A story of British Home Children in just 20 objects nu 17 .......... the letter home

We have none of the letters my great uncle sent to his family.

I know he wrote to his sister and I am guessing will also have written to my grandfather and his brothers, but none have survived.

Instead all we have are a few letters found in his file held by the charity which took him over to Canada from Derby in the May of 1914.

But in their way these are all the more significant given that they were written just after he had enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force and was bound for England.

His had not been a happy year in Canada.

He was sent back from the first two farms he had been placed on and ran away from the third.

The army was too prove equally challenging to a man who found accepting regulations and instructions very difficult which was very understandable given his early life.

But he stuck it out for the “duration” and so was one of the British Home Children who served their adoptive country.

Picture; letter from Roger James Hall/James Rogers, February 2 1916 from the collection of Andrew Simpson