Frances Ann Ellis stood on the ship, staring out at the water as the British Isles faded over the horizon behind her.
She was only 13, and she was leaving the only home she had ever known.
It had not been a good one.
In her young life, she had been abandoned, first by her mother and then by her father who gave her over to the owners of a shooting gallery.
Those people were terrible and beat her.
When she finally got away from them, she ran to relatives who turned her away as they were either too old, or too poor, to look after her.
Her only option was the St. Chad’s Home for Girls in Leeds.
She arrived in May 1894, only to be transferred to Clarendon House Home for Girls in Hull in October of that same year.
And there she remained for three years until the decision was made to send her to a new home where she would be put to work as a domestic servant.
She wouldn’t be the only one…
From 1869 to 1948, over 100,000 children were shipped across the ocean from Great Britain often against their knowledge or will and put to work in the colonies.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today I share the often-tragic story of the British Home Children in Canada.
If you have read any Charles Dickens, you know that crushing poverty was prevalent, and social safety nets were non-existent in 19th century Great Britain.
Unless you were a part of the upper class, survival was your best hope.
Amid the grand buildings of London, and within a short walk from Buckingham Palace, people scratched and clawed against a penniless existence.
Victorian Era author George Reynolds wrote at that time,
“In that city there are in all five prominent buildings: the church, in which the pious pray; the gin-palace, to which the wretched poor resort to drown their sorrows; the pawn-broker’s, where miserable creatures pledge their raiment…the prison, where the victims of a vitiated condition of society expiate the crimes to which they have been drive by starvation and despair; and the workhouse, to which the destitute, the aged, and the friendless hasten to lay down their aching heads – and die!”[1]
Many families fell apart.
Some fathers simply disappeared, while mothers were forced to work long hours in factories to keep everyone fed.
The work was often dangerous, and the pay was miniscule.
Child labour was common in those factories as well.
Most never saw the inside of a classroom.
If the children weren’t working, they were typically left to their own devices in the streets while their parents, or parents, worked.
Juvenile delinquency was rampant.
As a response to this need Captain Edward Pelham Brenton created the Children’s Friend Society in 1830.
He was supported by wealthy benefactors and the government, to help children from running amok on the streets of London.
The society believed to have a solution to the problem.
Instead of investing into a social safety net to help families deal with extreme poverty and tackle the problems of crime, alcoholism and neglect, the society believed it was better to send the children away, across the ocean.
It was right there in the original name.
“The Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy through the reformation and emigration of children”.
The first children were sent to Cape Colony in South Africa, and Swan River Colony in Australia in 1832
But then a new, more appealing destination appeared, and it was a lot closer than the others.
Canada.
By comparison Canada in the 19th century was booming.
While Western Canada had not been settled, eastern Canada was seeing growth as the country recovered from the War of 1812 a decade and a half earlier.
Yet from the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Coast the population was about 800,000, less than half of London, England.
For those who ran the Children’s Friend Society, Canada was a perfect destination.
In 1833, 230 children were shipped from the British Isles to Toronto and New Brunswick and went to work in their new homes and not much is known of them.
Two years later, the London Morning Chronicle simply said that only one child was charged with a crime in their new home and that one was acquitted.
Other than that, they faded into history.
But they were the first of many more that would soon follow and the example set by the Children’s Friend Society would be picked up by others in the decades to come by three individuals.
Maria Rye
Annie MacPherson
And Thomas Barnardo.
Maria Rye was born into luxury in 1829 in Golden Square, an affluent part of London.
She was educated at home and took full advantage of the massive library her father had built.
When she was 16, she was inspired to devote herself to helping others, by a friend of her father named Charles Kingsley, the vicar of St. Luke’s Church, who promoted labour unions, social services and working reforms. She was a founding member of the Society for Promoting Employment of Women, but left it as many members supported suffrage, which she did not.
Struck by the plight of girls in the poor districts of London, she established a telegraph school to train girls to become telegraph clerks, one of the few jobs available to them at the time.
The school was successful, but it did not take long before there were more girls than the school could handle all looking for help.
In 1861, she founded the Female Middle Class Emigration Society.
For the next seven years, her organization sent middle class girls to work throughout the British Empire, including in Canada.
By 1868, Rye realized that there was a greater need to help girls living in poverty than those in the middle class.
One year later she purchased Avenue House in Peckham to take in girls aged three to 16 who were living on the street.
They were given an education and trained to be domestic servants.
Rye then turned her attention to Canada and travelled across the Atlantic.
At Niagara Falls, she opened Our Western Home on Dec. 1, 1869, as a receiving house, to send girls from England to Canada to work.
While Rye was establishing Our Western Home, back across the pond, another woman was also beginning to help children on the streets of London.
Annie MacPherson was raised to help others. Born in 1833 in Stirlingshire, Scotland, her father was a member of the Society of Friends. He commissioned several schools while Annie’s mother took in orphaned children.
Following the death of her father, Annie and her family moved to the prosperous farm of her Aunt Rachel. With a love of teaching, in 1865, she moved to London with her mother where she started a mission that provided clubs, coffee rooms and classes to the poor, especially children.
One day, with her friend Lady Rawley, she visited the notorious London East End[2] known for deep poverty, overcrowding and many social problems. This is where Jack the Ripper would commit murder in the future.
Among the criminals were many families just trying to get by.
Several factories and businesses operated there, and Annie MacPherson saw the deplorable conditions.
During her visit she met Bethnal Green and went to her home. In the dark, she heard voices upstairs.
Investigating the noise, she opened a hatch to the sweltering attic where she saw children making matchboxes next to cracks in the roof where light came in.
She found out that each child earned less than one penny for making 144 matches out of 288 pieces of wood.
Most of the children, almost all girls, were between the age of eight and ten.
The only food they were provided was a loaf of bread. If a child became so tired they couldn’t work, they were given one slice of bread.
The cost of each slice came out of their pay.
From then on, Annie wanted to help.
She quickly set up night classes for the children and offered them free meals.
Through her connections she bought a large warehouse in the Spitalfields area that was once a cholera hospital where she set up a Home for Boys under the age of ten in 1868.
A Home for Girls was established soon after, with a third school for boys between the ages of 10 and 13 following that.
At these schools, boys and girls learned to read, write and acquired skills for various trades.
A fourth home called Home of Industry was opened but Annie knew that no matter how many homes she opened, it was not going to be enough.
She became convinced that the only option was to send the children to Canada,
In the winter of 1869, she wrote in a pamphlet,
“We who labour here are tired of relieving misery from hand to mouth, and also heartsick of seeing hundreds of families pining away for want of work when over on the shores of Ontario, the cry is heard, ‘Come over and we will help you’”[3]
Soon after she announced she was opening a fund to send children to Canada along what she came to call “the golden bridge.”
On May 12, MacPherson and the children left on the ship Peruvian from Liverpool.
While most were in their mid-teens, there were some who were much younger.
They came from reformatories and workhouses, but there were some boys who were picked up off the streets of London and put on the ship.
If you are a regular listener to the show, you will know that typically, a 19th century ship journey across the Atlantic was…well…terrible Remember the walls caked in manure and 15 centimetres of sawdust put down on the floor to soak up the vomit?
While the journey for the boys wasn’t that bad, there were still problems.
The ship only offered the basic accommodations.
There wasn’t enough bedding and MacPherson, with her volunteers, had to round up as many blankets as they could.
There also wasn’t enough soap for everyone to keep clean.
In Canada, MacPherson wanted to set up a receiving home for not only the boys on her ship, but the children that would be sent over in the coming months and years. She had no idea where that home would be.
Two weeks later, they sailed into Canadian waters.
After they docked in Quebec City, 11 children were put into indentured service.
As the train made its way west into Ontario, children were filtered out into their new homes.
Four went to Richmond, Quebec, another 23 were placed in Montreal, while 20 were put to work in Ottawa.
Another eight were in Belleville, and the rest were divided between Toronto and Hamilton.
As far as anyone knew, these children were being placed in good homes where they would be treated well and help them become productive members of society.
The Hamilton Spectator wrote,
“We are pleased to learn that the lads brought out by Miss MacPherson have nearly all found comfortable homes.”
What was not said was that many of these children missed their parents terribly.
They may have been turned over to MacPherson, but for some it was because their parents had no other c. Most parents believed it was just temporary until their financial situation improved. It was only afterwards they found out their children were a world away and would likely never see them again.
Some of the children arrived with siblings but soon were split up and divided into different homes.
Some siblings would not see each other for years.
Those 100 boys were the first of a wave of 100,000 boys and girls sent to Canada.
In Belleville, MacPherson met A.F Wood, the Warden of Hastings County, who brought a letter from the community’s council offering a home to use.
The rent would be taken care of, and she would be allowed to run the home as she wanted.
She accepted and found the large property with lots of trees in a beautiful almost English-countryside setting.
For the next two months, MacPherson travelled around Ontario, to raise money for her organization and to push the message that the best place for the children was Canada.
The speaking tour was successful, and MacPherson sent word to her sister Rachel in London that more children were needed.
Rachel found 70 and her husband travelled to Canada with them.
The first group of 100 children may have been all boys in their teens, but subsequent ships brought over both boys and girls, some as young as four.
As for MacPherson, she returned to England after her two-month speaking tour but returned to Canada soon after with more children.
500 children were shipped to Canada by the end of 1870, it was just the beginning.
And that brings us to our third person in this story.
Thomas Barnardo.
As a child and teenager living in Ireland in the 1850s, Thomas Barnardo was selfish.
His words, not mine.
He believed that everything that was not his, should belong to him.
But as he grew into adulthood, that changed, and he saw that the best path to happiness was by helping others.
In 1866, he moved to London to establish a mission. That didn’t happen, but he did find his calling.
He saw the suffering and he wanted to do something about it.
In 1868, he established Hope Place, a school for disadvantaged children in the East End.
Many were orphans, having lost their parents in the recent cholera epidemic.
The school provided them with education and training in a variety of trades.
He also established schools for girls.
In 1876, Girls’ Village Home was opened, followed by several more schools.
Two years later, he formed an orphanage when he saw that the boys in his school often slept in the streets.
By the time Barnardo died in 1905, he had established 122 orphanages and schools to provide shelter for 8,500 children.
Like with MacPherson and Rye, many of these children were later shipped to Canada freeing up room in the homes and orphanages for new children.
The work of Barnardo, MacPherson and Rye began with the best of intentions, a desire to help using their Victorian sensibilities.
But the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and many of those children who were shipped to Canada experienced that hell first hand.
Emma, Mary-Ann and Clara Bennett arrived in Canada on July 25, 1870.
Little is known of their parents, but upon their arrival they were sent to Our Western Home at Niagara-on-the-Lake, a distribution centre for children.
Emma was the oldest of the three; she was 11, followed by nine-year-old Mary-Ann and five-year-old Clara.
Their brief time at the distribution centre was the last time the girls would be together.
They didn’t know where their sisters were.
Their world had become one of isolation, away from those that mattered the most.
Mary Ann was lucky enough to find a good home with two kind people in Welland County.
She wrote to Maria Rye back in England in 1871,
“I am glad to tell you I have a good home, and I hope my dear sisters have as good a home as I have. My mamma would like to have them near to me, so that I could see them sometimes. My mama and dada are very kind to me. Please write and tell me where my sisters is.”
Emma, who was placed with the Lines family in Niagara County, wrote on July 17, 1871,
“Mrs. Lines has allowed me to write to you to ask you to inform me were my sisters are, if you please, I would be much obliged if you would be kind enough to answer my letter.”
Clara, the youngest, was placed far from her sisters in Montreal.
Did the sisters ever find each other again? While I can’t say for certain, but if they were it wouldn’t be until they reached adulthood and were no longer part of the resettlement program and no longer indentured servants.
They were three of tens of thousands who experience this type of hell.
Through the home child program of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, children were taken in by the various organizations in London, England, and remained there for weeks, or even months, before they were transported to Canada.
Once across the ocean, nearly all the children were placed in receiving homes, which were little more than large warehouses, in Ontario.
The largest were in Belleville, Stratford, Niagara-on-the-Lake and Toronto.
Advertisements were placed in local newspapers, stating that a new shipment of children had arrived, and farmers were invited to choose a girl or boy to work on their property.
When a child was chosen, they became an indentured servant.
In return for providing the children with lodging, food, limited schooling and a small payment that was placed into a bank account, the child worked on the property of the farmer.
They were at their complete mercy.
Far from home.
Far from their family.
The isolation they felt was terrible.
The life of a British Home Child was often difficult.
A boy working on a farm would be up at dawn and work until the sun set.
They lit fires, fed animals, cleaned stables, picked vegetables, milked cows and carried water.
It was back-breaking work and many of the children, some as young as seven, couldn’t keep up.
Rather than understand that a child could not work as hard as a full-grown farmer, farmers blamed the child.
The children were told they were lazy, slow and simple. They suffered physical, emotional and mental abuse.
When the child did not work out, as was often the case, they were returned to the receiving homes and labelled as unsuitable.
Then the process repeated itself
This was the fate of young John Dove
John Dove lived in London with his mother in the spring of 1905His mother was widowed in 1897 when her husband James died.
After years of struggling, she met with Dr. Barnardo that spring and agreed to send her son to live in one of Barnardo’s homes only for a time.
John never saw his mother again.
While Dr. Barnardo, who was only months from his own death, was always kind to John, other staff treated him harshly.
After a few months he was sent to Canada.
While all the other boys were sent to farms, John Dove was not.
He was small for his age and spent weeks by himself with the staff at a distribution home in Winnipeg.
One day, a woman from Silver Plains, Manitoba arrived stating the boy they sent her was not good enough and she wanted a new one.
For many, the British Home Children were nothing more than appliances, to be swapped out without much thought.
The distribution home sent John with the woman in September 1905 where he was taken to the attic and shown a corner where to sleep.
The next day, he ate breakfast by himself and was taken to the pasture where there were 100 cattle and was told to look after them.
Imagine if you were plucked and put in a pasture and told to look after 100 cattle with no experience.
That was what happened to John.
He had to learn how to milk cows on his own, while also cutting wood, getting water for the family and doing chores around the house.
He was paid one dollar per month through the British Home Child program, which would be available to him when he turned 18.
For John, that was a long decade away.
A month into the job, while checking the cattle in the field, he discovered ten were stuck in the mud.
He ran back to the farmhouse to get help. Instead, he got a severe beating for letting the cattle get stuck in the first place and, despite it being beyond his control.
Through the winter, he slept in the cold attic as snow fell on him through the cracks in the roof.
All the while not knowing his mother had died in London in July 1906.
No one had bothered to tell him of her passing.
After one year of work, he was returned to the receiving home by the woman who complained he wasn’t good enough.
John once again spent time alone in the distribution home.
When he wasn’t scrubbing floors, he taught himself to read and write using the newspapers he found.
In March 1907, John was sent to another farm near Brandon, Manitoba.
He was picked up by a farmer who told him he was to help his wife care for their many children.
The wife was the first person to treat him with real kindness.
He helped her for a few months until he was told to help on the farm.
For the next six years, John worked from dawn to dusk on the farm, barely attending school and being beaten by the farmer for the smallest error in his work.
The only person who gave him kindness was the wife.
Once a year, the inspector arrived to check on John but each time, John was always in the fields working.
The farmer would talk to the inspector, assure him the child was treated well.
Seen as a pillar of the community, who attended church regularly, and his word was taken without question.
When his contract ended, John went to the farmer, told him he quit, and received the $110 that had been put away for him through those long years of abuse.
He then walked out into a world with his freedom.
In 1874, Andrew Doyle, a representative for the London Board of Governors was sent to Canada to visit homes to determine the success of the resettlement program.
Doyle praised the work of the Home Children Programs, especially MacPherson, believing they had good intentions.
But…he was highly critical about everything else.
His biggest criticism was the lack of follow up on the children once they were placed in Canadian farms and homes.
Rye’s organization was especially bad as they did nearly no welfare checks on the children. He wrote,
“Because of Miss Rye’s carelessness and Miss MacPherson’s limited resources, thousands of British children, already in painful circumstances, were cast adrift to be overworked or mistreated by the settlers of early Canada who were generally honest but often hard taskmasters.”
Doyle’s report was severe enough that the House of Commons in Canada set up a committee.
Despite promises by the organizations to do better, and the federal government’s commitment to helping the children, nearly nothing changed for twenty years.
Not until 1897 when the Act to Regulate the Immigration into Ontario of Certain Classes of Children was passed.
This required child immigration agencies to be licenced and subjected to inspections.
Around that same time, J.J. Kelso, a superintendent of neglected children in Ontario, wrote in a report stating.
“Farm work should be healthful and enjoyable employment for young people if the employers are reasonable and kindly disposed. Unfortunately, there have in the past been cases brought to light forcibly illustrating the need for vigilance in protecting children from cruel taskmasters.”
Despite the fact he agreed that children were abused and treated as little more than enslaved individuals, he stated that there should not be sweeping changes as he did not believe the abuse was prevalent enough to warrant it.
Just because inspections were happening didn’t mean the abuse stopped.
Charles Davenport stated that a government man arrived at the farm once a year and looked for ill-treatment of the children like himself.
When asked if he was treated well, he always lied because he knew if he told the truth, the farmer would beat him once the inspector left.
These visits were typically planned and those in charge could prepare.
They would put children in good clothes, made sure they were clean and instructed them to say nice things, When the inspector arrived, all they saw was a child who appeared well regardless of their true conditions behind the scenes.
Even if a child reported maltreatment, that didn’t mean anything would be done to help them.
Margaret Gray was placed with a family in New Brunswick where she was beaten on a regular basis by a farmer.
When the sexual abuse started, she attempted to seek help and told an inspector of the abuse.
Instead of helping, the inspector asked the farmer about the abuse, which he denied. His word was taken over Margaret’s.
After the inspector left, she was whipped by the farmer and called a liar.
Eventually, the neighbours of Margaret’s host family saw her doing needlessly difficult work and reported the family.
When the inspector checked, the family lied, said she was cared for, went to church and school.
None of it was true and Margaret was not removed from the family.
For some, the experience was too much.
Almost every year between 1892 and 1924, a British Home Child died by suicide to alleviate the suffering they faced at the hands of people who saw them as nothing more than livestock.
Newspapers rarely had sympathy for them, stating that the children simply couldn’t handle the rigours of being Canadian and the work involved in that.
In a few cases, the child ended the life of their abuser.
Typically, they were portrayed in the media as villains who murdered an upstanding member of the community.
Either way the ongoing abuse was mostly ignored and allowed to perpetuate… even if it cost a life.
If a child was in a good home, the entire experience of being shuffled around stayed with them for the rest of their lives.
They lacked a sense of belonging and family, which made forming relationships with friends and family difficult.
Many home children never spoke about their experiences, and it was only after their death, when their children went through their items, often in a box in the back of a closet, that the children even discovered their parent was a British Home Child.
While many children were treated terribly, there were some who found kind and loving homes.
Couples who were unable to have children, or lost their children before they were grown, saw the home children not as servants and labourers, but as a new start.
They took the children in and treated them as if they were their own.
Elizabeth Wright was placed with a farmer and his elderly mother.
The mother barely spoke English and mostly spoke Gaelic.
Living with them, she worked in the home, was given plenty to eat and nice clothing. She said,
“They were kind to me.”
William Burnabeer was placed at the farm of William Hill and his wife, unnamed in my research, near Napanee, Ontario.
He was expected to work hard, but they treated him well.
He came to call them mother and father, and they treated him as a son.
When the couple passed away two decades after he left them to start his own life, they left him $400 in their will, about $5,000 to $6,000 today.
George Flower had a Cockney accent that caused endless bullying and teasing among other children, and even adults, in his new home.
He was often called a “bloody Englishman”, resulting in several fights before he got rid of his accent.
Labour organizations were especially critical of the children, stating they were stealing the jobs of Canadians.
The children carried the stigma of being a home child in the community and among their peers along with claims that they were winding up in prisons and asylums at alarming rates, putting Canadians at risk.
J.G. Moylan, an inspector of the country’s prisons, campaigned against the home children program by stating the prisons were overrun with pickpockets and thieves. He wrote,
“With very few exceptions, these street Arabs from Whitechapel and Rotherhithe and other like haunts of vice, speedily return to their old habits on arriving in Canada, and as a consequence, become a burden and expense upon the taxpayers of the Dominion in reformatories, jails and penitentiaries.”
Despite being an inspector of prisons, Moylan could not offer evidence to support his claims and government employees who interacted with the children the most, countered his argument by stating that apart from a few bad apples, most of the children were not criminals, nor did they end up as criminals as adults.
The stigma and shame followed the children even in death.
After George Green was starved and killed amid physical abuse at the hands of Helen Findlay, the newspapers covering her trial refused to see him as a victim.
They called him a boy who was perfectly useless, an idiot and a physical imbecile.
When the Toronto Evening Star wrote about the terrible state in which his dead body was found, the headline said in large letters “A Repulsive Boy”.
The sub-headline went further, stating,
“Disobedient, dirty, unable to work, but a big eater”.
Findlay wasn’t convicted of her crime due to a split jury, despite a dozen neighbours testifying they saw her physically abusing him.
The newspapers portrayed her as a victim of circumstance brought on by the British Home Child program, and the children from the streets of London.
The Owen Sound Sun Times wrote,
“The greatest crime is being perpetrated by the dumping of the diseased off-scouring of the hotbeds of hellish slumdom of England among the rising generation of this country.”
As the 1920s approached, the program was beginning to decline.
In 1924, Charlotte Whitton, who t became the Mayor of Ottawa 30 years later, wrote in her capacity as the director of the Canadian Welfare Council that the entire practice of taking children from England was inhumane.
This sentiment was echoed by James S. Woodsworth, the first leader of the Canadian Co-operative Federation, known today as the NDP, echoed this in the House of Commons when he said,
“We are bringing children into Canada in the guise of philanthropy and turning them into cheap labourers.”
The Bondfield Commission was established in 1924 in Britain, to inspect the homes and determine if the children in Canada were being treated well.
By November of that year, they had released their report recommending that only children over the age of 14 should be allowed to emigrate.
For the rest of the decade, only teenagers were permitted into the program.
But by this point it was the beginning of the end.
Not because of changing societal norms but because of economics.
The Great Depression led to high unemployment and drought caused farms to fail.
With that came the end of the British Home Child program and for most Canadians, the story faded away from their minds.
But among those who survived, the memories, more often bad than good, stayed with them forever.
On Nov. 16, 2009, Prime Minister of Australia Kevin Rudd apologized for the British Home Child program after speaking with 400 survivors on how best to deliver the apology.
A few months later on Feb. 23, 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown called the child resettlement program shameful and misguided.
He also announced a £6 million fund to compensate families. A £1 million fund was also set up by the British government to allow former child migrants to visit relatives they had not seen in years in the United Kingdom r. Australia matched this with their own monetary donations into the fund.
In 2020, Australia set up a national redress scheme to help children who were physically, mentally and sexually abused as part of the British Home Children Program.
And what has Canada done?
The government has issued no apology.
While the Immigration of Home Children was designated as a National Historic Event by the Government of Canada in 1999, little has been done to recognize the suffering endured by the children, the majority of whom were placed on Canadian soil.
The Governor General of Canada did designate 2010 as the Year of the British Home Child, and a stamp was issued by Canada Post that same year, but no apology has been forthcoming.
After Australia issued its apology in 2009, Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship for the then Conservative government stated there was no need for an in-Parliament apology.
He said,
“The issue has not been on the radar screen here, unlike Australia, where there’s been a long-standing interest. The reality is that, here in Canada, we are taking measures to recognise that sad period, but there is, I think, limited public interest in official government apologies for everything that’s ever been unfortunate or a tragic event in our history.”[4]
Whether or not the public is interested in government apologies, to those receiving the apology, it can mean the world and the closing of a dark chapter of their lives.
And time is running out to apologize and make amends as the British Home Children.
The program may have ended, but the children who were taken, eventually put down roots in Canada.
They married, got jobs and helped build the country they were forced to adopt for the rest of their life.
And some left a mark on that country’s history.
When the First World War erupted, over 10,000 young men k took up arms to fight for their adopted country.
Whether they did it for loyalty to Canada, or the British Crown under which they were born, is not known.
There is no firm record of how many British Home Children died in the trenches and fields of France, but what is known is that at least 689 died at Vimy Ridge, Passchendaele and Hill 70 in 1917 alone.
They donned the Canadian Expeditionary Force uniform to fight under the Red Ensign and earned many medals including the Military Cross, Military Medal and Distinguished Service Order.
And some, like Walter Lockett and Albert Edward Roscoe, earned the most coveted medal of them all, the Victoria Cross.
Others left their mark closer to home.
Ken Donovan was one of the last of the British Home Children to arrive when he stepped on Canadian shores as a 15-year-old on April 5, 1929.
As an adult, he worked as the assistant purchasing director with the Canadian Government Exhibition Commission.
One day in the autumn of 1964, a request came across his desk from Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson, for three prototype flags to be delivered to Pearson’s residence.
One of those flags would become the Canadian Maple Leaf.
Graphic artists and silk screeners Jean Desrosiers and John Williams worked late on the last-minute request.
And the person who sewed those flags was Ken’s daughter Joan.
The first Canadian Maple Leaf flag in our history was sewn by the daughter of a British Home Child.
As for John Dove, after he left the farm that abused him for years he found work on another farm.
On Jan. 27, 1918, he enlisted to serve in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.
He survived the war, fell in love, and married Irene Wright.
Together they had two children.
He died surrounded by his family at the St. Joseph’s Hospital in Toronto on May 3, 1985, at the age of 90.
The organization Home Children Canada estimates that one out of every ten Canadians living today are the descendants of a Home Child.
They may have been forced to come to Canada, but those British Home Children helped build our country…
The least we can do is apologize for the horrors they experienced.
