Children and Empire Day

'So we'll do our best while we're children
To grow up kind and true,
To keep up the fame of our Empire's name
And the old Red, White and Blue'

'Our Flag', New Zealand School Journal, Part I, June 1921

Children were key targets for Empire Day. Lord Meath's Empire Day messages encouraged them to celebrate the history of British royalty or the Empire. 'Remember brave warriors, pioneers, sea captains, 'Queen Victoria the Good'' ', he said in 1912.

Empire Day at Stratford

Think of the Empire as one big happy family, younger children were told. 'Britain is like a mother with many children who have gone from her into other countries to earn their living', the School Journal advised. 'She still loves them; she sends them many kind messages, and helps them in every way she can. And the children, the people far away from her, love her in return ... This little mother and all her big children we call the Empire, and we keep up Empire Day just as we might keep up our mother's birthday in the family, to show that we are still her loving children'.

In 1909, the School Journal likened colonials to swallows leaving their nest, flying overseas and then returning. That swallows were northern rather than southern hemisphere creatures did not worry Journal editors; dormice and other foreign critters infested their magazine.

Older children got a less homely homily. In 1912 Classes V and VI were warned that if 'citizens of the British Empire lose their simple and hardy ways of living, and become lovers of ease, the Empire will pass away'.

Occasionally, darker family secrets were shared. 'While we call to mind to-day the great multitude of brave men and women who sowed that we might reap', the School Journal told pupils, 'it is well that we should remember that the British Empire has sometimes grown by ways of which we are not proud'. That meant slavery and the Opium Wars.

Here, as elsewhere in the Empire, educators often diluted or resisted imperialism's propagandists. The School Journal kept printing articles about royalty, but by the 1930s the special 'Empire Day Numbers' had been dropped.