Seven SEWELL Children, Their Orphanage Years – An Update

By Richard Jones

This article was published in the April 2018 edition of Soul Search, the journal of The Sole Society

Ed: We’ll, not really an update, but a bit that I missed out of the original article in the August 2016 journal! The original article by Richard Jones told of his mother’s siblings who were sent to Newland Homes Orphanage in Hull in the 1930s. It doesn’t add to the story but is a lovely bit of social history which, as regular readers of the journal will know, I am very fond of!

Richard writes:

One of the most memorable new pieces of information that came out of my first conversation with [my uncle] Glen is his knowledge of a book, At the flick of a wish, written by George Elton in 1988. The initial chapters of George’s book cover his time from the age of 3 Years and 5 Months, October 1915, to his 15th birthday in May 1927, where George was confined to the same orphanage and at much the same ages as the Sewell Children. Although his life at the orphanage was a decade before those of the Sewell Children, there are three statements from the book that I would like to include in this document that I think are indicative of the lives the Sewell Children would have lived in the orphanage