ALL FOR LOVE
44,000 women crossed the ocean between 1942 and 1948 after marrying Canadian servicemen,
“We just clicked.”
It’s been almost three-quarters of a century, but Peggy Campbell, 93, still remembers the instant attraction she felt when she met her future husband.
It was in 1942, in Brighton, U.K., at the height of the Second World War. Peggy was 19, an office worker from Sussex, and had a blind date.
“My girlfriend had a date with a Canadian soldier and she asked him to bring a friend along,” she recalls.
That soldier’s friend was Bill Campbell, from Renfrew, Ont., overseas with the Governor General’s Foot Guards.
“I got down to Brighton and wasn’t going out anywhere, but a chum — we were roommates — asked me to go,” recalls Bill, 94.
The quartet met at an ice-rink near the Brighton pier. Bill and Peggy hit it off.
“He was just the image I’d pictured,” says Peggy.
Four years later, they were married and Peggy was sailing across the Atlantic, to her new home in Renfrew.
Peggy Campbell is one of more than 44,000 young women who came to Canada between 1942 and 1948 after they married Canadian servicemen. Granted free passage by the Canadian government, the war brides brought with them more than 20,000 children.
Like the vast majority of war brides, Peggy arrived in Canada in 1946.
Seventy years later, she and Bill sit in a common area of the Sunnybrook Hospital Veterans Centre residence, remembering the early years of their life together.
The couple kept in touch after their initial meeting, and saw each other whenever they could, but the war kept them apart for long stretches.
Bill was preparing military vehicles to be deployed in Europe. Peggy joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service and was sent to the town of Winchester, where her job was to order parts for navy planes.
As the war came to a close, in 1945, Bill was sent to Germany with the Allies’ occupation force. He and Peggy wrote each other plenty of letters.
“There was no phoning or anything in those days,” says Peggy.
Finally, when Bill returned to England in 1946, they married. Bill headed home to Renfrew to set up house. Peggy waited for her immigration papers to come through and set sail from the port in Southampton in late August. “My parents came down to see me off, which was a very sad day,” Peggy says. “My family felt pretty awful.”
They told her to make sure she always had enough money to come home.
“But I have no regrets in that department,” says Peggy. “It’s hung on for 70 years.”
She set sail on the RMS Queen Mary, and, five days later, landed in Halifax, where hundreds of war brides left the ship and boarded trains to travel to new husbands and new families all across the country.
The change of pace from Sussex to small-town Ontario came as a shock, says Peggy. “You come from a town where the next town is very close and then you come to Renfrew, which is sort of isolated, to me,” she says. “(And) I missed England. But then, you get used to it, you know? And you get on with your life . . . I guess we all leave our nests.”
The couple had two daughters. Bill got a job at a foundry, Peggy stayed home with the girls. The family lived what Bill calls “an open-air Canadian life,” going on frequent camping trips to Killbear and Killarney provincial parks, and down in the U.S.
Earlier this year, they moved into the veterans care residence at Sunnybrook. Always devoted watchers of the Remembrance Day ceremonies at the Cenotaph in Ottawa, Peggy and Bill will wake up on Nov. 11 to thousands of Canadian flags planted in the residence lawn, part of Sunnybrook’s annual Operation Raise a Flag campaign to honour veterans.
It’s been an adjustment, living at Sunnybrook, but the Campbells are glad to be together. “We hold hands often,” says Peggy. Their family lives nearby, and they regularly get to see their greatgrandson Billy, born last year.
“It’s been wonderful,” says Peggy of her life with Bill. “We’ve enjoyed it and we’ve done everything together.”
In the years after the Second World War, several war-bride associations sprung up around the country. One of the largest, Canadian War Brides, says about 93 per cent of war brides were British.
That proportion of U.K. arrivals, and the high number of war brides from the Second World War in general, can overshadow the stories of women from different countries, who came to Canada after different wars — even in the minds of the women and their families.
“It’s not really ‘war brides,’ because they’re not from Britain,” says Japanese-born Michiko Small, who came to Canada with her mother, Shizue Clark, and Canadian stepfather after the Korean War.
Shizue, who died in 2013 at the age of 91, had a thoroughly different immigration experience from that of Peggy Campbell and other British war brides — one marked by racial tensions and the lingering stigma of coming from an “enemy” country.
Shizue was not yet 30 years old when she met Canadian soldier John Clark in 1951, but already she had survived many lifetimes’ worth of disaster and loss.
Her first husband, Second World War Japanese naval officer Minoru Hirahara, was killed in action in 1944 when his submarine was sunk near the Philippines. Left to care for their baby daughter, Michiko, Shizue moved from the port town of Kure to live with her family in Hiroshima.
“She thought it would be safer,” says Michiko from her home in Ottawa. “Kure was the naval base for submarines, but Hiroshima was just supplies and old people.”
On Aug. 6, 1945, Shizue heard the blast from the first atomic bomb, dropped by the U.S. air force on the city she thought would be safe from attack. Shizue fled Hiroshima, on foot, with her baby, her father and grandmother, through the mountains, back to Kure.
Six years later, she met Clark, an Ottawa-native, while he was on leave in Kure during the Korean War. The couple married in a civil ceremony on Oct. 19, 1953.
In the summer of 1955, Shizue, John and Michiko sailed to Seattle, crossed the border into British Columbia and took a train headed east, settling in Ottawa on July 2. Michiko, 11when she arrived in Canada, recalls the hardships of being a Japanese immigrant in 1950s Ontario, let alone part of a mixed-race family.
“It was very, very difficult, because it was after (the First World War) and Canadians were not very kind . . . As soon as they found out we were Japanese, they became a little cold,” she says. “They just didn’t understand the people of other origins, I guess.”
John’s parents never accepted Shizue either.
“He was their only son and he married a Japanese woman with a child,” Michiko says.
John died in 1994. But Shizue, described by her daughter as a quiet person, led an active life into her old age, even taking up line-dancing.
“Later on, the older she got, she started to get used to Canadian customs, started to be vocal. Not timid,” Michiko said.
Shizue never, to her daughter’s knowledge, talked about being a war bride.
“In those days I don’t think we ever talked about (war brides),” she says. “Now everybody’s talking about it 70 years (on), you know.”