Forgive me first some snidery concerning our golden past, as depicted to me unceasingly by the army that laments the loss of the old Britain, and — using both the broad brushes of generalisation and the narrow ones of urban myth — paints its picture of a castrated, nanny-statebound, immigrant-beset, health-and-safety nightmare of a modern landscape. This too, friends, was happening in your ideal State: we were deporting thousands of small children, our own British small children, to the other side of the world, and then forgetting about them. Out of sight, out of mind, in that robust, superior time.

It’s not that the traffic was unknown. There’ll be a Pathé News somewhere from the late 1940s, with a breezy commentary about how these waving nippers and tiddlers are off to a better place in the sunshine of Oz or on the fertile prairies of Canada. So off they went, and our grandfathers and grandmothers, as a nation, never thought to demand what had become of them. You can find still photographs, marked the “Asturias Party 1950”, of smiling boys with teddies, ties and elastic serpent-belts, and overcoated girls with dolls.

John Hennessy sailed on the Asturias with 146 other children. He had no idea where Australia was. He was sent to an orphanage in Western Australia, where, some months after arriving, he was savagely beaten for stealing grapes from a vineyard. Other children, who had been in institutions, were told — as part of a deliberate policy of hiding their living connections — that their parents were dead. Brothers and sisters were separated, and only a tiny minority of child migrants were adopted.

Back in Britain parents were told that their children had gone to Australia and forced to accept that this was the best thing for them. Tens of thousands made the journey before the Second World War. And between 1946 and 1967 7,000 children were trafficked in this way. Well, what else would you call it? If there were stories, there were none that changed anything for decades.

This was a non-therapeutic age, in which emotional neglect, charitable abuse and arbitrary power were taken for granted. Someone in authority had decided — genuinely — that it was in the best interests of these children to be sent 13,000 miles away, and that was good enough. Were there BBC investigations? Were there campaigns and demonstrations? Did MPs travel to the former colonies to demand answers to hard questions?

No. Indeed, before the mid-1980s, when Margaret Humphreys, a social worker from Nottinghamshire, began to see a common theme in the lives of Australians trying to track down their British relatives, no one, it seems, took much of an interest at all.

In 1993 the BBC showed the documentary The Leaving of Liverpool, concerning what might be called the anti-Kinder transports. After the screening Humphreys’ helpline took 10,000 calls from people affected by the broadcast. In that same year the Christian Brothers apologised for abuses committed in the homes they ran in Western Australia. Yesterday, 16 years later, the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, made an apology for the treatment of the children — most dead, many elderly.

Gordon Brown will do the same soon. Many will suggest that he shouldn’t. Mr Rudd’s predecessor, John Howard, took the view that today’s Australians shouldn’t say sorry for stuff done by their close ancestors. One reason for such a view is that historical apologies can, in a certain light, look silly.

In 2001, for example, Pope John Paul II seemed to apologise to the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of Athens for the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by Western knights (most Venetian) participating in the Fourth Crusade. It was tragic, he said, “that the assailants, who set out to secure free access for Christians to the Holy Land, turned against their brothers in the faith”.

In a characteristic reductio one of our more anguished commentators yesterday expressed the view that, “at this rate, it surely can’t be long before Mr Brown feels obliged to apologise to the farming community for the 19th-century Corn Laws or to the Queen for the execution of Charles I”, thus demonstrating that she knew neither what the Corn Laws were, nor what concrete revenge was exacted upon the regicides after the Restoration.

But this ignorance doesn’t entirely blunt her thrust. What is the purpose of an apology for acts that the apologisers did not carry out, or that they cannot restore? The suspicion is raised that such an act of sorry is a cheap and convenient way of gaining good publicity. Mark the odd words used by Mr Brown when apologising to the gay Bletchley scientist, Alan Turing, who killed himself in 1952. On behalf of the British Government, said the PM: “I am very proud to say: we’re sorry.”

We’re proud that we’re sorry? Or we’re proud to say it? There’s some truth in the criticism, of course. But recall Hamlet’s famous question concerning the lead actor in the travelling players. “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,” muses the prince, “That he should weep for her?” The man’s tears — though he is an actor — might be a spur to Hamlet’s own real action. I didn’t deport the children, but as the undeported child of a generation that did, I can associate myself with the contrition that ought to be felt towards them.

And I think it does some good. The Turing apology was a recognition for a dying and suppressed generation of gay people, that we now realise how much they were made to suffer for the prejudices of others. It’s a form of truth and reconciliation. The Australian opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull put it beautifully: “We acknowledge that, already feeling alone, abandoned and left without love, many of you were beaten and abused, physically, sexually, mentally — treated like objects not people — leaving you to feel of even less worth.”

“You can’t say sorry for a lost childhood,” said one of the forgotten children. “But you can acknowledge it, and that’s what I needed.”

Yesterday, too, it was revealed that André Hanscombe, the boyfriend of Rachel Nickell, murdered on Clapham Common, had apologised to the man wrongly accused of her murder, Colin Stagg. Mr Stagg, made not a penny better off for such an apology, nevertheless said he was “very touched” and that the apology must have been “difficult”.

I salute them both. Give me the touchy-feely age of today over the stoical Golden Years any time.

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