Welfare Growing up in Scotland: A Century of Childhood

They called it boarding out.

For over a century,

it was the favoured Scottish method

of dealing with impoverished city children

who had been orphaned, abandoned, neglected.

At its worst, at its most heartless,

local councils would place groups of these youngsters in cars or taxis...

..to be driven into the countryside, to villages,

to remote crofting communities.

The children were offered to local families

who'd be paid to become their foster parents.

There were no references, there were few checks.

The lady said, "I'll take this one,

"but I don't want him, he looks a bit scrawny."

Nobody's child, nobody wanted him.

This is the story of the part played by governments,

by churches and charities,

in raising Scotland's most vulnerable children.

Boys and girls from broken homes.

For some, their supposed salvation caused only more suffering.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

But as the 20th century progressed, Scotland's institutions would

reach into the lives of tens of thousands of Scottish children,

improving their health,

improving their happiness.

For me, I mean, care was...

a very, very positive experience.

I really wouldn't be who I am or where I am or what I am

without fostering, it's just so fundamental to my life.

After a century that revolutionised attitudes to education

and childhood itself,

how did Scotland's institutions learn to cope

with the young lives entrusted to their care?

GIGGLING

I was about seven or eight

and I was playing in a field just up there

where there's some swing park and a couple of lads came and told me

there was a problem going on at my home.

This was the moment, in the summer of 1961,

that changed Gordon Bucher's young life...

for ever.

And I remember coming around here and seeing...

..just everything that we possessed, practically,

was out in the...

the back yard, just in a big pile.

And all our furniture was just sort of thrown out through the windows

or whatever, out the back door, onto the back yard, here.

And just left.

And my mum and dad were here, quite distressed,

talking to what turned out to be Sheriff's officers,

and basically they'd come for some reason or another,

I think we owed them about 30 quid's rent,

and they turfed us out onto the street.

Dad, you know, Dad had a gambling problem

and rather than pay his bills, he...

He didn't provide as a father should.

They took five of us into care out of the seven,

and that was us in the system, as it were.

Then aged between 2 and 11,

Gordon and his four siblings spent an unhappy year

in a series of children's homes...

..before being driven out of the city,

and onto a ferry...

..bound for the island of Tiree in the southern Hebrides.

The five Bucher children were to be boarded out.

I'd never been out of Glasgow. Never been out of the city.

It was just...

It's a different place.

This was abroad.

Our guardian, as it were, for the journey,

she informed my sister Mary that we were...

to go to separate homes.

My...

..younger sister, my older sister,

and my younger brother were taken away in a car.

And, you know, we didn't know where they'd gone.

We honestly believed we wouldn't see them again.

9-year-old Gordon and his 11-year-old sister Jean

were sent to this isolated croft house in the village of Barrapoll

in the west of the island.

Jean and I were brought in and the lady come to meet us.

I remembered my impressions, thinking she was an old woman.

But...

she was certainly a strong woman.

Her name was Christine.

But here she was called Kirsty.

And I was shown me bedroom and I...must admit I was...

It sort of sweetened the pill a little bit

to find I had me own bedroom.

And my own bed and...

it actually had sheets and blankets on it

instead of old army coats...

..which is what we'd have had in Glasgow.

Despite his fears,

Gordon was soon reunited with his brothers and sisters

at the local school.

Half of his classmates had been boarded out.

For a nine-year-old from the East End of Glasgow,

everyday life on a Tiree croft was an education.

The cattle would...

They would graze here and they also,

they would graze in a field way up by the church, there.

And my job many a night would be to go all the way to the church

to bring them back,

all the way down this road here, to go into the milking shed.

I loved it, 100%. It was... It was fantastic.

This was my domain, you know, when I was a kid,

this was my playground, this was...

You know, I was safe, I was fed, I was watered.

It was great. It was great.

Gordon stayed on Tiree for four years.

After which, Glasgow Corporation returned him

to the care of his family.

Aged 13, he reluctantly left the island...

..but he never forgot his foster mother, Kirsty.

When she was in an old folk's home,

and I spent a good few hours with her,

you know, sitting with her,

and every time I come up,

without fail, I'll go and visit her grave,

and I'll put some flowers down.

Yeah.

The practice of sending city children like Gordon

to the Highlands and Islands had begun in the 1860s.

By the time of the First World War,

Scottish local authorities were boarding out

up to 8,000 children per year.

They liked it because it was cheap, it was...

cheaper than placing children in institutions.

I think the city was seen as a pollutant, really, or polluting.

It was seen as having a very poor effect on families

and on family life and on children.

I mean, remember, if we think about Glasgow in this period,

late 19th, early 20th century,

it was overcrowded,

it was the most overcrowded city in the UK.

It was dirty, it was unhealthy.

People lived in very poor circumstances,

often in slums.

There was a philosophy that it was more healthy,

and more...

more Christian, I suppose,

to place children within rural Highland families.

They romanticised that crofting lifestyle as a kind of basic,

again, hard-working, God-fearing lifestyle.

Boarding out was born of the best intentions of the time.

But not all children would have the best of memories.

At the age of four,

Stuart Wilson was already a veteran of children's homes and foster care.

In the May of 1969,

he set off for Tiree,

clutching his favourite toy.

I remember holding a fire engine in my hand.

A wee toy.

And I was taken to Glasgow airport...

I was told I was going to a place with lots of children.

A happy...

family place.

And we got in the plane,

and came all the way out to Tiree.

I had no clue where I was, bewilderment...

Bewilderment, basically.

Terrifying.

But I mean, who's listening to a child?

Nothing was done to reassure me.

And when I arrived in Balinoe,

it was a big farmhouse.

It WAS quite busy, because there WAS loads of children there.

Stewart was to be one of 20 children looked after by Maryellen McLane,

a foster mother paid by Glasgow Corporation.

From their first meeting,

her approach to Stewart was brutal.

And Maryellen says, "Hello, I'm your new mum."

I wasn't even five.

And I grasped...

..that somewhere, I did have a mum.

And I said, "You can't be."

And she says, "I am. "Your mum was a hoor.

"You're a bastard, and I'm your mum."

Stuart remembers that the cruelty continued,

and became physical.

In the first months of his stay,

Maryellen accused him of stealing a piece of fruit.

I was taken out of the room and it was the wee...

There was an old cooker with the four...

three rings on it.

And I was told to admit it or produce the orange.

I couldn't.

So my head was grasped and I was placed onto the ring.

And I had actually three rings that was burnt on me.

And because I was trying to force myself away,

my hands were taken and placed as well.

It was... There was no visit to the doctor.

I just...

Like a wounded dog, I just went away to greet.

But considering...

..this is a person who has been paid to look after me.

But...

In charge of Stuart's safety,

in theory, at least,

was a visiting welfare officer from Glasgow Corporation.

I told him I hated it.

I said I just can't settle, I'm pissing the bed, now.

I was in bits.

And he's told me, don't worry. He wasn't aware of it, he was now,

and he'd fire it up the chain,

and it wouldn't be long before I was away.

But he told me, when I first went into to see him,

it was in confidence.

So...

Again, I wasn't even six.

You tend to...believe adults if they give you assurances.

After all the children had been in,

he went and had a word with Maryellen,

and as soon as he left, I took a beating again.

And I thought...I'm saying nothing to nobody from now on.

Never really played football when you got down here, did you?

Oh, no...

-What was a football?

-Yeah, exactly.

Something the posh kids had.

THEY CHUCKLE WRYLY

Stuart and Gordon's time on Tiree

was the legacy of a 19th-century belief -

that vulnerable children should be removed

from sinful, unhealthy cities,

taken far from their parents,

and placed in the healthy God-fearing countryside.

That belief was a cornerstone of public policy,

and also of the many Scottish childcare charities

of the early 20th century.

HORN TOOTS

Gosh, rain again?

BANGING

What the...?

The 1934 film Tam Trauchle's Troubles

was made by one such charity...

the wonderfully-named Necessitous Children's Fund.

With his wife in hospital,

the unemployed and impoverished Tam is left at home

with his two excitable boys.

Come on out, you hear me?

Robert Trauchle.

We were just playing at miners.

I work down the bowels of the Earth.

And it took us a wee while to come up.

The chaos is disturbed by the arrival of an unexpected

and rather genteel visitor.

I'm from the education authority.

Oh, come in.

You have two boys, Mr Trauchle, who have applied for a holiday.

Aye.

Their new guest signs the boys up

to attend a countryside holiday camp.

Two decades later, Owen Grieve was leaving behind a Glasgow slum

for two weeks at a very similar camp,

at Langbank on the Clyde coast.

We came here, out the station,

and that was amazing,

all these greeting-faced kids,

and all crying for their mammie.

And I'm wondering why they're crying,

I'm just happy that I'd got away.

Now I've got a big adventure for me.

They walked us from the station right up through,

up into the home,

and there was big trees on either side.

Look at this old path.

That took us up to the children's home.

Owen has preserved special memories of his time at Langbank.

For a boy who understood hunger,

it's the food he remembers most.

I woke up at breakfast,

knives and forks,

I never used a knife and fork in my life,

spoon, cornflakes, that and all. And...

it was scrambled egg and toast or something. You know?

But it was fun, it was lovely, it was nice.

# Oh, we're in a camp in the country, hurray, hurray! #

After a fresh air fortnight of exercise and healthy food,

the Trauchle boys return home as reformed characters.

What's for the tea?

I learnt a thing or two.

Holy smoke!

Wonders will never cease.

# Oh, been to the camp in the country

# Hurray, hurray! #

Come on, again!

As for Owen, he came home refreshed and well-fed,

with warm memories of the nuns who looked after him.

# So hip hip hip hurray! #

That's a great song.

Those nuns, they were strict but they were fair.

They were nice people.

And I remember one old, old, very old woman.

It was raining one day,

and she helped me with a jigsaw.

And I gave her a wee cuddle for it.

She wondered, What's happening here?

In the last minutes of the Necessitous Children's Fund movie,

the melodrama was cranked to maximum,

and cinemagoers were pressured to make their own donation.

JAUNTY TUNE

Not all families were as fortunate as the fictional Trauchles.

In the first half of the 20th century,

the impoverished children of broken families

would be visited by the so-called Cruelty Men.

Agents of the Scottish National Society For The Prevention

Of Cruelty To Children, their intervention would see

children taken from their parents,

and placed in residential care.

So, here we have Maggie and Isabel Higgins

who were...admitted to the Windmill children's home in Stirling in 1910.

Their father, William Higgins,

was 41 years old, and he was a former coalminer,

and we think he had been in the army,

and he was an epileptic.

Their mother was dead.

And he had spent the last two and a half years

trying to care for these children.

This is a letter that was sent

by the officer of the Scottish National Society Of Prevention Of Cruelty To Children

to the director of the Windmill children's home.

"During the past year,

"he has tramped the country accompanied by the children,

"living in lodging houses,

"and subsisting by singing in the streets and begging.

"You know what a miserable existence this is."

There's a photograph of Isa, and she's beautifully dressed,

and she looks very well, and very healthy,

and just looks like a normal child

that anyone would want to look after.

So the next document we're looking at here

is, I think, an admission document and it says...

It says, "I, William Higgins

"beg to state that I'm quite willing to hand over my children,

"Maggie Higgins and Isabella Higgins.

"From this date, I will cease to be responsible for the children

"and have no after claim whatsoever."

In the years that followed,

the Higgins sisters would endure more upheaval...

..for the sin of being born too poor.

Four decades later,

Hugh McGowan arrived in care for the sin of being born...

illegitimate.

He lived with his mother

in a Salvation Army hostel for unmarried women

in Glasgow's Southside.

Hugh was not allowed to stay in a hostel beyond his second birthday.

His mother's family didn't want to know.

And so, in 1949,

the Salvation Army looked to find Hugh a place at Quarrier's,

Scotland's largest children's home.

Over now to Renfrewshire in Scotland

where between Bridge Of Weir and Kilmacolm is a children's village,

complete with its own school, church and shops.

The Salvation Army wrote to Quarriers

and they said that they had

a child here and would they take me

into Quarriers.

They described my mother as being a "useless, dirty type,"

which I found quite offensive.

So they asked if I would be...

They asked Quarriers if they would take me in.

The children's home had been founded in 1873 by the Glasgow

philanthropist William Quarrier.

As a boy, Quarrier had known desperate poverty.

The village he built near Bridge of Weir renounced the large

dormitories of old.

Instead, he created a self-contained community of cottages with

the children looked after by so-called cottage mothers.

At its peak, Quarriers housed up to 1,500 children.

There were times when...

..I enjoyed myself. There's no doubt about that.

But there were times when I was scared out of my wits.

Step out of line, bang!

The cottage parent, the cottage mother, the teachers,

some of them they had their own strap and they used to do things

to it, like dip it in saltwater, so that it gets really hard

and, you know, that was the way, that was the way that Quarriers was.

Their religion was the hellfire stuff, you know,

all hell and damnation.

You know, the love of God was secondary.

Hugh arrived at Quarriers at a time of huge upheaval in the way Scotland

cared for her most vulnerable children.

The Clyde Report of 1946, commissioned by the Scottish

Office, called for children's homes to be less regimented, less

religious and to pay more attention to the needs of individual children.

Where possible, the report recommended that children in

care should remain with their family

or be boarded out to reputable foster carers.

The post-war focus on childhood extended into child health,

an area that had steadily been improving throughout the 1930s.

But it was the arrival of the National Health Service that

would truly revolutionise the health of Scotland's children.

This leaflet is coming through your letterbox one day soon,

or maybe you have already had your copy. Read it carefully.

The NHS came into being in the summer of 1948.

Seven months later, in the Aberdeenshire village

of Laurencekirk, John Callander was born.

At the age of five,

he fell seriously ill playing in the fields around his home.

My mum put me to my bed and the doctor was called and he had a

look and decided quite quickly that I should be taken to City Hospital

and I remember the ambulance came from the

central garage, which was next door to the smithy where my dad worked,

and I can still smell the sort of carbolic soap that must have

been used to scrub it out and then it was

a case of up to Aberdeen,

then it was into City Hospital and into isolation.

Diagnosed with polio and paralysed from the neck down, John's

only hope for survival was treatment in a new and expensive device.

The iron lung does artificially what his paralysed chest muscles cannot.

And through it all he's game and cheerful.

The best way that you could experience it would be if

you're down at the beach and you got completely covered in sand,

only your head sticking out, you can't move.

You literally can move nothing and your world then

becomes a piece of glass in front of you,

that's all you see and then you have the noise obviously of

the lung working as the pressure increases and decreases to

force you to breathe.

You could... I could see my mum and my dad at the window,

that's as far as, you know, you could get.

John's father was a blacksmith, not poor but far from wealthy.

The National Health Service promised

the best of care regardless of income.

If my parents had had to pay for, you know, the treatment,

it would've been extremely difficult,

but without the iron lung, I wouldn't be here today.

John's father documented his son's recovery.

A home movie enthusiast, he captured family days out in the hills

and on the beaches of Aberdeenshire.

You can see the right leg is a lot thinner than the left leg and

that I had a tendency to walk on the ball of my foot.

The new NHS, together with improvements in water

supplies and housing, began to conquer diseases that had

previously blighted Scottish childhood.

By 1962, the number of deaths from polio,

diphtheria and tetanus had fallen to zero.

The silent film is winter up the Garvock.

Getting down was fine.

But getting a back up for me was quite a difficult job.

When the century began, almost 150 of every 1,000

children would not live to see their first birthday.

By 1968, 20 years after the introduction of the NHS,

that figure had fallen to seven.

The power of the post-war state revolutionised the health of

Scottish children.

And as it did, other aspects of childhood came under the microscope,

and in particular how best to deal with children

in trouble with the law.

The work of war makes it a hard job to keep children out of mischief.

One in every ten crimes and offences in Scotland is committed by

boys and girls under 17.

It was felt that this was a result of wartime conditions, that

it was linked into the dislocations that were caused by evacuation,

it was also linked to the absence of fathers who were serving in

the military and were seen as important authority figures

within the family.

It was also linked by commentators to working mothers.

Those same issues were addressed in the 1944 film Children Of The City.

Commissioned by the Scottish Office and made for an international

audience by the pioneering left-wing director

Bridget, or "Budge", Cooper,

it was filmed entirely in Dundee.

Well, the film opens with three lads breaking into

a pawnbroker's shop and having great fun playing with the clothing

until, of course, they're discovered by a police officer.

One of the things that is very apparent from the film

actually is the issue of where blame was placed, because

Budge Cooper was very clear in her mind that it was actually

poverty and poor environments that were responsible for children

misbehaving in Scotland.

In the film, the three children and their parents are ordered

to appear before a juvenile court.

Children weren't considered when these towns were built.

They are shut in by factories, warehouses and tenements.

They are lost among granite streets

and pavements, courts, winds and closes.

Where can they play? Where can children go in a city?

Established in 1908, juvenile courts were operated by regular sheriffs

and magistrates, but away from the formality of the court room.

And now these three children

must answer to the law for what they have done.

So this is the hearing before the juvenile court magistrates.

It is interesting I think that the proceedings are much more

informal than they would be in an adult court,

so they're all sitting around a large table.

The youngest of the three boys is sent to one of Scotland's new

guidance clinics, his behaviour blamed in part on his squint.

The middle child's father is serving abroad and his mother is

struggling to cope. The boy is sentenced to 12 months probation.

Distributed around the world,

Budge Cooper's film offered a rose-tinted vision of Scottish

child justice, where punishment

could be replaced by welfare and education.

Clearly what was emphasised were the more progressive interventions

that were being used.

In fact, probably around three quarters of the cases that

came before the juvenile courts simply lead to fines or

admonitions, a kind of stern telling off.

But even in the liberal leaning world of Cooper's film,

there were some children who needed a firmer hand.

The oldest of the three boys, Alec, had been in trouble before.

His mother is apathetic and feckless.

The only chance for Alec to improve

is for him to be taken away from his family.

What we find out is that his home surroundings are deemed to be

far from adequate, I think his mother is...is...

There isn't a polite word about this now.

Alec must be sent to an approved school.

Alec's mother raises no objections.

The system that sent young Alec to approved school, or Borstal,

endured from 1908 to 1970.

What replaced it, children's hearings,

was the subject of this 1971 film made by Aberdeen University.

He's just arrogant, this one. You kind of get it into him and say that

if he's getting a fair day's wage, it's to do a fair day's work.

-He thinks everything should fall at him and nothing in this world's free.

-Shut up.

Children's hearings replaced magistrates with trained

members of the public who would decide the fate of both

children in care and those in trouble with the law.

Do you really think this will help the problems?

I'm quite well aware of the step and I hope you don't take the attitude

that I'm a bad mother, because I'm far from it.

I just can't cope, it's impossible.

Both films end with a boy being sent to an approved school.

Traditionally it was a place like this -

grim, oppressive, the last resort.

But times have changed.

Yesterday's approved school is today's education and care centre.

This is the secure residential area at Kibble in Paisley,

home to some of Scotland's most serious child offenders.

Each unit has six young people, accommodation for six young people.

Registration is from 12 to 18. They come from all over Scotland.

The change in approach from hard labour to soft furnishings

was heralded by the Social Work (Scotland) Act of 1968.

Incarceration is now a last resort.

For the last six years, the number of young Scots in secure

residential care has never exceeded 100.

So this is your bedroom.

Bedroom ensuite facility and we promote this as their space,

their safe space to have their thoughts and their activities.

You have their television, their Xbox, their computers, PCs,

whatever's deemed appropriate for them.

Matt McMini - his real name - took a room at Kibble in 1974.

I didn't like school because my passion was for cars.

Sometimes other people's.

Well, most of the time other people's,

and for the time that I had it, I would take care of it.

On many occasions I would take cars home,

give them a wash and then make it look a wee bit nicer, because after,

at the end of the day, it's me who's going to be driving about in it.

Matt's "hobby" attracted the attention of the authorities.

Aged 14, a children's panel decided he should spend two years at Kibble.

Much of that time he spent in the workshop.

We'd be tinkering about with cars and servicing the school

transport at the time. Couldn't wait to get to that class.

Just work your pedal back and forward, side to side,

give it a wee shake.

That training served him well.

Matt's now back at Kibble as a fully qualified teacher.

Kibble is now a charitable enterprise.

It makes money from donations and payments from local authorities.

These go-karts both raise money and teach young people about mechanics.

Don't mind telling them what my past is and everything else and

how I became where I am today.

It's a reward for me.

When I see a young person progressing from coming in first,

sitting down at a table with a hoodie up,

on their phone, until maybe two or three weeks later, they're

walking into the workshop and saying, "Right, what we doing today, Matt?"

And then I'll just give myself a wee tap on the back.

The final one...

Poacher turned gamekeeper, Matt is a living endorsement of the

child welfare reforms of the '40s, '50s and '60s. A time of revolution.

A whole new approach that prioritised listening

to the needs of the child.

But there remains the last vestiges of an older and crueller world.

In 1911, the desperate plight of Maggie and Isabella Higgins

had been discovered by the cruelty man.

They'd been taken to Winnwell children's home and then in 1915,

dispatched to Canada.

Astonishingly, the practice of sending vulnerable children

abroad continued into the late 1960s.

In January 1961,

12-year-old Hugh McGowan was living at Quarriers children's home.

Quarriers asked if he'd like to go to a home in Australia and wrote

to Hugh's mother - then living in England - asking for her permission.

That letter was sent to her,

it arrived in Surrey and...

they had said, "Return to sender," it's stamped there,

that shows that my mother never received that letter

and so Quarriers sent me anyway.

Hugh was initially delighted to leave Quarriers.

He arrived in Australia in September 1961.

100 miles north of Melbourne, Hugh's new home was to be

a 68-roomed mansion.

In 1961, it was the Dhurringile Training Farm for Boys.

Today, it's part of a prison. To Hugh it always was.

We were basically incarcerated here.

Because we weren't allowed to just...

"Hi, Mum, I'm going down to see Joe."

That didn't happen.

I'm grateful that I had somewhere to live.

I had food to eat, I had a bed to sleep in, I had clothes to wear.

When it came to...love,

it was non-existent.

We...are known as child migrants.

We weren't.

We were child deportees.

Because we came to Australia,

I did not have a birth certificate and I did not have a passport.

So we were sent here by the British Government at the behest of

the Australian Government and put here.

This is the first time I've been back in this room.

And frankly it's hurting.

I just remember this room too well.

Sorry.

It's where I was sexually abused...

..by the superintendent at the time.

In here.

What happened in this unremarkable room,

Hugh would keep to himself for 40 years.

I'm one of the survivors.

I know of others. I know that three of the, erm...

of the people, the guys that came to Australia from Quarriers,

are...are dead.

One suicided,

another one died of alcohol problems.

And another one died of drug problems.

They don't even know how many kids came to Australia.

They say there were 7,000 of us.

I don't believe that. I believe it's many more.

I know... I think it's up to 15,000.

Both British and Australian prime ministers have apologised for

their countries' part in child migration.

We look back with shame that many of these little ones,

who were entrusted to institutions and foster homes,

instead were abused physically,

humiliated cruelly,

violated sexually...

These wounds will never fully heal,

and for too long the survivors have been all but ignored.

The governments allowed it to happen.

They... They just...

They just wiped their hands of us and they still do it.

We've had two apologies and, quite frankly, they don't mean much

when they don't face what they have done to so many kids.

Hugh's journey into care had begun with two Scottish charities,

the Salvation Army and Quarriers,

but by the 1960s they were being replaced by a new generation of

professional carers - social workers.

Among them, Anne Black,

who was inspired at university to help those most in need.

It was quite unusual to be a social worker in those days.

People didn't really know what you did.

It was a stressful job, and it was emotionally draining.

In the 1960s, Anne's focus was on Pilton,

a housing estate in the north of Edinburgh.

It's strange when you come back down here, though.

You can't remember the person you've just met,

but you can remember the name of the family that lived at

that particular house. It's ridiculous.

Social workers of the period were taught to keep families

together whenever possible,

but one family, both parents alcoholics, forced Anne to make

a tough decision and place their two-year-old son Alec in care.

50 years on, they're still in touch.

This was a little card that we had.

That shows where you went and that you, Alec,

-went off to St Helen's...

-St Helen's.

-..which was the nursery along at West Coates...

-Yeah.

..with a Miss McIntosh who used to run it with a rod of iron.

My parents, it was a marriage made in hell.

My father took absolutely no responsibility

for his children whatsoever.

And my mother was just...

She had so many problems, it was, erm...

She couldn't look after herself, it was as simple as that.

It always is, for me, as a social worker, is, you know,

did we do enough to try to keep your family together?

-If you looked at where I came from, my family home...

-Yes.

..I was much happier in care.

-Yes. You were more settled and...

-Yeah, yeah.

-..it was more predictable, I suppose.

-Yes.

-I knew what was happening.

-Yeah.

-So, for me, I mean, care was a very, very positive experience.

-Mm-hm.

Well, I have a huge family,

and one of my siblings,

Tam, his kids are...

It's Tam and I when we were kids. It's what we should have been.

It's what we should have been, and it's fantastic to see where

that cycle has actually been broken.

The quiet victories of Scotland's social workers

received scant publicity,

but by the 1970s and '80s, their failures to recognise

child abuse were rarely out of the headlines.

At the age of four, Helen Holland was sent to

the Nazareth House children's home in Kilmarnock,

run by a Roman Catholic order.

Helen was placed in the care of a nun called Sister Kevin.

From the very beginning, she told me the devil was inside of me -

that I was the spawn of the devil.

"Hell" was in my name, and that's why I was called Helen.

And every day I was told that I was...

the devil was inside of me.

At the age of eight, Helen was abused by Sister Kevin -

at first physically, then, she alleges, sexually.

It meant nothing to her at all.

It was just another form of punishment,

and that's what sexual abuse became.

Somebody that could do that to you...

..I don't know how they can say they represent God.

Helen tried to raise an alarm on what was happening

at Nazareth House.

She confided in a Kilmarnock social worker,

who simply returned her to the children's home.

Scottish social workers were poorly prepared and poorly trained

for the tragedies that lay ahead.

When I look back,

I can see some children that were being emotionally abused,

or possibly sexually abused,

but, in fact, I did some checking for another reason,

and sexual abuse wasn't mentioned in textbooks until the 1980s.

So, I was 20 years into my career when, in fact,

it became something that people were aware of, would take notice of,

and got some help with dealing with.

Faced with growing evidence of child sexual abuse,

Scottish social workers rushed to react.

In early 1991, on the Orkney island of South Ronaldsay,

a single confirmed case of child sexual abuse mushroomed into

suspicions that four families were involved in ritualised abuse.

In a series of dawn raids on 27 February, nine children were

taken from the arms of their parents by social workers.

They said to us that,

"We have reason to believe they've been sexually abused."

And that was it.

They didn't say who was supposed to have abused them,

why, when, how or anything.

That was the only thing that they said.

I went up to get the children,

and they locked themselves in the bathroom.

Well, we eventually got the children out of the bathroom,

and then they went.

They got their shoes on and they got their coats and they went.

-SHE SOBS

-I'm sorry...

The children were flown to places of safety

on the Scottish mainland,

where they were held for 36 days,

until a sheriff ruled that the decision to remove the children

had been fatally flawed and incompetent.

-Give it in for that!

-Hear, hear!

-Here, now!

Make a statement...

On 4 April, parents stormed the Kirkwall social work office,

demanding the immediate return of their children.

You have made innocent children and families suffer.

What are you going to do about it?

If you are a little bit frightened, Madam, it won't nearly be enough.

-Can I ask that we see...?

-Nobody's listening to you any more.

-We've heard what the sheriff had to say.

-Please, calm down.

Yeah, we want the children home. What are you going to do about it?

Calm down?! You took our children!

You took our children!

You made them suffer! You made us...

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

That same evening, the children came home.

The social workers were universally condemned.

Anne Black worked on the 1992 Clyde Report into what had gone wrong.

It was a very black period in social work and social work services,

because people couldn't understand how children were

whipped away so quickly,

and without necessarily all that much evidence at that point.

People, when they saw behaviour that worried them,

perhaps jumped to conclusions and acted very quickly,

and I think that was public pressure, media pressure...

You know, we can't let children suffer.

The sins of Scotland's past -

Orkney, Nazareth House, and boarding out.

Every week, it seems, new tragedies are unearthed,

and there are still many haunted by decisions taken in their

childhood by the men and women trusted to look after them.

Boarded out to Tiree in 1969,

Glasgow Corporation social workers

had told Stewart Wilson that he was an only child.

He'd been given no details of his biological mother.

As an infant, Stewart had been adopted by his grandparents.

When he recovered his adoption paperwork,

he discovered startling new information.

They pulled out an A3-sized envelope with a big court seal

on the front of it.

"Sealed on this day, 10 December 1965,

"by order of the Glasgow Sheriff Court."

For the attention of me.

I got it photocopied, took it home,

and I found out I had five sisters and a brother,

at the age of 40.

To say I was shocked was an understatement.

It then took me possibly three years to track the first one down,

so I was trying to trace my brother.

I went on Friends Reunited,

and then his widow contacted me to say he'd died three months earlier.

He'd had a brain tumour, and spent the last six years of his life

trying to find me.

But because the records were sealed on me,

my own brother couldn't find me.

I thought that was it,

and then when I was 50,

while still trying to trace my mother,

I found out she had died in Glasgow in 1983 at the age of 36.

Again, nobody had told me.

Such is life.

Yeah, I'm angry I wasn't given the information,

because I could have made so much of that, and formed a relationship

with my brother and my mother,

and got to know their kids as they were growing up.

Somebody in authority decided that I shouldn't have to know.

Erm...

And they obviously got it wrong, but I...

I wasn't the only person in Scotland that happened to.

It happened to thousands of children,

because the authorities at the time had too much power.

Physically abused and shut off from his family,

Stewart Wilson could be a blueprint for

where Scottish childcare went wrong.

Much effort has been placed in getting it right.

In 2003, a young girl from Lanarkshire had grown up to

be appointed Scotland's first Commissioner for Children.

Well, I spent the first six years of my life

in an interesting street in Hamilton.

You know, I remember one family who just disappeared,

and we were told that the children had been taken away by the cruelty -

the youngest one first and then two older boys -

and I used to think, you know, what that was like.

I had this vision of the cruelty as looking like a burglar,

you know, with a sack, swag sack on it...

But there were a family where,

you know, we used to see the children sitting out on the step.

-I'm sorry.

-That's all right.

-I know, really, I just...

-Sorry. Aye.

-These wee kids were just hungry.

But we just have to keep reminding ourselves that there are

children whose basic needs are not being met,

and that we have to find ways of doing that,

and making sure that children have their basic needs met,

and are able to have a happy and fulfilled life,

and I think happiness is an important word.

So, in 2017, are Scotland's most vulnerable children

any closer to happiness?

19-year-old Adam came into care in 2012.

He now lives with Colin, a full-time foster carer.

Since 2003, Colin's looked after 17 children.

I really wouldn't be who I am or where I am or what I am

without fostering.

It's just so fundamental to my life.

But it's not who I am.

I often speak to kind of my friends

and I actually find that I can speak to my friends now...

Occasionally, cos I tend to call Colin "Dad",

but I'll occasionally call him my foster carer,

and people will be like...

Be honest, you've done the Star Wars thing recently, "Father".

-I did call you Father. I did.

-It's all about Star Wars.

Yeah, I didn't know how to go about it.

And I speak to one of my friends about it and they don't think

I'm in care, they don't attribute it with anything,

so I think that that's a sign of how good fostering has been for me.

I think there are stigmas attached to care,

I think people see children in care as, you know...

One of the youngest, he always says to me, whenever he tells

people he's in care, the first thing they say is, "Oh, sorry."

-Yeah.

-As if... You know, apologising for where he is.

Today, of the 15,000 Scots now labelled "looked after",

only a tenth are in residential care -

a quarter live with their parents,

and more than a third are with foster carers like Colin.

And since 1995, young Scots can remain in care until the age of six,

a policy designed to increase their stability and prospects.

In 2016, Adam began his third year at Edinburgh University.

I am massively proud watching Adam kind of wander through the

world of university and just fitting in and being part of it

and having a great social set and good friends and that lovely

moment where people say, "Oh, I didn't realise you were in care."

The vulnerable children of the 21st century are far better

protected than the children of 100 years ago.

But even today, government statistics reported that

one in five Scottish children live in poverty...

..and the country's neediest children face new dangers,

just as serious as those faced by their predecessors.

I sometimes think that,

despite all the advances in children's rights,

if you go away back to 1924, the first Declaration of the Rights

of the Child by Eglantyne Jebb, who got the UN to accept it,

it said that mankind owed to the child the best it had to give.

It said that the child that is hungry must be fed and that

the child must be the first to receive relief in times of distress.

And sometimes I think we have to go back to that and ask

ourselves whether, in spite of all of the developments we've had

in children's rights, we are actually fulfilling these very

basic standards that were set out in 1924.

Are we giving children the best we have to give?

Are they first to receive relief in times of distress,

including economic distress?

And are hungry children being fed?

And sometimes I think the answer is no.