The experiences of British Home Children in Canada were I suspect as varied as the backgrounds of the children themselves.
Before leaving Britain they would have received some training in the career which had been chosen for them. Most either went into domestic service or on to the land.
Canadian farmers could apply for a child to work for them and in return promised to send the child to school as well as provide a wage. Some were kind, treating the children as their own, while others regarded them as no more than cheap labour. There is also some evidence that there were also mixed feelings towards the children in the communities where they lived.
Nor should we forget the impact on the children. The weather could be bitterly cold, the farms remote and the loss of siblings hard to endure.
Most on arrival in Canada would move on to a receiving station before being placed with a family. My own great uncle had arrived in Halifax in November 1914 and spent a short time at Fairview Station which was a Middlemore home.
But he did not settle well to this new life. Reports from the farms he was placed on spoke of a difficult young man who became increasingly unwilling to work and was sent back from one farm for suspected arson. First in Sheffield New Brunswick and then at North Sidney in Nova Scotia and finally Inverness, Nova Scotia. His stay with each was short and he ran away from the last placement just days after he arrived, enlisting in the Canadian army, having changed his name to Roger James and lied about his age.
Now most of the children who were sent have died but their stories are recorded in many books and web sites in Canada. There are also sites on facebook dedicated to British Home Children. One of the most useful is http://www.britishhomechildren.org/
Picture; the farm of Sayer Vernier Griffith where my great uncle stayed in 1915
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