Ten Pound Poms: What the Scheme Was and When It Ran

The Ten Pound Poms were British families who emigrated to Australia under the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, which ran from 1945 to 1982. Adults paid ten pounds for the passage and children travelled free. In return they had to stay at least two years or repay the full fare. More than a million Britons went. About a quarter came home, and about half of those turned round and went back again.

The scheme in nine lines

• Official name: the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme.
• Ran from: 1945 to 1982. New Zealand operated its own version from 1947 to 1971.
• Cost: £10 per adult, children free. Raised to £75 in 1973.
• The condition: stay two years or repay the passage.
• How many went: more than a million Britons to Australia; a further 76,673 to New Zealand.
• Peak year: 1969, with over 80,000 arrivals.
• On arrival: migrant hostels, often ex-army camps. Bonegilla in Victoria was the largest and longest-running.
• How many came back: around 250,000. Roughly 125,000 of those returned to Australia a second time, and were known as Boomerang Poms.
• The name: the ten pound fare, plus Pom, an Australian word for the English already in use before the First World War. The tidy story that Pom comes from the fee is wrong.

Why Australia wanted them

Arthur Calwell became Australia’s first Minister for Immigration in July 1945, and the argument he made to parliament was blunt: the country could not hold a continent for itself and its descendants unless it greatly increased its numbers. Populate or perish. The Japanese advance had been close enough to make that sound like defence policy rather than rhetoric.

The target was population growth of one per cent a year from immigration alone. Britons were the first choice, and the response was immediate: by 1947 more than four hundred thousand had registered. Between 1946 and 1960, migration accounted for over a third of Australia’s population growth, some 1.2 million people.

Why Britain let them go

Assisted emigration to the dominions was not an invention of 1945. It had statutory backing in Britain from the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, and the post-war scheme was a continuation of an imperial habit: surplus people at home, empty land in the dominions, move one to the other.

What made it work in the fifties was the state of the country they were leaving. Rationing did not end until 1954. Housing was short and much of it was damaged. A family in two rooms in a bomb-scarred city, offered a berth for ten pounds and a photograph of a bungalow with a garden, did not need much persuading.

What the two-year condition actually meant

This is the part that gets sentimentalised out of the story. Ten pounds bought the outward passage. The fare home was upwards of a hundred and twenty pounds, and if you left before two years you owed the difference.

For most families that was not a penalty, it was an impossibility. It meant that a woman who arrived at a hostel in the heat with two small children and understood within a fortnight that she had made a mistake had two years to serve before the question could even be asked. A great many stayed because they could not afford to leave, and then stayed on because by then the children had accents.

The hostels

The brochures showed bungalows. What met most families was a hostel: corrugated iron huts on former army camps, communal dining, a single room per family, shared washing blocks. Bonegilla, in Victoria, took more than three hundred thousand people over its working life and is the one most often remembered, though there were dozens.

Some families were out within weeks. Others were there for a year or more.

The part that usually gets left out

The scheme was not only recruitment. It was selection. Calwell’s 1945 announcement opened Australia to Europeans beyond the British Isles for the first time, and that was genuinely a watershed — but the restrictions on non-European migration stayed. Britain was subsidising the export of white workers to a country that wanted them in large part because they were white.

And it was happening at the same time as the opposite argument at home. The Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury in June 1948 carrying British subjects with every legal right to be here, into a country that treated their arrival as a problem to be managed. So in the same years, and out of the same Treasury, Britain was paying a million of its own people to leave and telling citizens of its colonies that there was no room.

That is not a modern reading imposed on the past. It is simply the two policies set beside each other, which is rarely how either is told.

One thing worth separating out: the ten pound scheme is not the child migration programmes. Those sent unaccompanied children, many of them wrongly told they were orphans, and they are a distinct and far darker story. The two get conflated because they overlap in time.

Who went

Two Australian prime ministers, for a start. Julia Gillard’s family emigrated from Barry in 1966; Tony Abbott was born in London and came out as a small child. The Gibb brothers went to Queensland in 1958 and came back as the Bee Gees. The Young family left Glasgow for Sydney in 1963, and two of the sons formed AC/DC. Harold Larwood, the Bodyline bowler, emigrated in 1950 to the country whose batsmen he had spent a winter terrorising. Kylie Minogue’s mother went out as a child.

It is a strange list, and it is worth remembering that it represents about one in a hundred thousand of them. The rest built houses, taught in schools, worked in factories and did not become anything in particular, which is what emigration usually looks like.

Coming home

Around a quarter came back. What is more interesting is that roughly half of those who came back went out to Australia a second time, which is why the Boomerang Poms have a name at all.

That is the shape of the whole thing. Not a triumph and not a scandal, but a very large number of ordinary people making an irreversible decision on ten pounds and a photograph, and then spending years working out whether they had been right.

Sources

• Ten Pound Poms, for the terms of the scheme, the numbers and the return figures.
• Postwar immigration drive, National Museum of Australia, on Calwell, the one per cent target and the 1945 announcement.
• Post-War British Migration to Australia, Museums Victoria.

Why I write about this

I write about people who leave and about what it costs them, which is most of what my books are about. I have also written about Robert Tressell’s grave — a man who died in Liverpool waiting for a ship to Canada — and about the 1995 dockers’ dispute. If your family went out on ten pounds and my account of it is wrong anywhere, I would like to hear it.