Perhaps only the stark title of the exhibition currently running until 4 October at Liverpool’s Merseyside Maritime Museum, “On Their Own”, can sum up the situation of the children – from toddlers to teenagers – sent to Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Mavis Appleyard must have spoken for many when she said: “I leaned over the railings [of the ship] and watched the ropes which held us to the dock. When they slipped into the water, my heart sank with them.”Mavis was one of 100,000 children sent to the countries of the so-called “White Commonwealth”, as well as to what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, in the century up to the late 1960s.The first child migrants were sent to New England in the seventeenth century, but it was Ma