Britain’s children fought for Canada

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This article was published 12/11/2013 (4527 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A century ago, Great Britain’s poorest children were shipped off to work in Canada, and when they were called to serve during the First World War, more than 4,000 answered. Nearly a quarter of them were killed.

For the first time, the war service of the British Home Children was honoured this Remembrance Day with a wreath laid at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.

“I am ever so pleased they are recognizing these children that had it so hard from the very beginning and never stopped giving to the country that took them in,” said Brenda Ford, whose grandfather, John Ford, was a British Home Child who served in the front lines at Vimy Ridge, then worked for CP Rail in Winnipeg.

Between 1868 and the 1930s, more than 100,000 destitute children in Great Britain were shipped off to Canada. An estimated two-thirds of the Home Children, as they were known, were under the age of 14.

One of them was Winnipeg’s Charles Reaper — the last survivor of the historic Battle of Vimy Ridge. He died in 2003 in Winnipeg at the age of 103. He was remembered Monday in Ottawa with the other British Home Children and their descendants.

“I think it’s great,” said Winnipeg’s Roberta Horrox. Her grandfather, James Towner, was an orphan plucked off the streets of London and sent to Canada in 1900 at age 10. He had been taken in by the Barnardo Society in London with his sister, Florence, and younger brother, George.

The Bernardo Society was one of 50 “child-saving” organizations in Victorian England that sent children to build its colonies in places such as Canada, said Horrox.

In Manitoba, at the Barnardo Industrial Farm near Russell, more than 1,660 British kids were trained as agricultural workers from 1888 to 1907.

Thousands more were sent to work on Manitoba farms where, in the late 1800s, there was a huge demand for labourers, especially at harvest time.

When Towner became a man and war broke out, he wanted to serve, said Horrox, a Winnipeg history buff: “My grandfather tried to join but his feet were too crippled.”

Many of the British Home Children did serve, she said.

“A lot signed up right at the beginning of the war,” said Horrox. It may have been so they could return to England and look for family members or because they felt they had nothing to lose or nobody who cared about them, she said.

‘I am ever so pleased they are recognizing these children that… never stopped giving to the country that took them in’

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Close to one-quarter who fought for their new country didn’t survive the First World War, she said.

“Nobody knows why so many went or why so many were lost,” said Horrox.

The Ontario East British Home Child Family organization sponsored the Remembrance Day wreath. The organization says its mission is to “give a voice to all the British Home Children who walked silently among us.”

The Canadian government has never apologized for that sad chapter in this country’s immigration history, said Horrox. A petition calling on the federal government to issue an apology is being prepared to present to Canada’s Immigration Minister Chris Alexander, she said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca

Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter

Carol Sanders is a reporter at the Free Press legislature bureau. The former general assignment reporter and copy editor joined the paper in 1997. Read more about Carol.

Every piece of reporting Carol produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.