Babies and children had a tough time in the early nineteen hundreds. The boom that followed the South African War was sadly brief and within months the country was plunged into a depression. Life was hard for many people, but the children’s suffering was particularly cruel.
Though governments plan to invade Cape Town came to nothing and the Mother City had no direct experience of the carnage, many shattered lives had sought refuge in the alleyways and slums. Pimps, prostitutes and gamblers who’d been drawn by the glitter of the gold and diamond fields had retreated to Cape Town during the war. The city’s small police force was hard-pressed to maintain any semblance of law and order.
Housing Crisis
Housing had long been inadequate. Now the shortage reached crisis proportions.
The birth rate soared and with it, infant mortality.
Statistics showed that perhaps as many as a hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand European children born in the city died before they turned one year old. The figures were three hundred and thirty-four for non-European infants. Diarrhoea and dysentery accounted for a significant number of these deaths, with under nourishment and malnutrition contributing.Early reports on social ills blamed the father of the child for many of their social ills.
It was said that the most cases the destitution of the children is caused by the father’s failure to meet his obligations. Either he won’t work, pleading as an excuse that the children earn more by begging than he could by working. The law rigidly respects the liberty of the individual even if he is a lazy good-for-nothing father. And the law looks on quietly while the children graduate as criminals. Or maybe the father drinks most of his earnings. Or he may be an invalid, in which case the whole burden falls upon the wife. How is it possible for the mother of four or five children, one an infant, to become a breadwinner outside her home? While she is looking for work, the children run wild, hungry and dirty.
Another fruitful source of misery among children is was the desertion of the father. Things are bad in those days as the father would go off to some distant part of the country, leaving a wife and three or four helpless children perhaps with only a few shillings. Months pass, not a word. The poor mother would be driven to despair, one article of clothing after another would be sold, and the children grow white and pinched.
Many of these children were found either with a poor boarding house keeper or some equally poor coloured family.
All over our country you will find little white babies in coloured homes and although the `baby savers’ always affirmed that their concern transcended all boundaries of race, language and creed, many early reports indicate a tacit understanding that foster-parents had to be colour-matched to the youngsters they took in.
It was reported that in 1903 in one house alone, five infants died, three of them being illegitimate.
In 1905 Mrs Henry Cloete and her friends established `De Wieg’, a small home for destitute European children under two years of age, to rescue them from such `farming’.
After `baby farming’ street urchins were the main causes of concern to early baby savers.
Little children from four years upwards were found being forced to become professional beggars. The little mites were kept out on the streets until midnight in the hope of getting a few pennies when the theatres were over. Again and again it was found such children asleep on the pavement. When spoken to, they often would not answer and it was difficult to track them to their homes. There was no law against this practise that could be enforced so locals were forced to stand by helplessly and watch the conversion of innocent little girls into hardened practised beggars. It was a small step from there to professional prostitution.
During the year 1909, 85 cases were received attention; representing 149 white and 57 coloured children. In 35 of these cases the fathers are deserters, having strayed to all parts of the world to look for work. Nine are widows with four or five children dependent on them. In order to earn enough to provide food and shelter the mother must be separated from her little ones; and if she arranges for someone to take care of them at a low rate, it often happens … the caretaker was not found, some of the children are playing in the street, while the babies are locked in an empty house.
Among the first to notice the sorry state of affairs revealed by these figures was the Governor’s wife, the Honourable Lady Hely-Hutchinson. She was known for her practical interest in family life, and she started the Society for the Protection of Child Life to prevent cruelty to children. The position of Governor was eventually taken over by Sydney Buxton and his wife Mildren (Lady Buxton). Each governor’s wife played patron to Child Life.
The object was not to give charity, but to find out what the actual conditions of Child Life are, to give immediate help where such seemed urgently required, and, above all, to get at the real cause of the alarming death rate of infants, the suffering of young children and the undoubted increasing depravity among young people.
During the first year when situated in Hatfield Street over a hundred children found their way to the office of the Society and placed their needs before it.
In 1914 the society moved to Military Road in Tamboerskloof and in the same year as second home was opened Wynberg. During 1916 an outbreak of enteritis spread and within a few days three of the most delicate babies were dead. The house had to be given up and further premises were found in Bellevliet, Observatory
Poor Conditions
In the early years pest control was a nagging headache at the home – lice, mosquitoes and bedbugs were common and the children were used being told “good night, sleep tight and don’t let the bugs bite”
This condition was brought on from children being admitted from insanities homes and ill health.
Poor building conditions such as drainage and sanitation was another hazard in the home. Boughs dipped in arsenic of soda were hung up in the rooms to discourage these pests.
Alley cats in the area were a great nuisance as they found their way into the building through windows that would not close properly.
Measles, whooping-cough and chickenpox were regular epidemics and in 1920 the matron reported that 29 children were reported at one time with measles (two with pneumonia as well).
It was then decided that new inmates (as they were sadly called) had to be exhumed before being admitted and had to be quarantined in isolation for two weeks. They were on arrival stripped of their clothes and scrubbed down.
Soon it became clear that a mortuary was needed as hardly a month went by without a few deaths. Children arrived on the doorstep literally at death’s door were eventually not admitted after several committee meetings.
Another plague was that of ringworm which went hand in hand with lice. The children’s heads were shaved and the matron had a small supply of chloroform for testing hair samples.
The Buxton babies’ morals had to be guarded as cautiously as their physical well-being and contact with strangers was deemed just as harmful as infection.
The love, care and humanitarian work undertaken through the decades by the staff of the Buxton home has been unsurpassed and the results of healthy children and babies being able to lead normal lives.
