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Preface The Battle of Love by Melynda Jarratt

Basically we girls came out to Canada, by and large not knowing what to expect, the vast majority of us dug in, adapted, compromised, made homes for our husbands and families and became good contributing Canadian citizens.¹ (Dorothy (Currie) Hyslop, Scottish War Bride, St Stephen, New Brunswick)

When Canada joined Britain in its declaration of war against Germany on 10 September 1939, the last thing on anybody’s mind was marriage.

But less than forty days after the First Canadian Infantry Division landed at Greenock, Scotland, on 17 December 1939, the first marriage between a British woman and a Canadian soldier took place at the Farnborough Church in Aldershot on 28 January 1940.² That marriage, and the nearly 48,000³ which followed over the course of the next six years, formed one of the most unusual immigrant waves to hit Canada’s shores: all women, mostly British, and all from the same age group, the story of the Canadian War Brides of the Second World War is one worth telling.

Ninety-four per cent of Canadian War Brides were British, and the reasons are fairly obvious: the Canadians were the first to come to the defence of Britain after the declaration of war and they stayed there for nearly six years. And even though GI Brides received a lot more press, Canadian War Brides outnumbered their American counterparts by more than 10,000 and were the mothers of 7,000 more children by the time the war was over.⁴

Nearly a half-million Canadians served in Britain during the Second World War, the majority of them passing through the Victorian Hampshire town of Aldershot which became known as the Home of the Canadian Army. Canadians lived in the UK for so long they became part of the landscape. Stationed in military barracks and billeted with families throughout the country, it was only natural that they would meet local women, fall in love and marry – and that’s exactly what one in every ten Canadians did.

As the number of Canadians in Britain increased, so too did the weddings: in 1940 there were 1,222 marriages; the number more than doubled in 1941 when there were 3,011; in 1942 there were 4,160; and in 1943 they climbed again to 5,897. From January to June 1944 there were 3,927 marriages and another 2,273 from July to December.⁵

By December 1944 marriages were no longer exclusively to British women as the Canadians were marrying French, Belgian and Dutch women they were meeting on the Continent. But the vast majority – 44,886 – of the 47,783 marriages that took place before the last of the Canadians left for home, were to British War Brides.⁶

Back in Canada, the marriage boom certainly didn’t go unnoticed; as War Brides began to trickle into the country in 1942, 1943 and 1944, stories about them began to appear in the press and not all of it was kind.

It didn’t take long for someone to react. In January 1944 an unidentified British wife wrote a two-page article in Maclean’s, Canada’s national magazine. In it she talks about the reception she’s received since arriving in Canada three months earlier and recounts the warning she was given by her husband shortly before she left England:

‘After the last war,’ he said, ‘there was a certain amount of gossip about British war brides. Some of the Canadian boys married poor types of girls. Some fine British girls married no-good Canadians. As a result some of the marriages turned out disastrously and caused gossip. People talked about the marriages which failed. They appeared to forget the many British brides who came to Canada and proved splendid wives and mothers.’⁷

The writer, who goes by the pseudonym ‘One Of Them’, feels she always has to explain why she married a Canadian and defends her sister War Brides from one of the most stinging criticisms that these ‘Limeys’ are taking the ‘cream of Canada’s young men out of circulation.’

She also comments on the aloofness of Canadians whom she resents for giving her short shrift when she makes a mistake or says the wrong thing. ‘One Of Them’ feels Canadians just don’t seem to appreciate what life is like for the average British citizen, with the severe rationing, queues, bombing, and tragedy around every corner.

The Maclean’s article touched a nerve across Canada. An article which appeared in the Toronto Globe and Mail in April 1944 faces the issue head on and encourages Canadians to extend a warm welcome to British wives:

There actually seem to be people who feel that there is something sinister and unnatural in the circumstance that if you expose a normal Canadian youth to several million normal females of his own race for two or three years at a stretch, he is apt to up and marry one of them.

Most British war brides who have traveled to Canada to begin the job of making new homes are received as warmly as they deserve … [but] in far too many cases the reception ranges from polite hostility to studied rudeness. Particularly if she is setting up housekeeping in a small community the girl from abroad is likely, sooner or later, to meet the girl her husband left behind him, a thwarted mother-in-law, or simply a few third parties who have no legal standing in the discussion at all but feel that their duty to a jilted friend compels them to ‘take sides’.

There is hardly a family in Canada that, somewhere in its genealogical history, cannot find a British bride. The type of British bride that the Canadian overseas forces have started to bring back home now will differ from the earlier models only as models in women differ generally from generation to generation.

In the main, they will be pretty much the same kind of women who helped to make our country and the people in it what they are. Most of them will need all the help and kindness their new country can spare them.⁸

In reponse to such concerns, the Department of National Defence wisely issued British wives with a publication called Welcome to War Brides. The 40-page booklet included an introduction by Princess Alice, the granddaughter of Queen Victoria and wife of the Governor General of Canada.

Welcome to War Brides also contained some common sense advice, from the obvious: ‘If you should unwittingly convey the impression that you regard Canada as in any way a dependency of Britain, you are likely to find that many people will temper their welcome with coolness’, to the downright depressing, ‘[In small towns] you simply must conform … or live like a hermit and disappoint your husband and his people.’⁹

It also included a glossary of familiar terms with their Canadian equivalents. That booklet would have come in handy for English War Bride Vera Brooks, who made more than one mistake with her use of the vernacular:

I tried to help some of the girls cope with two or three children, saying ‘Keep your pecker up,’ which later we discovered was a very rude expression. In England it means chin. We made a lot of these mistakes. Another was to knock someone up, which we’d always used to mean to awaken somebody. We found it was more polite to say ‘I am warm’ instead of ‘I am hot’. The ironmonger’s turned into the hardware store. The clerk was a clerk, not a clark. ‘Are you one of the clarks?’ I asked in a store one day. ‘No, I am one of the Browns,’ the clerk replied.¹⁰

Meeting the Canadians

British women met Canadians in all kinds of places and under every circumstance imaginable: from huge dance halls where the sounds of big band music like Glen Miller and Tommy Dorsey urged young people to get up and dance, to standing at a post-box mailing a letter; from having a drink in a pub, to skating; from being introduced on a blind date, to escaping German bombs in air-raid shelters; from meeting a relative’s pen pal, to walking down the street: from the planned to the accidental, Canadian men and British women met and when that happened they did what has been going on since the beginning of time: they fell in love and married.

The women Canadians met were just as likely to be working in a munitions factory or driving an ambulance as they were to be a member of the Women’s Land Army (WLA) or the NAAFI (Navy, Army and Air Force Institute). By 1944 nearly a half-million British women were in uniform, including the Auxiliary Territorial Services (ATS), the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) and the Women’s Royal Naval Service (WRNS).¹¹ Tens of thousands of them became War Brides.

Like many young women her age, nineteen-year-old Johan (Hillis) DeWitt of Glasgow, Scotland wanted to join the WAAF but her father wouldn’t hear of it. At the time, there was considerable public criticism of the women’s services, due in large part to unfounded rumours which held that innocent young girls were being exposed to all manner of immoral behaviour.¹²

Despite her pleas to the contrary, Johan’s father refused to budge. Instead, he would only let her join the Women’s Land Army, a British solution to the farm crisis sparked by the war. The Land Army put women on farms and freed up men for more important work in the services and elsewhere. Johan’s story of meeting her husband shows just how accidental a meeting could be:

One day when she was in the barn cleaning up the cow manure, two young Canadian soldiers passed by. One of them was Luke DeWitt, who had been recuperating in the nearby hospital. Her first impressions weren’t too positive: here she was, up to her elbows in cow manure, and standing in front of her laughing were two young men. ‘I was a heck of a mess … I don’t know in the name of heaven how Luke and I got together but he must have felt sorry for me.’¹³

The fact that nearly all the available young British men had joined up and left their local communities only increased the certainty that eligible Canadian servicemen and British women would meet. Under normal circumstances, fathers, uncles and brothers may have put a stop to the amorous adventures of their female relatives, but most of the men were gone, based elsewhere in the UK or fighting, at first in the Mediterranean and Africa, and later in Italy, and Northwest Europe. There was little they could do to prevent Cupid’s arrow from striking their daughters, sisters, aunts – and in some cases, even their wives.

There was talk about Canadians stealing British women, sometimes even married British women – and certainly, that did happen. More than one British woman divorced her husband and married a Canadian instead. There were bigamists too, of both sexes, but in the files of the Canadian Wives Bureau the male bigamists of Canadian origin outnumber the women by eight to one.¹⁴

As if the divorce and bigamy weren’t enough to contend with, there were an estimated 22,000 Canadian babies born to unwed, single British women during the war. The most famous of these so called War Children is blues guitarist Eric Clapton, whose father is Montreal-born serviceman Edward Fryer.

Eric’s mother, Patricia Clapton, met Fryer in the days before the D-Day landing and nine months later, young Eric was born. Patricia married another Canadian and came to Canada as a War Bride in 1946, leaving her son behind with his grandparents who raised him as their own.¹⁵

British Attitudes Towards The Canadians

For the most part, Canadians were welcome in Britain. They were, after all, fellow cousins in the Empire. Nearly fifty per cent of all Canadians could claim British ancestry and many of the young men serving in the UK had relatives living in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Some Canadians were actually born in Britain and had emigrated with their families as children, so they were, for all intents and purposes, going back home.

Although Canada was a Dominion, it was still perceived as a colony by many British, which bothered some Canadians – especially the politicians – but nobody could ignore their shared history; the First World War had proven Canada’s commitment to the Mother Country and the Second World War wasn’t going to be any different.

Britons recognized that Canadians were performing an important duty, but it didn’t mean they always had to like these young ‘colonials’ as they were sometimes disparagingly called. The first winter of 1939–1940 didn’t do much for the Canadians’ reputation: It was the coldest winter on record since 1894 and the men didn’t like anything about Aldershot: the food was different, the barracks were freezing, and the people were ‘strange and reserved.’¹⁶ 1941 wasn’t any better.

The Canadians who arrived in the first few years may have had their reasons to dislike Britain but some of them also gave Britons a few reasons to dislike Canadians. Away from home for the first time, undisciplined and untrained, they didn’t always behave the way their hosts would have liked, especially when it came to drinking.

British attitudes towards alcohol and the presence of so many pubs represented a huge cultural shift for these young men. In the first few years there was more than one complaint about drunken Canadians tearing up a village. This 1941 letter from a woman in Reigate, Surrey sums up the feelings of many Britons about Canadians that Christmas:

The damned 3rd Division has now been inflicted on us and they seem just as rough and tough as their predecessors; last night, Xmas eve, they were rolling along in the middle of the road till all hours yelling at the top of their voices, the dead drunk being dragged along by the not so drunk. If anyone wants to know what your wife thinks of Canadians, just say ‘they stink’. I heard yesterday that a local girl not quite sixteen was expecting triplets any moment and the Canadian responsible has debunked.¹⁷

Given that kind of boorish behaviour, it’s not surprising that more than one Canadian wasn’t embraced by his British girlfriend’s parents. This War Bride describes how her husband had to ‘sell himself’ to her parents:

They, in common with a lot of other parents over there, looked suspiciously at Canadians. Definitely, they agreed, we should be hospitable to Canadians, for they had volunteered – not been called up – to come and stand shoulder to shoulder with the motherland. They were grand fighters in the last war and probably would be just as good in this one. But to have a Canadian as a son-in-law?

Too many people had heard the story of the ‘pub’ down in Brighton which Canadians had wrecked, and the story had lost nothing in the retelling. There were those drunken Canadians my father himself had seen in Piccadilly Circus.

With all this, it was to a definitely hostile atmosphere that I brought my husband-to-be home for the first time. Through him, my people met other Canadians and I think I can say that in all England there is not a more loyal pro-Canadian family than the one my husband and I left behind.¹⁸

Over the course of the war, relations between Canadians and their British hosts became considerably more relaxed and cordial. United by the shared experience of German bombing during the Blitz, incidents like the one at Reigate were rare in the last half of the war. With training and discipline, the Canadians put their best foot forward and, although they weren’t perfect, over time they began to understand the British and accept their different ways.¹⁹ As Canadian sacrifice on the battlefield became increasingly evident at Dieppe, then Sicily, Italy and Northwest Europe, Canadians and Britons got to know each other very well and one of the best ways to seal that relationship was through marriage.

I Do

Getting married in wartime wasn’t as easy as saying ‘I do’. In those days, it was expected that a young man would ask the parents for permission to marry their daughter. Assuming the answer was yes, only then could the fusillade of paperwork begin.

Forms had to be filled out, appointments made, medical exams taken, and although the rules changed over time, a Canadian serviceman had to obtain permission to marry from his commanding officer before a wedding date could be set. If he was under twenty-one, he even had to get permission from his parents back in Canada. If she was under twenty-one she had to do the same with her parents. The bride-to-be also had to get a letter of recommendation from her employer attesting to her character, a meeting with the chaplain was set, and a licence had to be purchased before any vows could be exchanged.

Reverend Father Raymond Hickey was the Roman Catholic Padre of the North Shore (New Brunswick) Regiment. The North Shores were of English, Scottish, Irish and Acadian²⁰ descent and many of the young French soldiers whom he ministered spoke not a word of English.

One of Father Hickey’s tasks was to counsel young couples who were contemplating marriage. In his book The Scarlet Dawn, which chronicles his experiences with the North Shores during the Second World War, Father Hickey explains how he learned a lesson about love in a chapter called ‘Love knows no language’.

Joe came back from a seven day leave to Edinburgh, came in and ‘Father,’ said he, ‘I come to get married.’ ‘Fine Joe,’ said I, ‘marriage is a fine sacrament; a good girl Joe?’

‘Oh yes, Father, Irish.’ ‘Irish,’ was the answer that Joe knew would score a bull’s eye with me. ‘Yes I know Joe, but know her well?’ I asked. ‘Oh yes, real well, Father,’ was the reply. Joe had already told me that he had met her for the first time on that leave. Now it took Joe a day to go and another to return; his Irish Mary was working all day in a factory, so with rapid calculation I figured out just how well Joe knew her. This was a chaplain’s duty, so I set out to side-track Joe’s marriage. ‘Now look Joe,’ said I, ‘have you thought this all out? Have you told her everything? Does she realize what she’s doing? For example, have you told her of the cold winters we have back home, with our ice and snow? And another thing Joe, how is your little Mary O’Brien, with her Irish brogue, going to get along in your village where you speak mostly French? Have you told her all this Joe?’ Joe’s only answer was a shrug of his shoulders. With a promise to Joe to shove his case through, we said goodnight and I sat down to write Miss Mary O’Brien the things her Joe wouldn’t speak. Here was my letter:

‘Dear Miss O’Brien:

I’m the Catholic chaplain of the regiment your friend Joe is in. He tells me you intend to marry. Now Joe is a fine good boy, but has he told you of the conditions you will be going to in Canada? For example, we have terrible winters where Joe and I come from; we have nine and ten feet of snow; it’s awfully cold, and there’s ice from October to June.

And, secondly, Miss O’Brien, have you considered the language question? How are you going to get along with your Irish brogue – which I admit is sweet in your County Down, but out of place in Joe’s French-speaking village?’ And with a bit of fatherly advice I closed my letter.

Back by return mail, came the answer. It was written post haste in lead pencil on, I think, paper she tore off the wall in her wrath. Here was the answer:

‘Dear Father Hickey:

Thank you for your letter. As to your first difficulty – I like snow, and secondly, love knows no language.

Yours truly

Mary O’Brien.’²¹

All this bureaucracy was designed to slow down hasty marriages and it seemed to work: only the most determined couples could be expected to go through that entire process and still come out the other end with stars in their eyes. The ‘permission to marry’ form would give a date upon which the couple could legally marry and with that piece of paper in hand, they could purchase a marriage licence. The licence was good for a certain period of time and if the marriage didn’t take place within the prescribed dates, a new licence had to be bought.

There are so many examples of weddings gone awry that it seems they were the norm, rather than the exception. It was impossible to say when a fiancé would be called away to duty, so marriages that had been planned months in advance could often be called off at the last minute or, vice-versa, hurried preparations had to be made at a moment’s notice when it was known a soldier was due for transfer or repatriation back to Canada. How they managed to pull it off is nothing short of miraculous in some cases.

Still other women’s hopes of marriage would be dashed when her fiancé was repatriated before the paperwork was complete. This appears to have happened quite frequently if the number of fiancées who came to Canada to get married after the war is any indication.

For the husband, there was little preparation: he wore a uniform. But all the nice things that a young bride dreams of such as a white dress, flowers, cakes and fine food for guests at the reception had to be purchased using ration cards. More often than not, she ended up getting married in a two-piece suit, the cake was made without sugar, and the menu was whatever could be cobbled together from rations, including the serviceman’s friend, Spam^®.

Transportation of War Brides

Between January 1942 and August 1944, the transportation of servicemen’s wives and children was administered by the London Office of the Immigration Branch of the Canadian Department of Mines and Resources. At first the numbers were barely noticeable, and the reasons why so few came during the war years are fairly obvious: the exigencies of the fighting services, the very real danger of travel on the seas and the ban on the westward movement of wives and civilians ensured that only a very small number of dependents could make the dangerous journey to Canada.

But with victory in sight, everything changed when the Department of National Defence took over the transportation and travel arrangements of servicemen’s dependents in August 1944. The Army was put in charge of moving wives and children of all three services, Army, Navy and Air Force, and one of the first things it did was to set up the Canadian Wives Bureau on the third floor of a fashionable and expensive store called Galleries Lafayette on Regent Street in London.

Established as a Directorate of the Adjutant General’s Branch at Canadian Military Headquarters, the Bureau was responsible for arranging dependent’s passage to Canada, collecting and caring for them en route to their ships and providing information and welfare services. The Bureau also encouraged the formation of wives’ clubs in the UK, where brides held social gatherings and listened to talks on life in Canada.

Although smaller numbers of War Brides and their children had made their way to Canada between 1942 and 1945, the overwhelming majority, (45,320 of 64,451), were brought to Canada in 1946 in a massive year-long effort that began with the sailing of the Mauretania on 5 February.

English War Bride Eswyn Lyster and her young son, Terry, came to Canada on the Mauretania which departed from Liverpool in the early morning hours. The Mauretania was ‘the vanguard’²² of more than 45,000 Canadian servicemen’s dependents scheduled to sail for Canada over the course of the next twelve months. A famous photograph of the ship’s departure paints a vivid picture of the huge vessel in the soft morning light, smoke billowing from its stacks as two tugs help it along its way. In this brief excerpt from her memoirs, Eswyn describes the five-day ocean voyage:

Terry and I sailed from Liverpool on the Mauretania in a group of about 1,000 Canadian War Brides, in the early hours of February 5_th. This was the first dedicated War Bride sailing, although small groups had made the crossing while the war was still on. From the dock the Mauretania had looked like a floating warehouse, and most of us assumed that no amount of water could unsteady it. We were wrong.… The Atlantic in February gives a watery impersonation of the Canadian Rockies. The good ship Mauretania tilted much too far one way, slid into a valley; tilted as many degrees the other way, and rode a sloping wall of water until nothing could be seen from the porthole but sky. Not that anybody was looking. The process was repeated endlessly for five days with predictable results.²³

That sailing marked the beginning of what the Canadian press affectionately dubbed ‘Operation Daddy’²⁴ in reference to the thousands of women and infants on board the huge ocean-going ships. But for members of the Canadian Wives Bureau, the Immigration Branch, the Red Cross and for the women themselves, it was a huge logistical undertaking that took on the dimensions of a D-Day assault. By the time it was all over, 43,454 War Brides and their 20,997 children were transported to Canada.

The Darker Side

Interestingly, more than 4,500 of the 48,000 War Brides who married Canadian servicemen refused to take the government up on its offer of free passage to Canada. While it is true that about half of the War Brides who decided to stay in Britain and Europe did so because their husbands found employment, there is evidence of a seamier side to the War Bride story.

Riddled throughout the files of the Canadian Wives Bureau and Immigration Branch are the most personal and intimate details of these people’s lives, including lists of hundreds of War Brides who are either refusing to come to Canada because they are getting a divorce from their Canadian husbands, or who are being refused transport under the War Bride transportation scheme because their settlement arrangements have been deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ by the Immigration Branch. In the files are these couple’s full names, addresses and sometimes quite shocking revelations about the reasons why the women aren’t coming to Canada.

In a day when everyone seems to be so concerned about privacy, it’s surprising that the files are actually public record and open for anyone to see. Reasons given include everything from ‘husband in jail’ to the unsavoury ‘VDS’ (which stands for Venereal Disease Symptoms); from ‘wife insane’ to ‘divorce pending’; from ‘husband cannot be located’ to ‘husband doesn’t want wife’.

Although the reading may be titillating, the fact is that these five per cent of cases were rare in comparison to the ninety-five per cent of War Brides who did come to Canada to happily join their husbands. What happened when they got there is another story.

Boarding the Ships

Each wife had documents to provide, forms to fill out, medical appointments to keep, and more forms to fill out before packing her luggage and finally boarding a ship in Southampton or Liverpool. Each night before the ship would sail, wives and children would descend upon one of the brides’ hostels in London, such as the Mostyn Hostel, where they were organized by the Red Cross for departure to Canada the next day.

Unfortunately for those brides travelling between 1942 and 1945 the accommodations and services provided to dependents was by no means as impressive: sailing in wartime, on reconverted troopships with no special considerations for the needs of babies in nappies, and without the dedicated assistance afforded to wives in 1946 through the Red Cross Escort Officers and VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachments), the wives who came during the war years had a vastly different experience than those who came at the height of the War Bride transportation in 1946.

Doris Lloyd, an English bride who arrived in New Brunswick in November 1944, remembers how she and her daughter, along with twenty other War Brides and their children, ended up spending four days in a dismal Scottish hostel while waiting for a winter storm to break. Once on board their ship, the Ile de France, twelve women and their one or two children each were crowded into cabins with twelve bunks, one bed for each mother and her children. As seasickness set in, they approached the Red Cross for help and were told to take care of themselves. Doris was not impressed.²⁵ By 1946, however, the kinks were worked out of the system and few brides would share that experience.

Travelling in style on refitted luxury liners such as the Queen Mary and the Aquitania, the War Brides who came to Canada in 1946 had a luxurious trip by comparison. For these brides, the transatlantic trip was equivalent to a modern-day cruise, with fine food, lodgings and services.

In this newspaper article dated 11 June 1946 the author makes it quite clear that the Wives Bureau had taken ‘every precaution’ to ensure the comfort of its special cargo:

Every possible precaution was taken to protect infants from accident or illness during the voyages … No children were allowed to travel in ships considered unsuitable, such as the Ile de France and the Lady Rodney which have steep companion ways and narrow alleys. Ships especially equipped for children are the Letitia, the Queen Mary, the Aquitania and the Lady Nelson. All have babies’ cots adjacent to the lower berths reserved for mothers, up-to-date hospitals, maternity wards and full staffs of doctors, nurses and Red Cross workers.²⁶

But no matter if you were on the Ile de France in 1944 or the Queen Mary in 1946, seasickness was a serious problem for many on board and there was little that could be done except to lie in bed and suffer until the ship docked at Pier 21 in Halifax. English War Bride Pat Pyne recalls coming down with seasickness on day three of her voyage on the Letitia and in her diary she wrote:

Peg (another War Bride) and I were the only two at our table today for dinner and there were only a few at breakfast. Our steward told us not to take any sugar in our tea or coffee if we didn’t want to get seasick. We haven’t been feeling too good ourselves today but are both most determined to not be sick.²⁷

Making matters worse for the seasick was their proximity in closed cabins to other sick wives along with their nauseated, crying children in nappies, not to mention the threat presented by stormy weather during the sometimes turbulent ocean crossings. In the diary she kept of her work as a Canadian Red Cross Escort Officer on board the War Bride ships, Kay Ruddick wrote of a harrowing storm that hit the Queen Mary on 27 August 1946:

Terrific sea; around midnight, wave hit the ship and was so huge, splashed into the portholes on top deck and hit the bridge, down the gangway into the Captain’s cabin … Electrical equipment put out of commission and ship stopped for two hours, bobbing like a cork … brides, babies (1000 brides and 1,000 babies on board) ship’s crew sick all over the place! Men, civilians and other passengers, turned to, to help us look after the babies. By morning the seas had calmed down and the ‘cleanup’ started … wet mattresses galore, not to mention gallons of javex used to clean the cabins and decks.²⁸

After spending up to two weeks at sea, the vast majority of War Brides and their children arrived at Pier 21 in Halifax, the principal gateway to Canada for returning servicemen and their dependents during and after the war.

From the ship, they were escorted into a waiting area in Pier 21 where Red Cross personnel would care for the children while the wives were processed through Immigration. From Halifax, the next step of their journey began with trains called War Bride Specials, equipped and staffed by military personnel and Red Cross Escort Officers. At every whistle stop across Canada, these War Bride trains brought dependents to their husbands and new families from Cape Breton to British Columbia. Thus marked the end of the fairytale and the beginning of real life in Canada.

Settling In

After the initial shock of arrival wore off, the War Brides settled into the regular ebb and flow of life in Canada. At the beginning, War Brides’ groups formed in towns and cities with the help of the local YMCA or the Red Cross and women tried to help each other with a friendly network of support. But the fact was, with new babies arriving one after the other, there was little time to go to War Bride meetings and most of these groups soon disbanded.²⁹

In retrospect, had some War Brides known what was in store for them in Canada, they probably would have turned around and gone straight back home to their parents. But it wasn’t so easy in 1946 to just get up and leave and even if it had been, many still would have decided to stay. ‘You made your bed, now you have to lie in it’ was a saying that reflected the social expectations of women for whom marriage was supposed to be forever: divorce was simply not an option.

In response to concerns raised in the media about the fate of British War Brides, in May 1947 Canada’s Department of Veterans Affairs released the results of a cross-country survey of War Brides that intended to show how they were faring in their marriages to Canadian servicemen. Using New Brunswick as the example, the study found that the majority of these marriages were ‘as successful as even the most optimistic could expect’,³⁰ and it offered up statistics showing that the War Brides’ marriages were no less likely to fail than any other Canadian union.

The reason the DVA released the report had as much to do with public perception that some War Brides had been lured to Canada with false promises as it did with the reality that others were in fact returning to their homelands after their marriages had failed.³¹

We will never know how many women went back home to Britain and Europe after coming to Canada as War Brides. Once the war emergency was over, Immigration no longer counted these women as a distinct group so they blended into the statistics for outward migration. We can only imagine how many War Brides would have liked to go back but they did not have the financial resources to do so and there was no help from the Canadian government.

Correspondence in the Canadian Wives Bureau files shows the difficulties some War Brides had in adapting to life in Canada and the kind of help they could expect from Canadian authorities. Some clearly wanted an escape, but not all War Brides were planning to leave their husbands behind. As this January 1947 letter to the Canadian Wives Bureau shows, there were also economic reasons for going back home:

My husband, baby and myself wish to return to England. My husband has been offered a good position out there but we haven’t the money to pay both our fares. I am a War Bride and I haven’t lived in Canada over a year. Two people told me I can apply for my fare through the government because of this. Is this true and if so would you be so kind as to give me the necessary information …³²

There were as many reasons why a bride would want to leave as there were reasons to stay and whether she acted upon it depended on a whole set of circumstances unique to her situation. We do know, however, that the majority stayed in Canada. As any married couple will attest, it isn’t easy starting out, and so it was for the War Brides in the postwar years.

With so many returning veterans, jobs were scarce and it was difficult, if not impossible, to find adequate housing. Cultural differences, language, ethnicity and religion caused problems for many women as they tried to fit in. English War Bride Henrietta Pronovost couldn’t speak French when she arrived in St Gabriel de Brandon, Quebec but she says she knew enough ‘to tell when they were talking about me’.³³

And although outhouses were a normal part of Canadian life, they certainly weren’t for city slickers used to plumbing and electricity in big cities like London. How many women found themselves facing down an angry barnyard rooster on the way to the ‘biffy’ is impossible to tell, but at least they can laugh about it now. British War Bride Betty Campbell came from Plymouth, England to Arthurette, New Brunswick. She had a run in with a rooster named Jimmy Duke who took a disliking to her.

We lived six miles out in the woods in Birch Ridge. The outside toilet was 400 feet from the house and my sister-in-law had a very ugly rooster named Jimmy Duke. One day I had to go out there. When I opened the door to come out, there stood Jimmy Duke. My sister-in-law was wondering what had happened to me so she came out to see if I was okay. There she stood, laughing at Jimmy Duke and me inside, crying. Any time I came home from somewhere or stepped outside, he came running as soon as he saw me or heard my voice, so I had to learn to keep my mouth shut. And guess what? I always had to have an escort to go outside.³⁴

Added to the mix was the fact that many of the husbands had been repatriated ahead of their wives and had spent the last six months or more back in their home towns, hanging around with their war buddies at the Legion, drinking and reliving the good times – and the bad – overseas. Others suffered what we would call post-traumatic stress disorder which was exacerbated when their wives and young children arrived in Canada.

‘He wasn’t the same man I married,’ is a saying that was heard often among the War Brides. Hopes and dreams of a happy life in Canada were sometimes buried under infidelity, poverty, unemployment, alcoholism and debt. For these War Brides, returning back home to Britain was not only an admission of failure, but it was financially impossible, especially if there were children involved.

Undoubtedly, rural life was a shock for women raised in cities with modern transportation and communications systems: dirt roads that turned into mud in the spring, no electricity or telephones and lack of access to education and healthcare were all important concerns. But if your husband treated you well and you were in love, nothing else really mattered.

The War Brides Today

It would be impossible to tell the story of every Canadian War Bride in this short volume: every woman’s experience was unique, ranging from the ‘idyllic to the tragic’.³⁵ They shared much in common: meeting and falling in love with a Canadian soldier in Britain, marrying and coming to Canada, settling into a new culture and adapting to a new way of life. But far from the stereotypical War Bride with her tea-cosy and loveable accent, the War Brides are as different from one another as they are to any other immigrant group.

Without question, there are couples who probably should never have married. But behind the sordid tales of unhappy War Brides is anecdotal evidence which shows these women have had mainly successful marriages, filled with happiness and plenty of love to pass down to their own children and on to the next generation.

And no matter what happened in their personal lives, if you ask the War Brides today if they would do it all over again, most will give a resounding ‘Yes!’ For many, their lives were enriched both materially and emotionally by coming to Canada and the list of their accomplishments is lengthy: a loving husband; a good home; fine well-educated children and grandchildren; as well as a standard of living far better than what they might have had in their homeland.

Many played important roles in their communities, first as volunteers with their children’s schools and later, as the children grew up, taking leadership roles in organizations, service groups, arts, culture, religion and even politics.

Many wives worked outside the home, providing a second income to make ends meet while gaining a wider circle of friends and deeper ties to their community. Others became famous in their own right; English War Bride Joan Walker won the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour in 1954 for her book Pardon My Parka, a hilarious look at her experiences coming to Canada as the wife of a Canadian serviceman. Betty Oliphant became the head and inspiration of the National Ballet School of Canada, and was considered one of the country’s leading professionals until her death in 2004. And in 2006, Jean Spear was honoured by Queen Elizabeth II when she received the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in Buckingham Palace.

In the 1970s when the last of the children flew the nest, and later, as husbands started to pass away, many returned to their immigrant roots and revived long defunct War Brides organisations in villages, towns and cities across the country. The revival began in Saskatchewan, then spread like wildfire across Canada until nearly every province had an official War Brides Association. Today, the War Brides may be in their eighties, but the groups provide a tangible connection to a sisterhood, which despite their differences, share so many similarities.

The groups also symbolize Canada’s continued fascination with the War Bride story more than sixty years after the end of the Second World War. Every year, there are War Bride reunions from Regina, Saskatchewan to Halifax, Nova Scotia; from Peterborough, Ontario to Fredericton, New Brunswick, and even though they always say ‘this will be the last one’ there always seems to be another.

In 2006, the sixtieth anniversary of the War Brides’ arrival in Canada was celebrated across the country. Six of ten provinces declared 2006 Year of the War Bride and in November, the largest gathering of War Brides since 1946 made a pilgrimage to Pier 21 in Halifax on board VIA Rail’s special War Bride train. Age and time have not slowed them down. They are still the bright young lasses who caught the sparkle in a Canadian’s eye and fell in love with him in the midst of the Second World War.

The War Brides came to Canada at a time when there was a renewed sense of optimism that things could be better after six long years of war. Anything was possible, so long as one was willing to work for it. Together with their husbands and families, they helped shape the Canada we know today, reinforcing British cultural traditions and fostering emotional ties with the Mother Country that have been passed on with pride to the next generations. Whether they were English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh, their legacy is alive in the one in thirty Canadians who can count a War Bride in their family tree.