From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/English/Bruce S. Elliott
Much of what has been written about the English who came to Canada during the first three decades of the twentieth century addresses special subgroups: labouring children, domestic servants, gentlemen immigrants, distressed gentlewomen, slum families assisted by Britain’s Local Government Board. Though these groups deserve attention, it is important to recognize that, like the impoverished Irish whose arrival on Canadian shores in 1847 dominated the scholarly literature on that group until recently, all of them can be written about because of a piece of historical good fortune; that is, these groups, either because they excited controversy or because they were the objects of assisted immigration programs, generated considerable paperwork in their own time. Compare the copious literature on the short-lived Barr colony in Saskatchewan with the paucity of writing on the hundreds of thousands who simply came on their own and adapted.
One of the many groups of Canadian English who have not received much notice is the soldiers of World War I. The first contingent of the Canadian Expeditionary Force was 70 percent British-born and heavily English. Many young men only a few years in the country no doubt were motivated by emotional attachment to their native land, but others joined up because they hoped for a free trip home, away from unemployment in a strange country. The British accounted for 49 percent of enlistments until late 1917, when conscription finally tipped the balance in favour of native Canadians. In the end, 25 percent of Canada’s 470,224 soldiers were English-born, compared to 7.7 percent Scots, 3.1 percent Irish, and 47 percent Canadian-born.
The English-born had also signed up disproportionately in Canada’s much smaller Boer War contingents. The English percentage was then not as high, but the south African venture came at the end of a decade in which the British-born proportion of the male population (7 percent) was the lowest in years and lower than it would be again for some time. In this context, the English-born percentage of 19.6 (and the overall British percentage of 29.4) is quite impressive. Moreover, Englishmen tended to volunteer when the war was going badly; the first contingent, dispatched when the conflict seemed an easy adventure, was more heavily Canadian. The experience in World War I was the opposite, with conscription helping to make the difference.
Immigration was much reduced after the Great War, with only the net increase of 16,000 English in British Columbia in the 1920s approaching the gain of 21,000 in Ontario. There was an overall decrease of 5,000 in the prairies; only Alberta showed a small increase. This drop in the popularity of prairie settlement occurred despite the promotional efforts of the British government. Under the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, the British government allocated £3 million a year to assisted passages and training on a matching-funds basis.
Most of the programs directed settlers to the prairies. The Hoadley project brought over a hundred schoolboys to be trained in western farming. The Canadian Cottages Agreement of 1924 saw the British government build houses on prairie farms so that labourers could gain experience. The largest project was the 3,000 Families Scheme whereby the government of Canada provided farms under the Soldier Settlement Board and the British government royally financed livestock and equipment. Though the program was so well funded that it could hardly fail, in the long term it left the families vulnerable to the Great Depression because all their earlier hardships had been handled for them. Scattered through the prairies, they were unable to draw upon community support when adversity struck. Two-thirds left the region, most of them quitting agriculture, and 11 percent returned to Britain. Furthermore, many of the other projects of the period – one was the Fellowship of the Maple Leaf, which aimed to bring British teachers to the west – were advanced by the same promoters who had encouraged western settlement before the war, itself a sign of stagnation. The Fellowship was inspired by the Reverend G.E. Lloyd of Barr colony fame.
The English, as indicated, tended to scatter throughout the prairies, a process encouraged by a shared language and certain similarities of culture with native-born Canadians. It is unclear to what extent familial chain migration functioned. But the disastrous experiments of the pre-war era had reaped their harvest. The bad reputation attaching to green Englishmen, far worse than that suffered by the Irish and Scots, the bad press at home, and the tendency, strong since the turn of the century, for the disgruntled of English cities to avail themselves of urban job opportunities in Canada, and especially in eastern Canada, diminished their presence in the prairies even before those remaining had to face the dustbowl conditions of the Great Depression. The 3,000 Families Scheme could itself have accounted for most new English rural settlement during the 1920s.
The Canadian government by then was convinced that assisted immigrants were a bad risk and it minimized its involvement under the Imperial Settlement Act. But on occasion it was strong-armed by other interests into accepting people it knew would have difficulty adapting. The prime example was the British harvest workers. Between 1890 and 1929 the fabled harvest trains transported young men from the Maritimes and central Canada west to harvest the all-important wheat crop. In some years of bumper harvests, Canadian labour proved insufficient and Americans and city dwellers were recruited. Only in 1906, 1923, and 1928 were old country workers brought in. In 1923 some 12,000 paid reduced fares for the privilege and 80 percent remained in the country after the work ended. But English press accounts of callous treatment threatened the future of British family emigration and the government resolved not to repeat the exercise. Under pressure from farmers, shipping companies, and British authorities, however, another 10,000, many of them unemployed English miners, were brought over in 1928. This time the program was an unmitigated disaster attended by uncontrollably bad publicity.
The newcomers’ ranks were penetrated at the outset by English communist agitators intent upon wrecking the scheme, and a vocal minority of “misfits, malingerers, and malcontents” poisoned the English press against Canada. Three-quarters of the harvesters returned home, 40 percent with no money and a third at British government expense. Their inadaptability reinforced the image of the “lazy, condescending Englishman” and turned round even the opinions of older English immigrants who wanted the prairies kept British. They expected the harvesters to be men like themselves, who had paid their own passage and endured years of uncomplaining privation to secure their present independence. The incident impressed upon them that England itself had changed: “To them, Englishmen were products of the dole and unemployment insurance, which sapped their strength and made them unable and unwilling to work. Buttressed by trade union and Communist rhetoric to the point that they were afraid to venture alone, they were unable to cope, even with considerable subsidies. They appeared to be more interested in advertising their plight than in making an honest effort to correct the situation.”
The young men who came as farm labourers in this period had their counterpart in the young women who arrived as domestic servants. By 1830 most domestics were Irish, but with the decline of Irish immigration this changed and in the pre–World War I years over three-quarters of immigrant domestics were British, 60 percent of them English and 29 percent Scots. Because single women earned less than men, large numbers were assisted to emigrate by government subsidy and philanthropic loans. The British Women’s Emigration Association aided 16,000 in total, and the Salvation Army 15,000. Inter-war demand in Britain lessened the supply of domestics for the dominions and, despite loans and subsidies under the Empire Settlement Act, the proportion of British and especially of English declined in favour of central Europeans. After World War II, there was again a shortage of domestic workers in Britain, and so Canada turned increasingly first to continental Europe, and then, from 1955, to the West Indies.
Some 95,016 children were brought to Canada to labour as domestic and farm workers between 1873 and 1930. This project was a natural extension of the long-standing practice (discontinued after 1838) of parishes apprenticing orphans and deserted children locally or as factory hands in distant villages. Its origins can be traced back to 1832, when organizers of the Children’s Friend Society queried Governor Aylmer about the practicality of sending out poor children to be apprenticed in the Canadas. The first three teenaged boys arrived from London in 1833; in all, some 232 were sent out before the Rebellions of 1837–38 dampened enthusiasm for British North america as a destination, 41 to New Brunswick, 3 to Halifax, and the remainder to the Canadas.
Small parties of children from the London Ragged Schools and some reformatory schools began to arrive in the 1850s, but economic conditions late in the decade diminished the need for the programs. The movement revived in the 1860s and received substantial public attention following an experiment in 1869 by Maria Rye, who set up distribution centres for the children in Canada and persuaded the British government to sanction further parties. However, reports of lax supervision precipitated an official inquiry and a new ban on government-assisted child emigration that lasted until economic troubles reversed the policy again in 1883. Rye in the meantime continued her work, canvassing for donations and sending children who were not receiving parish assistance. Numerous other agencies joined in the movement, the best known being Dr Barnardo’s Homes which began sending children to Canada in 1867 and was responsible for relocating more than 22,000 by 1913. The Canadian government provided transportation subsidies and grants-in-aid. The favoured destination was rural Ontario, which was thought to provide the most wholesome environment, isolating though it was for children raised in English cities. It was also there that well-established commercial agriculture generated the greatest demand for farm labour. The fiction that the “home children,” as they were called, would be adopted was abandoned early by most agencies. The latter spelled out the terms of the children’s employment in indentures, but inspection and enforcement remained inadequate.
Only a third of the children were orphans. Many undoubtedly were abused, but fewer were sent to Canada without parental consent than is popularly believed. Only 6 percent of the Barnardo boys and 8 percent of the girls were the victims or beneficiaries of “philanthropic abduction” and another 3 and 6 percent respectively were sent out under court order. The majority of consenting parents maintained some contact with their children, and attempts were made by most homes to locate siblings near one another. Nearly a third revisited England by the time they reached their twenties, and 16 percent returned there to live.
Public opinion began to turn against child emigration before World War I as socialists were elected to English Boards of Guardians. In the 1920s, a declining birthrate, mother’s allowance, and adoption legislation made the practice seem less advantageous. Lobbying both in England and by Canadian social-service agencies led the federal government in 1925 to ban the immigration of unaccompanied children under fourteen. Teenagers who had completed their education continued to emigrate under the auspices of the British agencies until 1939.
World War II brought two special categories of immigrants to Canada, most of them English, though the available statistics are aggregate. Over 7,700 children were evacuated from Britain to Canada for the duration of the war. Eighty percent were private evacuees sent abroad by wealthy families or sponsored by companies, service clubs, and institutions; they were accompanied by some 1,500 mothers. A Canadian government program to assist in the evacuation of a more demographically representative cohort was ended after the sinking of the transport City of Benares in September 1940. Most were cared for by Canadian families as “guest children”; care was taken that they not be considered successors to the labouring children whose emigration had been terminated some years earlier. All but 205 of the children returned to Britain by February 1945, but many had a difficult time adjusting to a country and families they had not seen for up to six years and an unknown number eventually returned to Canada to live. Much larger numbers of war brides came to Canada during and after the war, in all numbering 48,000 from Britain and Europe. Canadian ground forces were in Britain from 1939 until the summer of 1943 without seeing military action and many developed relationships with British women. After careful investigation of each case, Canadian authorities permitted such couples to marry and provided them and their children with free passage to Canada.
Following the war, Canada, especially British Columbia and Ontario, became a destination of choice for British immigrants making an uneasy transition back to civilian life or weary of the enforced austerity that continued into the 1950s. The Canadian economy by this time was more urban and industrialized and a wide variety of social and occupational groups found ready employment. Though the United Kingdom was the object of the greatest Canadian recruitment efforts after the war, British numbers were exceeded by those of refugees and immigrants from Europe, and in the succeeding decades more people arrived from southern Europe and the Third World as Canadian admission policies evolved.
