Watching the Santa Clause parade in Kenora, Ontario, in 1953

This is Kenora in Onraio and I am watching the 1953 Santa Clause parade.

It is the second in a short series on Christmas before now.*

There is no plan to the series, no great message, just a love of old pictures and the hope that stories will flow.

So this is Kenora and my friend Susan is there in the crowd watching the parade.

Kenora, originally named Rat Portage, is a small city situated on the Lake of the Woods in Northwestern Ontario, Canada, close to the Manitoba boundary.**

It stands on the territory of the Ojibwe or Chippewa who are a large group of Native Americans and First Nations in North America.

There are Ojibwe communities in both Canada and the United States.

In Canada, they are the second-largest population among First Nations, surpassed only by the Cree. In the United States, they have the fourth-largest population among Native American tribes, surpassed only by the Navajo, Cherokee, and Lakota.***

The town of Rat Portage was amalgamated with the towns of Keewatin and Norman in 1905 to form the present-day City of Kenora. The name, "Kenora", was coined by combining the first two letters of Keewatin, Norman and Rat Portage.

And in the December of 1955 Susan and her family were there as the parade rumbled past, and over and above Christmas there is another connection because Susan was prompted to send me the picture after reading about the petrol station that had been a cinema.****

It was one of those old fashioned ones with the now iconic petrol pumps and it led Susan to reflect to  “love coincidences...or, perhaps, synchronicity. I have not seen a photo with a BP sign in it for several years.

Now, within 2 days, I have seen two pictures: one here, Andrew, and one in a photo of the 1955 Santa Claus parade in my home town.

My parents used to use BP all the time when we were young. 

In fact, we took out little blue 'Hillman' car there quite frequently! 

Our surname was Hillman (originally from Wlitshire in England pre 1840) and I always thought it quite appropriate that our very first vehicle was named after us!”

But like all good memories Susan came back with a correction, “it was the 1953 Santa Claus parade...and it's a B/A sign.”

So there you have it, yesterday I posted of festive preparations in Varese in Italy, earlier in the week it was a postcard from 1916 and today a Santa Clause parade from the 1950s.

Picture; the Santa Clause Parade, Kenora, 1953, from the collection of Susan Susan [Hillman] Brazeau

*Christmas Past, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Christmas%20Past

** Kenora https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenora

***Ojibwe, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ojibwe

****Chorlton’s first cinema, a Molotov cocktail and a shed load of new stories, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/chorltons-first-cinema-molotov-cocktail.html

Walking the railroad in Ontario …….

Now, if you want a series of images of rural North America, these from Karen Mahoney do the trick.

They bring back countless films of small towns, and hamlets which history has pretty much passed over and the railroad is the one reminder along with the radio station that there is a bigger world out there.

But that is a tad unfair on Guelph which is where these railroad tracks are situated.

My Wikipedia tells me that Guelph has "a population 131,794), is a city in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. 

Known as 'The Royal City', Guelph is roughly 28 km east of Kitchener and 100 km west of Downtown Toronto, at the intersection of Highway 6, Highway 7 and Wellington County Road 124. 

It is the seat of Wellington County, but is politically independent of it. The city is built on the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.

Guelph began as a settlement in the 1820s, established by Scotsman John Galt, who was in Upper Canada as the first Superintendent of the Canada Company. He based the headquarters, and his home, in the community. 

The area – much of which became Wellington County – had been part of the Halton Block, a Crown Reserve for the Six Nations Iroquois. Galt would later be considered as the founder of Guelph.

For many years, Guelph ranked at or near the bottom of Canada's crime severity list. 

However, the 2017 Crime Severity Index showed a 15% increase from 2016. Guelph has been noted as having one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country throughout the Great Recession. In late 2018, the Guelph Eramosa and Puslinch entity had an unemployment rate of 2.3 per cent, which decreased to 1.9 percent by January 2019, the lowest of all Canadian cities. 

The national unemployment rate at the time was 5.8 percent. Much of this achievement was due to the great number of manufacturing facilities, including Linamar”.*

And it is birthplace of  John McCrae who was author of In Flanders Fields.

So, the images are perhaps not quite what I thought, but nevertheless I do like them, leaving me just to quote Karen who commented, “A quick trip to Guelph to see my mum and my sister. 

I told Laura to come check out the tracks with me, she said you shouldn't play on them, I said we did all the time when I was young, even my mum played on them when she was young. 

The men who rode the rails were always invited into my great grandmother's for a drink and some food. My sister lives in the same house that we grew up in, so when I go home, I really go home. Freight cars still use the line”.

But the images of  "men who rode the rails", still conjures up memories of those films and for me sitting here in Manchester, thousands of miles away that will do.

Location; Guelph, Ontario

Pictures, railroad tracks, Guelph, 2021, from the collection of Karen Mahoney

* Guelph, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guelph

The Maple Leaf Flag, the European Union, and that house in Ingersoll

Now Ingersoll is one of those places which my Canadian cousins talk about.

It is a town in Oxford County on the Thames River and is in south western Ontario, with a population of just 2016.

The nearest cities are Woodstock to the east and London to the west, and on a visit our Chris took this picture, commenting,  “this is a house in Ingersoll, typical of the Victorian architecture you'll see in the older part of town. 

However, if you look closely at the flag pole, you will see under the Canadian flag, the flag of the European Union”.

And that has to have a story, although at this stage I am not sure what it is.

But Chris has promised to find out adding, “I will make an effort to get a better picture at some point, with both flags flying and in better light” although I think the image he sent is fine.

Still it would be interesting to know why the flag of the EU is there in Ingersoll.

And that just leaves me with the tale of the “Mammoth Cheese”, which was a giant wheel of cheese weighing 7,300 pounds.

It was made in 1866 to promote the area’s cheese industry and was exhibited at the New York State Fair in Saratoga, NY, and then in England.*

Picture; Ingersoll, 2018, Chris Pember

*Ingersoll, Ontario, Wikepedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingersoll,_Ontario#Early_history

Pizza, pesto and a trip up country ........... getting closer to my Canadian history

Until recently I had no idea just how deeply my family’s past was linked to Canada.

Our connections with Germany and Italy were pretty straightforward but the Canadian side rested on a few stories of my great aunt Dolly who crossed the Atlantic in 1925.

Of course if I had thought hard enough it would have been obvious that a fair few of the family would have chanced their arm and started a new life on the other side of the world.

After all with an empire upon which the sun never set there were plenty of open spaces.*

I knew about Uncle Charles who had gone out to East Africa and later India in the 1930s and pretty much never came back but was totally unprepared for the rest.

These included the brother of our great grandfather who had slipped off to New Zealand before settling in Australia the relative who had plied the high seas as a ships engineer and great grandfather Montague who in the course of serving in the old Queen’s army had seen the sun rise in the West Indies, idled his spare time in Gibraltar and spent three years in South Arica.

All of which could be the story of many British families but what I never expected was the great uncle migrated to Canada in the spring of 1914 by the Derby Poor Law Guardians because my great grandmother “was incapable of caring” for him and his siblings which included my granddad and great aunt Dolly.

Once established he persuaded Dolly to join him which she did but in her own words not “fancying the open wilderness of the far west” she settled in Ontario got married and that is how we now have an extensive Canadian family who in turn can draw on French and British settlers from the late 18th century along with a Mr and Mrs Pember who set out from Salford in the 1840s and never looked back.

And in the winter of 2015our Saul wass there in Ontario,.

He did the tourist bit of visiting New York, Memphis and Texas before making the 36 hour bus journey north from New Orleans to Ontario crossing the border at 6 am on a cold Saturday morning and has spent the last week with our cousins.

During that week he met more of the family, saw some stunning countryside and in return dished up homemade pizza and pesto and in the process brought all of us a lot closer.

All of which could be a prelude to a shed load of family stories but instead it will just be a thank you to Chris and Andrea and their two sons for making him so welcome and to our  Jac who sent me the first picture of them all together.

Andrea has more photographs ready to send but for now that’s it.



Pictures; a meal and the landscape of Ontario from the collection of Saul Simpson

*Possibly according to one American journalist because God didn’t trust the British and so wanted to always be able to see what we were doing.

In Ontario with our cousins ................ exploring a landscape and a shared British Home Child

Now there is something about looking out across a Canadian landscape that one of your family might first have encountered a century ago on first arriving as a British Home Child.

And even more so when in my case our Saul repeated the experience on a long three month holiday away from Europe.

Of course if I am to be strictly accurate great uncle Roger was put to work on farms in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, finally settling in British Columbia while Saul looked out on the wilds of Ontario.

But everyone is allowed a bit of license especially when dealing with a country as vast as Canada.

Added to which I have to say I am falling in love with the place.

Not that I could or would want to shake off being a European, this is where I was born and spread out across my continent from the highlands of Scotland, into the dark forests of northern Germany and down on to the Bay of Naples is where my extended family call home.

But that decision by the Derby Poor Law Guardians to send great uncle Roger across the Atlantic began our connection with Canada.

It was a story I only stumbled on a decade ago when a set of old letters from his sister revealed that “none of us received much education; we were in the homes until twelve.  

Jack was apprenticed to Chatsworth House to be a blacksmith.  Mother got his release at 14 and apprenticed him to Fletchers where he stayed excepting war years.  

Roger was sent to Canada at 16 he ran away from where he was took the name James Rogers and got into the army your grandfather was sent to the navy, when he was around 17 he joined the army.”  

That said it would not be Roger but his sister who cemented the link because she went out from Britain in 1925 having been helped by him and one of those Empire schemes.

It is a story I keep going back to and one that has new meaning as one of their great nephews has made it to Canada and been embraced with warm hospitality by our cousins.

Chris, Andrea and their two sons showed Saul a wonderful time and for that I will always be grateful.

I never met either great uncle Roger or his sister who was Chris’s grandmother and our great aunt Dolly so it is fitting that the bonds have been renewed through another generation.

And for me it marks one of the more positive as well as personal aspects of British Home Studies which often quite rightly dwells on the hardships, abuse and unhappiness experienced by those who were sent out.

Like so many others exploring the life of our BHC it has not always been easy and their remain many opaque bits but it is pretty neat to have rediscovered the family we never knew.




Pictures; from Saul’s visit to Ontario and our cousins, 2015, courtesy of Andrea Pember, http://www.pemberphotography.ca/

Coming soon........ stories of Canada’s history

St John River, 2011,  where our great uncle first worked in Canada,

I am quite excited that my cousin Chris from Ontario has agreed to share some of his research and stories of Canada’s past.

Our great uncle crossed the Atlantic in 1914 as a British Home Child and was followed just eleven years later by his sister on an Empire assisted passage.

Talking to Chris the other day it transpires that we have other connections in that we can both trace family from Germany and he too is fascinated by all things historical.

So it follows that his first contribution will be on a “small number of Mennonite families who arrived from Pennsylvania to settle along the Grand River in southern Ontario in 1800.”

Now I like my history messy and so I am drawn to a tale which mixes the American Revolution, a  bunch of Empire Loyalists and members of the Six Nations together and in the process tells me things I did not know.

So there you have it first story coming soon, with pictures by Andrea Pember.

Picture; the St John River, © Angela Faubert , 2011