. Broomieknowe just to the south, Kingsknowe to the west. John Thomson helpfully records the name in the maps of his 1830s “Atlas of Scotland“. But I can locate neither Perdrix– nor Partridge– knowes in the Ordnance Survey Name Books for Midlothian of 1852-3 or in any archived newspapers of that period, suggesting it had already fallen out of favour as a local place name by that time.

Certainly Perdrixknowe, as ancient a name as it may be, was only given to the house here as recently as 1990 when it was converted into retirement flats. When it was first built back in 1884, by the genius architect, local politician and quarrymaster that was Sir James Gowans, it was known instead as Waverley House. We should not be troubled by this name in the slightest, it was a very common trend back then to give something a referential name to the works of Sir Walter Scott. Except in this case, all is not quite what it seems.

The house was built for a wealthy local businessman by the name of Duncan Cameron (1825-1901). The Cameron family owned the stationery firm of Macniven & Cameron based on Blair Street in the Old Town. The brothers John and Donald Cameron had joined the stationery wholesaling firm of Nisbet Macniven in the 1840s and soon ended up first running and then taking a share in it, the name changing to Macniven & Cameron in 1845.

Duncan joined his older brothers in the business in 1850 and in 1862 patented a new and improved fountain pen nib which he christened The Waverley. This was featured a fine, upturned point so as to better write on rougher papers; a double efficiency that both sped up the writing speed of clerks and also allowed them to work on cheaper papers.

The name was of course taken from the works of Walter Scott, as just about everything popular in Scotland seemed to be at the time, and the tin in which the nibs came even had his image on it.

The Waverley nib was a smash hit success, it was affordable, it was effective and because it could write on cheaper papers its utility was wide, “a luxury for the million” as the testimonial from the Argus newspaper says on the tin. With an official contract to supply pens to Her Majesty’s Government Offices, it was with good cause that they proudly boated that “Macniven & Cameron’s Pens Are the Best” on the box. Their nibs were much in demand in India amongst the Imperial civil service, indeed their Hindoo nibs of 1873, designed for caligraphy and sold in a tin with an Indian elephant upon it, may have been deliberately aimed at it.

With famed stable mates The Owl (“Par Excellence the Ladies’ Pen”) and The Pickwick (for “Swift Commercial Writing“) in their portfolio, the company became one of the names in pens and the Camerons became fabulously wealthy. From the names of these best sellers the company took its familiar slogan, “They came as a boon and a blessing to men, The Pickwick, The Owl and the Waverley Pen“.

Macniven & Cameron didn’t make their own pens, they did not have the specialist fine manufacturing base in Edinburgh to do this in the required volumes, and so instead they subcontracted the work out. Such was the demand however that in 1900 they acquired a factory in Birmingham, the epicentre of this specialist manufacturing in Britain, to bring production in house. The city housed eleven of the top twelve manufacturers of pens in the 1930s, producing ten-to-fifteen thousand pens per week.

The company advertised widely in the press and was quite canny, being a prominent adopter of railway advertising and made sure adverts for its wares were prominent in main line stations. A certain generation of rail traveller may still recall the enamelled signs that used to prominently greet the travelling public.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/allybeag/2142739598

Back to Duncan Cameron, like all self respecting Victorian businessmen he expressed his success in life by having built for himself a fabulous villa. For his architect he chose James Gowans, one of the most creative and distinctive local architects and one who had a passion for masonry worked from the nearby Redhall quarries.

The detailing of the house itself heavily referenced the source of Cameron’s wealth; look at the mouldings around the pediments and cornicing and also the chimney pots and you will see that these are pen nibs. James Gowans liked this sort of visual pun, his own house – Rockville – was decorated with daisies, his surname being the Scots term for that flower. The inverted crow-stepped detail around the main window is a feature distinctive in the work of Gowans.

A description of the house is given in a 1902 advertisement for its sale, a “substantially built and commodious two-storey villa, with area flat behind and conservatory in front, sheltered from the east; Containing dining room, drawing room, parlour, five bedrooms, four dressing rooms, bathroom, 2 WCs, kitchen, scullery, pantriea (pantry), servants’ accommodation; Laundry with fixed tubs and boiler; Hot and Cold water throughout; Ample cellerage. There is an Acre of Garden Ground.” The photograph below shows the main front door, flanked by an ornamental stained glass window and one of the conservatories that wrapped around the front of the building.

The grand staircase balusters I have seen being described as based on fountain pens, but I can’t find a photo however but the interior photo below suggests that this similarity may be purely symbolic, unless those are bundles of pen bodies?

Duncan Cameron was well known throughout Edinburgh but kept himself out of public life and municipal affairs. He was however known to the people of Blair Street where his factory was based and his obituary notes that he was kind and generous to “many a poor widow in the neighbourhood“. With plenty of money to spare, Duncan senior bought himself the Oban Times in 1882. His parents both hailed from Glencoe and he maintained a keen interest in and sympathies with the lot of the Highlander, extending to being able to converse in Gàidhlig. The Camerons were well known in the area and were referred to as the Pen Folk. He installed his son (also Duncan) as editor of his newspaper. He held his position as Chairman of the Board of the family business until his very end: he died suddenly in February 1901, aged 76. Duncan junior took over the business but did not keep on Waverley House; it was for sale in 1902 and by 1903 it was being lived in by the “Misses Geikie“.

In 1890, Duncan junior had returned to Edinburgh to join his father in the pen business, which had left a vacancy at the top of the Oban Times. This was filled by the next son, Waverley, who was named after the pen. Sadly Waverley drowned in a tragic yachting accident off nearby Lismore just a year later in June 1891. He had been sailing with friends when their boat was swamped by a sudden squall; Waverley’s hat was all that was recovered of him and his friend, Donald Campbell, later succumbed to his exposure. Only Allan MacDonald survived the accident. His grieving father had a large Celtic cross erected on the Lismore shore as a memorial, close to where the boat had gone down.

After his father’s death, Duncan junior kept the pen side of the business going but massively expanded the manufacturing stationery side of things, with new factories opened in Leith and London. He ran the company from London until he retired to Oban, his son Waverley B. Cameron taking over. He was chairman of the Oban Times, until his death in 1954.

In 1911, the Oban Times editor’s chair was filled by Flora Anne, Duncan senior’s eldest daughter, when she and her husband retired to Oban. By this time she was known as Mrs Macaulay, her second husband being George Macaulay, a Superintendent of the Edinburgh City Police but also a highlander. The Macaulays had a house at Argyll Lodge, but also an apartment above the Oban Times‘ offices on the second floor.

George passed away in 1924, but Flora remained involved in the running of the Oban Times for the final 47 years of her life. She was a supporter of Highland culture and the Gaelic language and in 1947 helped establish the Macaulay Cup for camanachd (shinty), which is still going. She died in Oban in 1958 at the age of 99, still working on the paper despite having been invalided in an accident and confined to her home since 1952. She was returned to the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh to be buried alongside her first husband and near the Cameron family plot, a vast Celtic cross with Pictish details marking the spot.

Duncan senior’s younger daughter Mary, who painted the portrait of him earlier in this post, was a renowned artist and sister to Duncan junior, Waverley and Flora. She travelled to Spain in 1900 to study art and fell in love with the country, becoming known for her Spanish scenes. She had a particular skill for painting animals, having practised using the family dogs and her own horse as models and by taking classes at the Edinburgh Veterinary College to better understand animal anatomy.

In the late 1939 Waverley House was taken over by the Scottish Wayfarer’s Welfare Society as a boys home, it having been evicted from its own premises in Stockbridge by wartime Civil Defence. It took in boys from broken homes or off the street – usually turned over by sympathisers in the authorities as an alternative to the punishment of a reformatory – who found themselves in the city “penniless, tattered, despondent and hungry“. The organisation could house around 25 to 30 boys at a time, they typically stayed for six months before moving on to employment such as agricultural labour or the armed forces. The Society had only been established in 1935, starting off with the donation of £10 and use of an abandoned police station on Hamilton Place by Miss Dorothea Maitland.

It was a very progressive place for the time and while it was initially set up just to be a night shelter, it soon took on a wider purpose as a reactionary response to the ill effects of institutionalisation at the time. It sought to provide its boys with the caring, family atmosphere that was missing from their lives, with each resident being assigned a “Housemother” and a “Housefather” from amongst the staff. It had a rule of never turning a boy away, and never holding someone’s past against them and sought to re-integrate wayward youths back into society with a sense of purpose and self-worth. It was reported as having had a good success rate, with 51 out of 55 boys cared for in 1957 passing successfully on from the house into work.

The house parents rose at 430AM to ready the first boys for their work or training, and all boys had to return by 10PM, later on Friday and Saturday evenings. Even after they left the boys were encouraged to treat Waverley House as their family home. The Wayfarer’s Society were still there as late as 1983 when they advertised for staff for the establishment to help care for its nine residents. The trustees of the society sold the building to Ogilivie Homes in 1989, who converted it to the retirement complex of Perdrixknowe and started it on the next chapter of its life.

Thank you to John Grant who has allowed me to include some of the research of his late father-in-law, Derek Prime, who was a resident of Perdrixknowe and took a keen interest in research its history, as well as that of the Cameron family and Sir James Gowans.

Note to readers: unfortunately in April 2026, a third-party plug-in more than exceeded its authority and broke many of the image links on this site. No images were lost but I will have to restore them page-by-page, which may take some time. In the meantime please bear with me while I go about rectifying this issue.

If you have found this site useful, informative or amusing then you can help contribute towards its running costs by supporting me on ko-fi. This includes my commitment to keeping it 100% advert and AI free for all time coming, and in helping to find further unusual stories to bring you by acquiring books and paying for research.
Or please do just share this post on social media or amongst friends and like-minded people, sites like this thrive on being shared.

Explore Threadinburgh by map:

These threads © 2017-2026, Andy Arthur.

NO AI TRAINING: Any use of the contents of this website to “train” generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to generate text is expressly prohibited. The author reserves all rights to license uses of this work for generative AI training and development of machine learning language models.