Roger James Hall, a British Home Child Part Three

For just over 60 years children from all over Britain were sent across the Atlantic to Canada. These were the British Home Children. Some had been abandoned and lived on the streets others had grown up in orphanages and others still came from families where dire poverty offered little life chances.
My great uncle was one of them. He had arrived in Canada in the May of 1914 but had been unable to settle. Many of the children given this fresh start had found it difficult to adjust. And after being placed on three different farms across north east Canada, he ran away and joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the August of 1915. He lied about his age changed his name and denied any knowledge of his family.
In the early months of 1916 he was back in England and ironically the holding camp where he stayed before transit to the Western Front was just an hour away from where his father lived. Like most families of the period he was not alone in taking the King’s shilling. Two of my uncles, my grandfather, great grandfather and another great uncle were also in uniform and I can count relatives of my German grandmother in the Imperial Armed Forces of Germany. So you see both World Wars were really our own family’s civil war. I noticed on a Canadian gravestone of a veteran of CEF that the 1914-18 was described as the “Great European War” which is an interesting perspective for what we rather arrogantly call the First World War.
Still all survived although in the case of great uncle Roger not before he had faced four court martial’s. His unit participated in the great battles of the last two years of the war including Passchendaele.
After the war the paper trail becomes thinner. We know he was in British Columbia and there is a James Rogers who was granted a land grant in 1928 beyond the 5th meridian. He had for a long time been trying to persuade my great aunt to join him. It was she who had been born in the Derby workhouse and she crossed the Atlantic in the November of 1925 but got no further than Ontario where she married and raised large family who are still there.
The online sources in Canada have yet to reveal anything about him after 1928. There is no marriage certificate, or death certificate and I have yet to write to papers in BC to see if he has left any relatives. Of course he may have changed his name again. Leaving aside the land grant which may or may not be him we can fix him till November 1925 when he persuaded his sister, my great aunt to emigrate to Canada.
The lives of many of these children can be follwed at British Home Children Canada http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/index.html
Picture; Attestation papers of Roger James Hall/James Rogers, from the collection of Andrew Simpson