A Child Immigrant Comes to Canada by Rose McCormick Brandon

Grace Griffin Galbraith

“I can never regret coming to Canada. I have had to work hard but I don’t mind that for I love to work.” Grace Griffin Galbraith, my grandmother, wrote these words in 1928. She was twenty-five and a perfect candidate for regret. She immigrated to Canada as an eight year-old with her sister, Lily. The two, and later their brother, Edward, arrived through a child immigration agreement between the United Kingdom and Canada. After their father’s death and their mother’s remarriage, Grace and her siblings were placed in the Annie MacPherson Home for Children in the east end of London, England. They remained there until their mother’s death, after which their paternal grandmother signed the Canada Clause giving the Home permission to send the children to Canada.

Grace became one of more than one hundred thousand children to immigrate to Canada between 1869 and 1939. She landed in Quebec on May 13, 1912.

Most child immigrants became indentured servants contracted to work as farm hands and mother’s helpers. Lily was sent to Toronto and Grace to a southern Ontario farm. At the end of her thirty-day trial period Grace was returned to MacPherson’s Canadian Home in Stratford because she “not wholly satisfactory.” This isn’t surprising since she had never been on a farm. Her next placement also ended after thirty days.

Grace’s third placement took her to Manitoulin Island. This home welcomed her at first but later reneged on their contractual responsibility to send Grace to school for at least three months each year. One day, a local minister, Rev. Munroe, arrived at the farm and found Grace in alarming condition.  He immediately removed her and took her to live with a family that attended his church, the Gilpins. She stayed at this safe and kind home until her marriage at age seventeen.

One year after her marriage to James Galbraith, a farmer with Scottish roots, Grace received the sad news that Lily had died of tuberculosis. She wrote, “It was lonesome for me when Lily died. I missed her sisterly letters.”  

Meanwhile, Grace’s brother, Edward, who had the good fortune to live with a couple who considered him a son and included him in their will, had returned to England where he visited relatives and contacted MacPherson’s for information about his sisters. On his return to Canada, he began a search for Grace. By the time he found her they had been separated for fourteen years.

Grace wrote, “I always have a longing to see some of my folks.” She also made the sad statement, “I can never remember seeing my mother.” How happy she must have been to reunite with her brother. Edward spent a lot of time on Manitoulin with Grace and then moved from Southern Ontario to Sudbury to be closer to her.

By 1928 when Grace wrote that she had no regrets about coming to Canada, she was married, had re-united with Edward and had four daughters. (A son arrived later.) Her difficult childhood days over, Grace’s writings reveal a full and happy life. “I have a good and loving husband and a good home. We have a 100 acre farm, a large barn and a fairly good house. Jim is a very good to help me. He is very fond of children. We have our place paid for now and I must add that we have a 1918 model car but we intend dealing on a new one next spring.”

The Home Children were unprepared for the harshness and isolation of Canadian farm life. One boy expressed it this way: “When I landed on that farm, I looked up and said, ‘Oh God, where am I?’” Whereas most immigrants form communities in their adopted homelands, these children were scattered in ones and twos throughout Canada’s towns and farms. Like Grace, most had more than one placement making it difficult to put down roots.

As we celebrate Canada’s 150^th anniversary, it’s estimated that the descendants of Canada’s child immigrants, the Home Children, make up ten percent of the population. This period in our history serves to remind us how much immigration practices have changed. Today, no serious consideration would be given to a program that sends children overseas to live with and work for strangers. What a debt our country owes these young ones who endured heartbreak and loneliness to become some of Canada’s hardiest and most dedicated citizens.

Grace might have become bitter. Instead, she, like most child immigrants, chose to find hope in her new land. Grace’s positive attitude is reflected in her statement - “I can never regret coming to Canada.”

Grace spent her last twelve years at The Lodge in Gore Bay on Manitoulin Island where she passed away at age ninety-nine in 2003.
*This article was published in The Manitoulin Expositor 2017

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Rose McCormick Brandon wrote Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children and dedicated it to her grandmother, Grace Griffin Galbraith. She's also the author of One Good Word Makes all the Difference and numerous magazine articles. She writes two blogs, Promises of Home and Listening to my Hair Grow. Contact her at: rosembrandon@yahoo.ca  

Quotes Bring Non-Fiction Characters to Life by Rose McCormick Brandon

When writing non-fiction, it’s always helpful to use quotes that not only inform but touch the reader’s heart. In writing the stories of children (more than 100,000) who immigrated to Canada from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales between 1869 and 1939, I like to use the words of the children themselves. It’s difficult to find these but when I do, I store them away and treasure them like gold.

Sometimes it takes a few back and forth conversations with descendants before someone hands me a nugget. Like this one that came to me from Linda Clarkson Pagnini, daughter of Arthur Clarkson.

 

Arthur Clarkson

Arthur Clarkson, a boy who came to Canada in 1909 through Barnardos, an organization that facilitated the immigration of some 30,000 children, was the victim of severe abuse. The farmer he was indentured to whipped him, left him out in the cold and half-starved him. He almost lost both feet. An intelligent and determined boy, Arthur survived, married and made a successful life for his family of eight children. He didn’t speak to his children about his near-death experience at the hands of the cruel farmer but they had a vague idea about it.

 Near the end of his life, as Arthur lay in bed, his daughter read to him the poem, Invictus by William Ernest Henley. When she came to these words -

 In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

 Arthur wept. Then he said these marvellous words: “Life can beat you up, for sure, but you can’t let it break you.”

 When I wrote Arthur’s story, these words became the center-piece.

Cecilia Jowett, front row right

Cecilia Jowett, another Barnardo child immigrant (1901), grew up and fulfilled her dream of becoming a nurse. She wrote these words in her book, No Thought for Tomorrow and I used them in telling her story:

 Oh, I’d never take a child like that into my home, I have heard ladies say. You never know how they will turn out. And there was I, a graduate nurse, in their homes, rendering skilled assistance, perhaps saving, or helping to save, a life. Yet they didn’t dream I was one of those children.



Grace Griffin Galbraith

Whenever I speak about the British Home Children, I always explain that my interest in them grew out of my grandmother’s life. In 1912 Grace Griffin Galbraith was an eight year-old orphan, brought to Canada from England by Annie MacPherson’s organization. As with all child immigrants, she became an indentured servant. She ended up in a caring home, after experiencing rejection and trauma in at least three placements. Her difficulties make this quote from her extremely meaningful. 

I can never regret coming to Canada. I have had to work hard but I don’t mind that for I love to work.

William Edwin Hunt, back row, left

Often the writer’s words alone don't do justice to a story. The story begs for quotes, here and there, to bring it to life. Words from the people for whom the event was no mere story, it was reality.

I never look in the rear-view mirror, I just keep moving forward. William Edwin Hunt, immigrated, age fourteen, 1906, through Smyly’s of Ireland.

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Rose McCormick Brandon is the author of four books including, Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children, Visit her website Writing From the Heart. Two blogs: Promises of Home and Listening to my Hair Grow.

 

A Time to Cry by Rose McCormick Brandon

For the past eighteen months or so I've been working on the book, Promises of Homes, Stories of Canada's British Home Children. Though all the children whose stories appear in the book, except two, have passed on, I've sensed a strong connection to them. As I read their letters, gazed at their photographs, dug up their documents and talked to their off-spring, they became like my children. I grieved over the abuses they suffered and ached for their loneliness. After leaving overflowing orphanages in Britain, these little ones landed on isolated Canadian farms with strangers, most of whom lacked empathy.  

Much was expected of these young immigrants. Though none had ever set foot on a real farm, they were expected to work adult hours in the barn and in the fields. No excuses. Many were mistreated and half-starved. Though their placement families had contracted to send them to school, most didn't.

Like seed, these British Home Children were scattered from Atlantic to Pacific, not in handfuls as would have been appropriate for children, but in singles, one here, another there. Hampered by the derogatory label, Home Child, severed from their familial connections, against the odds, they took root and became grounded and sturdy enough to change the landscape of our young Dominion.

It's time for Canadians to cry over the abuses they suffered, to applaud their successes and, most of all, it's time for us, as a nation, to say, "thank you."

The stories of the these immigrant children are now intertwined with my story. For better, or for worse, we're in this project together.

 



Walter Goulding

Meet Walter Goulding. Walter was eight when his mother died and his father went off to fight for England in WW1. When Walter's father returned from the war, he didn't reclaim Walter from the Barnardo Home for children in London. He re-married, had another son, and when Walter was thirteen, he gave Barnardo's permission to send him to Canada for a "better life."

Walter was placed with a childless couple on an Ontario farm. He said, "I came from the big city of London. When I landed on that farm, I looked up and thought, O Lord, where am I?"

 

When we think of the children, like Walter, and the many hardships they faced alone, our hearts can't help but go out to them.

Walter says that as an eight year-old standing alone in the corridor of that Barnardo Home in England, he felt God with him.

Today, Walter is the oldest living British Home Child in Canada. He lives in a seniors' facility in

London, Ontario where he recently celebrated his 106th birthday. Walter still weeps for the little boy in this photo who lost his entire family.

The writing is finished. My next step is to introduce these children to the rest of Canada. As a group they weren't embraced by previous generations. My hope is that the present generation will take them into their hearts and keep the memory of them alive. As Canadians, we owe them that. Telling their stories is my way of saying thank you to the children. Stories will keep their memory alive.

Walter's complete story is in Promises of Home, Stories of Canada's British Home Children.

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Rose McCormick Brandon is a descendant of four British Home Children.  She writes books and publishes articles on faith, personal experience and the Child Immigration Scheme. She lives in Caledonia, Ontario.

Listening to my Hair Grow - Rose's faith blog

Promises of Home - Stories of Canada's British Home Children

Rose's website

 

 

Digging For Answers in the Past - Rose McCormick Brandon

In January I started writing Sandra Nunn's life/love story. And . . . a thousand cheers . . . by Labour Day the final word was tweaked .

I've written a few magazine stories for others but this is only the second time I've written a client's book length memoir. The greatest difficulty? Finding the person's voice, letting their personality, and not mine, shine through the words. Sandra is funny and direct with a dollop of quirky. And her story is unusual. She stayed in a loveless marriage far longer than anyone would expect. She and husband Ernie fell in love in their fifties. (They married at eighteen.)

Sandra couldn't tell me why she stayed with Ernie. She didn't know. As her writer, it was my job to find out - I've always loved detective work - so with lots of prodding questions, I made her talk . . . fortunately, talking is one of her favourite activities.

I dug through Sandra's life until I found out why she stayed with a man who didn't love or want her. I dug all the way to Germany, the land of Sandra's birth. There, the answer became as obvious as a coffee stain on a white blouse. Sandra's parents were part of a child immigration program. Both were forcibly removed from their Ukrainian families - Walter at 14, Martha 12 - and sent to Germany to become farm workers.
Sandra developed, or inherited, probably a little of both, a steely determination to cope with adverse circumstances..
Giving up isn't in Sandra's genes. (Until I met Sandra, I'd never heard of the thousands of abducted Polish and Ukrainian teenagers that were sent to Germany. I know a lot about the British Child Immigration plan and write about it at: http:littleimmigrants.wordpress.com)

As much as I tried to maintain Sandra's voice, I couldn't resist channeling some of my thoughts through her. I saw the hardships of Sandra's parents, and they were many, through a different lens than she did. Their trust in God and determination to overcome  gave them an indomitable spirit, which they passed on to Sandra.
Sandra and I had many sessions in my living room. For hours, she talked while I tapped on my laptop. The result? Sandra's story of late love is a message of hope to all couples, even those with semi well-functioning marriages.

The book is on target for publication in late Fall. Stay tuned for more details . . . .

Rose McCormick Brandon’s articles and essays are published in magazines, books, newspapers and devotionals in Canada and the U.S. She is an award-winning writer who specializes in personal experience, faith, life stories and the British Home Child Immigration period of Canadian history. Rose is a regular contributor to several national publications, including The Testimony, The Evangel and Daily Boost. Her work appears in Chicken Soup for the Soul and other compilations of personal stories. Rose is married to Doug and lives in Caledonia, Ontario. She has three adult children. Visit her blogs: The Promise of Home (http:littleimmigrants.wordpress.com) and Listening to My Hair Grow (http:rosemccormickbrandon.wordpress.com). Contact address: rosembrandon@yahoo.ca.