Author speaking at British Home Children reunion
TRURO, N.S. - A scrawny nine-year-old boy who arrived in Canada in 1915 is being remembered through a new book.
Joe Payne was a British Home Child who was sent from the Middlemore Home in Birmingham, England, to a farm in Glenville, Cape Breton.
His daughter, Carolyn Anne Macisaac, has written a book, All Alone Again, Joe Payne, British Home Child, about his journey and his life afterward.
“One of the things I found the hardest was trying to get into my grandmother’s head to try to picture what it must have been like for her to have had her son leave and not expect to ever see him again,” she said. “It must have been heartbreaking for her.”
Payne’s mother was working, trying to raise two children on her own and had to go into hospital for surgery when she placed him in the Middlemore Home. When the opportunity arose for him to go to Canada, she would have considered it a chance for a better life.
She sent him many postcards at his new home.
“What’s written on some of the post cards kind of shows what she was feeling – broken hearted,” Macisaac said.
Payne went to live on a farm with 20-year-old Neil Macinnis, his mother and five younger sisters.
Some home children were treated well in their new homes, others were beaten and raped. Luckily for Payne, the Macinnis family cared for him, although he was required to work hard.
He stayed with the family until he was about 19 and later married a woman from Truro. When he had children, he took them to Cape Breton for visits. Macisaac has happy memories of playing with Neil Macinnis’s children who were about her age.
Later in life Payne returned to England and visited his mother and sister but found it hard to make a connection. Payne passed away in 1987. He was one of an estimated 130,000 British Home Children who were sent from England to Canada between 1869 and the 1940s to work as indentured servants. It’s estimated these children and their descendants make up about 13 per cent of the Canadian population today.
“We want people to know about the heritage of the British Home Children,” said Macisaac. “A lot of the children in the younger generation don’t know the story and it’s their ancestors, too.”
Her book has been released just ahead of the 150th anniversary of the first British Home Child being sent to Canada. It is available on https://www. amazon.ca/.