A boy named Ethelbert
In 1896 a tragedy took place. Little 16-month old Ethelbert drowned in a storm water drain where he had gone to retrieve a ball. Francis and Tom Corbishley grieved deeply for their little son, and out of their grief came the decision to erect a living monument to their son.
They decided to spend what would have been needed to rear Ethelbert on other, less fortunate children. The family was also determined that the Home, named after their son, would be as much of a real home to the children who lived there as possible. Ten years after the sad incident – the Corbishley’s idea was put to the quarterly meeting of the Durban Methodist Central Circuit. The family would give about three and a half acres of land in Malvern together with £1 000 towards the erection of a children’s home and a second
£1 000 at the rate of £200 per annum for five years, on condition that the Circuit would realise £500 towards the building and furnishing of the home, as well as a further £100 per annum for maintenance.
The building of a Home
The foundation stone was laid in June 1907 and eight months later, on 12 February 1908 the first eight children were admitted. (4 girls and 4 boys)
A few memories gleaned from the records:
“Two boys, aged eight and six, whose father had brain fever for over a year “during which time he has been unable to earn anything for support of wife and children. The mother is now able to go out and earn a living”.
“Three girls of eight, seven and fourteen of a family of five. “The father has left and it is not known today whether he is alive or dead. The mother is now able to go out and earn a living”.
“Two boys aged six and four and a girl aged three. “The father has been in Australia for over a year during which time the mother has received only £3 from him. She has a baby in arms. Now she will be able to find employment as a housekeeper in a private home to which she can take her infant.”
These were the kind of children Ethelbert Children’s Home and Orphanage took in for more than half a century – children who needed a roof over their heads, a healthy diet, a warm bed to sleep in and people around them who cared for and loved them.
The Methodist Church and other supporters
The children’s material needs have always been partially met by the Methodist Church. Even before the first children were admitted, the church decided to give all Christmas Day collections throughout Natal (KZN) to the Home - a practice which continues to this day. The Methodist Church’s Women’s Auxiliary, has taken an active interest in the children over the decades and helped to make the Ethelbert children as comfortable as possible.
The Home has also been fortunate to have had prominent and wealthy Durban families on the management committee – the generosity of the Greenacres, the Payne’s and the Gobles amongst others, is well documented in the old minute books. In more recent years the names of the Haleys, Corbishleys, Pooles, Dyers and Rycroft families are listed amongst the leaders of the Ethelbert family.
Early on it became a principle of the Home that where parents and friends could contribute, they be asked to do so; although today most parents are not in the position to give financial support.
Later, the Durban Community Chest supplemented the Home’s funds with generous contributions and further financial help came by way of Government subsidies. As a result of all this, there is no reference to any serious financial crises and no threat of closure due to lack of funds, in the Home’s historical documents. Although there have been times when money was tight, the Home survived and even during the years of the Great Depression the records indicate that the Home was well able to keep the children physically comfortable.
Today one third of the funds come from a Government subsidy, almost a third from the Christmas Day collections and the rest of the funds required are raised by the Home itself. This is an enormous task, which entails selling of Christmas cards, street collections, golf days, other individual functions as well as appeals to the business and private sector. This task is undertaken by the committee, PRO officer and volunteers from the community.
Life at Ethelbert
At first the boys and girls were housed in a single double-storey building – the existing hall at the Home today is all that remains of that original structure. The girls were accommodated upstairs and the boys downstairs. Later the Corbishley family provided extra ground and another house was built for the girls.
From the beginning the children were integrated into the Malvern community as much as possible. They attended government schools in the area and were encouraged from the start to bring their school friends home for visits. In a 1909 log book, for example, we read about a Malvern gala, where “our little ones carry off the prizes”.
In the early days, trained sisters were recruited from the National Children’s Homes in London, to provide the children with the love and care they required. Sister Edna was the first. She was followed by Sister Lottie Freeman and then Sister Grace Burrows took over as matron. All of them enjoyed long service at the Home. Other matrons have followed, equally dedicated, until the structure of the Home changed in 1973 to appointing principals. Ernie Nightingale held this post for 28 years. Andy Lemley then took the reigns for six years and Sean Ingram presently holds the position of principal at Ethelbert.
Changing the face of Ethelbert
Towards the end of the forties, the committee involved with the running of the Home realised that however hard they tried, the Home would essentially remain an institution as long as the girls and boys lived separately in boarding school-type accommodation. Like children at boarding school, they lacked the love and individual care that come from living in a small family.
After sixteen years of planning, Ethelbert introduced the “cottage system” of residential care – a concept entirely new to children’s homes in Durban. The six new homes were opened in November 1959. One newspaper headline describes it as an experiment, another heralds the event as the opening of “a new era in child-care in Durban”.
The scheme cost £40 000 and consisted of six cottages each equipped with a kitchen, lounge, dining-room and five or six small bedrooms. This meant that the children could be fully integrated – boys and girls and brothers and sisters of different ages living together as they would at home. Each cottage was supervised by a housemother and the overall running of the Home was taken over for the first time by a married couple.
By this time the background of the children entering the Home had changed. They were no longer all orphaned or destitute. Most of them had parents, food to eat, clothes to wear and a roof over their heads. The reasons for their committal were many and varied – some were products of a broken home, others the victims of abuse, others still in families which just couldn’t cope with the responsibility of having children – and what they needed was an understanding of their problems by people qualified and trained to deal with them.
Recruiting the right staff
The challenge facing Ethelbert now was to find suitable staff – men and women who saw their jobs as more than caretakers. Staffing of the Home had become a serious problem. A period of fifteen months saw 21 staff changes including a matron and a principal, as staff found it increasingly difficult to cope with the changing behaviour patters of children who had been rejected too many times by their families, other adults and an inadequate welfare system. At that time anyone could get a job in a children’s home. There were no regulations governing qualifications for the employment of staff and there was no adequate formal training programme. The Witwatersrand College of Advanced Technical Education offered a correspondence course for child-care workers. To qualify for the course only a standard six pass was needed. Child-care work was a very small part of the social work degree offered at universities. Low salaries and demanding working conditions also made the job unattractive. The Home offered a two-year in-service training course for child-care workers, supplementing the correspondence course with lectures by outside experts and practical experience in the Home. But it became impossible to carry on without a government subsidy for training.
The Home adopted the attitude that if they were not able to do more than simply feed and clothe the children, it was better to leave them with their parents. As a result, Ethelbert held out for suitable staff even if this meant reducing the number of children in the Home and closing cottages if necessary.
The “orphanage” part of the Ethelbert name was deliberately dropped by the Home in the seventies, in another attempt to change its image – to make the public aware of the change which has occurred inside the Home and to encourage society to approach children in care with a vision that goes beyond mere charity.
Ernie’s era
In the 1970’s under the leadership of Ernie Nightingale, Ethelbert Children’s Home was at the forefront of the struggle to provide trained, professional personnel for child-care work. This meant educating the government, the public and child-care workers themselves for the need of training. This was done through the National Association of Child-Care Workers (NACCW) whose founders included people representing the interest of children at Ethelbert. The Home’s then principal, Ernie Nightingale, was elected first national chairman of this organisation. After much pressure from the NACCW, at the beginning of 1980, technicons throughout the country offered a part-time, post-matric higher certificate course in residential child-care work.
In 1980 the Home appointed its own part-time social worker to look seriously at family reconstruction. Until then, reconstruction work was attempted by outside agencies which had their own problems as far as staff was concerned. Coping with vast case loads of their own, these social workers simply did not have the time to do any serious work in this field. In 1981 a full-time social worker was employed to work with the children and a part-time remedial teacher was engaged to work with the little ones. House parents (married couples) were employed to care for the children.
The staff lived in the cottages with the children, so the Home rented a flat in Malvern for the sole use of the staff during their time off. When that was sold, a small cottage was built on the grounds of the Home for staff use only. This gave them a measure of privacy and an opportunity to recoup the resources they needed to cope with the needs of the children. The introduction of new Labour legislation changed the working conditions of staff and they no longer live in the cottages, some live out and some occupy separate accommodation at the Home when not on duty.
The children have their own holiday home in Park Rynie, which accommodates 24 children. In the past the children were “placed out” for holidays. But the Home realised that this only served to make the children more insecure and restless – it was impossible to expect them to establish a relationship with another family for four weeks of the year knowing that they would not see that family for another year at least. The use of host families (volunteers from the community) who accommodate children for weekends and holidays helps to provide children with the experience of living within a functional family where they can enjoy the warmth and hospitality of a family unit.
New programmes
Towards the end of the 1980’s Ethelbert once again set the pace for residential child care services by introducing a totally new concept of treatment and care for children living in institutions. These new programmes of short term residential treatment and long term residential care were introduced. The aim was to ensure that decisions about children and their families were made within a two year period and to work towards the best possible placement for each child within that time. The long term care programme was only for those children who were without any means of support. These programmes were submitted to the Department of Social Welfare for subsidisation. This also meant that the staff working in the short term programme were no longer house parents, but child-care workers that had a more professional role to play in a structured two-year plan. The staff also changed their hours of work and a two-tier shift system was introduced.
This new programme brought on the realisation that staff really needed to have specialised training. Ethelbert started a new training centre in 1990 under the guidance of Ernie Nightingale and headed by Llyris Rielly. This was the first and only centre in South Africa offering a full time training course in residential child care. The centre was sponsored by Mobile Oil S.A. and ran successfully until the technicons realised the need and started a full time child-care course of their own.
The 1990’s brought more exciting programmes to life at Ethelbert. In 1991 the integration of children of all race groups took place at Ethelbert. It took many years of negotiations with Government, as their policy, at the time did not allow for cross cultural placements. The transition took place smoothly and life went on without incident.
Little Miracles
Ethelbert established a separate residential section for toddlers and pre-school children and in 1992 opened ‘Little Miracles’ a day-care centre and nursery school, headed by a qualified pre-primary teacher in the form of Janice van Heerden – a former resident of Ethelbert Home. An after school care service was also established. These services were specifically offered to assist disadvantaged members of the community and families who were unable to provide adequate care for their children while they were at work.
In 1995 the Home experienced a period of great uncertainty in terms of the funding. The Department of Social Services made many policy changes and recommended that children’s homes be transformed to reflect all levels of intervention and practice. Only children with serious emotional or behavioural problems, or seriously disabled or orphaned and abandoned children, would find their way into children’s homes. This was a very difficult time of readjustment and financial problems resulted in a cut back on activities and services. Little Miracles day care centre and the newly established baby unit had to be closed down.
In 1996 in response to the Government’s call that children’s homes become more integrated and representative of the needs of the community, part of Ethelbert’s unused land was put aside to build a retirement village for aged members of the community. The vision of helping aged folk to be able to have their own home under the management of the Ethelbert umbrella and to keep prices realistic soon found great appeal and a waiting list for accommodation has been created.
Bidding Ernie and Rosa farewell
After 28 years of faithful and devoted service, our beloved ‘Uncle Ernie’ and ‘Auntie Rosa’ retired from Ethelbert Home leaving a legacy of commitment, forward thinking, love and caring. Not only had Ernie been at the forefront of child care, he had been an inspiration to so many in that field. He led Ethelbert Children’s Home into new pastures, always looking ahead and remaining mindful of the needs of children and members of the community. Although retired from child care, Ernie has remained available to Ethelbert and has generously shared his knowledge and skillswith us whenever asked to do so.
More recent times
Ethelbert Home had known adversity in the past, but now faced financial worries while dealing with the departure of two principals in a short space of time as well as having no principal for six months. Strengthened by the prayers of our many, many Methodist friends and supporters we carried on the work and problems were overcome. The hard work of the executive committee and the newly appointed principal, Andy Lemley, ensured that financial problems were overcome and good child-care practises put in place. Ethelbert had again, as in the past, adapted to change and embraced the new challenges of 21st century residential work.
Tragedy struck in the 100th year when the then principal Andy Lemley passed away very suddenly. Again, Ethelbert was without a principal. Another six month period ensued without a principal, but owing to the strong infrastructure and dedication of the staff, life went on smoothly. Sean Ingram was appointed in April 2007 to lead the Ethelbert team and he still does.
