I really enjoyed Dan Snow’s recent series on BBC2, Empire of the Seas.

It was a thoroughly enthralling story of England’s and then Britain’s rise as a global imperial power. For me, it was one of the best current explanations of who we are, where we came from, and how at its height, a third of the world was painted pink on maps; an empire over which the sun would never set!

As a child, myself, I loved this period of history – and Snow’s series, for me, was a great nostalgic look back at the fantastic heroics of Nelson and the great explorations of Captain Cook. But it was precisely that, a nostalgic look back.

Today, quite rightly, the British Government is apologising for a terrible chapter in Britain’s quite recent imperial past. We now know that from the 1920s onwards, there was a clear policy – agreed between Britain and her Dominion governments – of child migration to help maintain and grow the ‘white’ population principally in Australia (though others were sent to South Africa, Rhodesia, Canada and New Zealand too). This policy affected no fewer than 130,000 British children over several decades.

In 2010 we are understandably appalled that any British government – of the left or right – could allow this practice to happen, particularly as archive reports show that concerns were raised at the time about the poor living conditions and the physical and sexual abuse faced by those children.

And what shocked me the most was that this wasn’t just from the pages of the inter-war history books; BBC News yesterday interviewed a man who had been sent to Australia as a five-year-old in 1970. That was only four years before I was born!

I hope, as with Kevin Rudd’s apology in Australia a few months back, the British Government’s apology today can help the process of healing for those now adult ‘child’ victims and their families.

It won’t undo those terrible experiences, but it is a chapter in Commonwealth history we should be very keen to to acknowledge and close – though for the sake of those children, never, ever forget.