Thomas Barnardo

Thomas Barnardo was born in Dublin, a small, short-sighted and combative boy who underwent an evangelical conversion at sixteen. In 1866 he came to London to study medicine, intending to go as a missionary to China. Cholera was killing thousands in the East End, and he began preaching and teaching in Stepney, opening a ragged school in a donkey shed.

One night a boy called Jim Jarvis, who had no home, took him through the streets and showed him children sleeping in gutters and on roofs. Barnardo gave up China. In 1870 he opened his first home for boys in Stepney Causeway. When an eleven-year-old known as Carrots was turned away for lack of space and found dead of exposure days later, Barnardo put up a sign: no destitute child ever refused admission. A village of cottages for girls followed at Barkingside.

He was a brilliant fundraiser and a difficult man. He called himself Doctor for years before he had a qualification. In 1877 an arbitration hearing examined accusations that he had staged before-and-after photographs of children in rags to raise money, and had taken children from parents without consent, which he called philanthropic abduction. The photographs charge was found to be partly true. From 1882 he sent thousands of children to Canada as farm labour, a policy later judged to have caused great harm to many of them.

By his death in 1905 his homes had taken in around 60,000 children and trained them for work.