THE plight of five orphaned siblings from Cirencester, rumoured to have been sold into slavery in Brazil, shocked readers of the Standard more than 140 years ago.

George Harmer, the Standard’s then editor, contacted the Foreign Office to demand an investigation and launched a fund to rescue the children and return them home to Cirencester.

But how did these children, previously residing at Cirencester’s workhouse, find themselves in Brazil during the early 1870s?

The Standard’s Joe Lumley reports.

George Bond was a widower with six children, an elderly mother and a grandchild in the Cirencester workhouse. So when the opportunity arose in 1872 to be reunited with his family and start afresh in Brazil, passage paid, it was an offer he could hardly refuse.

Except Bond died shortly after arriving in Brazil, so his children ended up in a Brazilian orphanage. And when reports were published in the Standard that Bond’s children had been sold into slavery there was a diplomatic outcry.

The historian Oliver Marshall makes reference to the Bonds of Cirencester in his book, Pioneer Settlers in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.

The book tells how the Brazilian government sought out British farm workers, recruiting thousands from about 1850 onwards.

Marshall introduces the reader to Bond, from Park Street, a master blacksmith, whose wife Emma Gegg died after giving birth to their sixth child in 1870. The six Bond children - along with Bond’s 85-year old mother - were then taken to the Cirencester Union Workhouse.

Bond claimed his children in late 1872, around the time of his mother’s death. By then there was an addition to the family, a baby girl named Lucy, born a workhouse ‘inmate’ to Bond’s eldest child, Clara, in September.

At this time the agricultural labourers’ union was recruiting would-be emigrants for Brazil and an agent persuaded Bond, according to Clara, that “we should do a [great] deal better in [Brazil] than in England and should have a [great] deal of money”.

The Bond family left England at Christmas 1872, travelling to Brazil via Liverpool, arriving a month later in Rio de Janeiro. They were then all sent to a lodge in Curitiba, the capital of the Brazilian state of Paraná.

Bond was sent to sharpen tools used by construction gangs working on a road linking Curitiba with Assunguy, leaving the children at the lodge, under the care of Clara. But within days Bond fell ill and two weeks later, on 16 May 1873, he died.

Mr Marshall said: “His death, most likely as a result of alcohol, became a diplomatic situation after news of the now orphaned Bond children appeared in a series of reports in the Standard.”

A letter in the newspaper from Jane Lander, originally from Cirencester but living in Antonina, said that the “head man” had “sold some of the children”, a sale only stopped after intervention by other English immigrants.

“It sounds far-fetched but slavery still existed in Brazil,” Mr Marshall said.

The news that Charles (13), Annie (11), Emma (10), Ernest (7) and Alfred (3) – might have been sold, sent shockwaves through the readers of the Standard.

But within weeks, the story altered, with claims the children benefited from their father’s death.

“George Bond, a confirmed drunkard,” the Foreign Office informed Harmer, “died near Curitiba of delirium tremens, and his eldest daughter (Clara) who had an illegitimate child, went off to Assunguy with an emigrant by the name of Hatching.”

The local Judge of Orphans, readers were reassured, placed the children under the protection of “respectable families”.

To return the children to England, Harmer concluded, would be expensive and as the British minister was satisfied they were being well treated, unnecessary.

The eldest boy, Charles, was said to have found a good position as a domestic servant, while the younger children were accepted more as family members.

Clara and Hatching left the colony in Assunguy after a few months and walked to Antonina then begged a passage to the port of Paranaguá in the hope of returning to England.

Mr Marshall said: “They later separated but I’m pretty sure Clara and her baby made it back to Cirencester.”

The historian confirmed the surname Bond and other English surnames still feature in the telephone directory in-and-around Curitiba today, with dozens of listings.

One descendant of the Bond family, who remains in Paraná, is Mauro Fortes Carneiro, whose great-grandfather was Ernest Bond - son of George.

Any readers who are descendants of Clara Bond, or any other Brazil emigrants, are asked contact Joe Lumley at the Standard on 01285 627317.