Sunday 27 November 2011

A British Home Child an introduction


To the best of my knowledge there is no one famous in our family and that suits me just fine.

We cannot claim a great general or writer, and no one ended their life with a title.

The largest house I can find was a four bed roomed house with one of those gardens which can be transversed in minutes.

So that makes me like millions of others. Having said that the Simpsons, Halls, Boots and Honeymoons and the others fought in all the wars of the last century and before, worked in the factories and mills and some at least spent time in the workhouse.

Their horizons often as not were dingy streets which all looked the same, with a pub at each corner, the sound of shunting yards to send the children to sleep and the bleak promise of a retirement funded only by poor relief.

Even when we seem to be marked out as a little different it can be for less than pleasant reasons. So it was with my great uncle Roger. Until recently he was just a birth certificate, an entry on a ships list and a sentence from one of my great aunt’s letters. But it turns out he was British Home Child, one of the 100,000 sent from Britain to Canada.

From the Derby Workhouse he set out on a journey which would take him to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, service with the Canadian Expeditionary Force in France during the Great War and finally back to Canada and British Columbia where he disappears sometime after 1925.

It is one the great historical journeys.

Picture; the John River, Canada far from Derby Workhouse

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