Faraway Memories
Sent alone to Canada as a boy, her father grew to love his adopted land
In 1929, at age 14, my father Thomas Charles Biggs travelled alone to Canada from England, via the Barnardo Association. Between 1882 and 1939, this charitable agency for children migrated more than 30,000 orphaned boys and girls to Canada alone. My father would never talk to us about his past, so most of our information came in letters from his family overseas and some facts that he shared with our mother.
Years later, my eldest sister wanted my father to go with her to visit his family in England, but he refused, saying he was now Canadian. My sister visited and found out more information about my father’s past, but they were a quiet, reserved family and told only basic, long-suppressed information.
BANISHED
Our grandmother did tell my sister that whenever she heard a knock at the door, she wondered if it was a policeman complaining about her son. One time, he planned with his sister and friends to raid a large apple orchard. The owner spotted them and called the police. Everyone managed to escape detection except my father, who had climbed highest up the tree.
My grandfather, a taciturn man, rejected his middle son, who tested his father’s limited patience with many daring exploits, and escalated his father's anger when he climbed the church steeple and rang the church bells—not on a Sunday. He retaliated by fostering his son off to a local farmer while arranging his deportation to Canada. We can only imagine the boy’s fear and hope that his father would change his mind and reconsider the banishment. But the day of his departure arrived with no further word. His upset mother said she had gone to the Liverpool dock to see him off, crying and waving, but his stern, unforgiving father never showed.
The young boy, likely frightened and bereft, travelled on the Duchess of Atholl for the week it took to cross the vast Atlantic
Ocean. In our research, we learned that the year-old ocean liner had belonged to Canadian Pacific Steamships. In 1942, after the ship was conscripted into war service, a German torpedo sank it in the South Atlantic Ocean.
A NEW LIFE
When land was finally sighted, my father must have been relieved and anxious, but also sensing the adventure of exploring a new land. He had likely listened to crew and passengers, managing to fade into the shadows while hearing about the vast areas and distances in Canada, along with the many diverse nationalities growing together into one great nation.
The ship coursed its way down the St. Lawrence River to arrive at the Montreal harbour. The group of children disembarked, and my father, with food and travel vouchers, transferred alone onto a train to finally arrive at the small town of Wingham in southern Ontario. He had been hired out to a farming family and later told our mother that he had been treated well, but he kept to himself. He was in awe of the expanses of land, comprising farmland, forests and mountains, and his main complaint when he infrequently wrote to his mother in England was to say that he had never seen so much snow in all of his young life.
After four years, at age 18, he took a break from his sponsor family, and with meagre savings from the pittance he received, he worked his way on a cattle boat to visit the family in Yorkshire, England. His mother and a younger brother and sister were there to welcome him, but two older sisters had married and moved north. His father acknowledged him but spoke briefly, as he was mainly away working with his eldest son down in Portsmouth.
After visiting close and extended family, who were engrossed in their own lives, my father told my mother that he had felt alienated and redundant while in England. He also didn’t like the rigidity of the country’s social structure, after growing used to the freedom of all the classes of people in Canada. He realized how fully he now embraced his adopted, young country. After a month’s holiday in England, he left his birth country forever—
this time by his own choice—and vowed to never return.
Three more years of toiling on the farm passed. He worked hard but still kept to himself, remaining a very private man. After church service one Sunday, another lad from an adjoining farm asked him to travel with him up to the town of Sudbury, as the Inco refinery was hiring. They could live in a boarding house and jump on the railway cars to get to the plants in Copper Cliff. He started at the smelter, glad of working above ground
instead of in the mines, as he had no training. He also said that the workload proved lighter and was limited to fewer hours than the continual farming chores so dependent on weather conditions.
A loner now and finding the time long, he put in for overtime to while away the hours. One day, a co-worker showed him pen pal ads in the newspaper for people to converse with one another. He thought it was something he could relate to, a sort of long-distance friendship.
My mother, on her
poor farm in Tramore in the Ottawa Valley, told us that she had written the introduction letter for fun. She was pleased to receive a letter from a young Englishman, sounding shy, who had travelled here from across the ocean. She felt intrigued that he had no relatives in the country. She constantly tripped over cousins and extended family in her small Irish community. They exchanged correspondence for a few years before he visited her and her many family members. A few years later they married, and my mother
moved with him to live in Sudbury, where they went on to raise six children together.
She took over writing the letters to England, sending news and photos of the children. At her insistence, my dad would add the occasional postscript. During the war years, she managed to send care packages of essential staples and goods overseas to my grandmother and family.
FAMILY TIES
Growing up, we knew very little of our English heritage, except for the sporadic correspon-
dence from our grandmother in England. In later years, some cousins came over to visit with us and travel across our vast country of forests and numerous lakes. While they stayed with us for more than a week, we introduced them to the cottage in bush country, where they canoed over the lake and ate large barbecued steaks outside on the deck. Though they glimpsed many wild animals, such as deer and moose, their only regret was in not spotting a bear. That suited me fine.
My father was
staunchly Canadian. As adults, we now have some understanding of his loneliness and his trek as a young boy from far away to arrive in some unknown world. The traumatic experience of abandonment must have humbled his nature, destroying that boyish exuberance. We only knew him as an attentive and kindly father, while other people said they saw him as a gracious, quiet man who listened to others rather than joining in conversations. We miss him in our lives, more than we ever thought or expected.