‘Home Children:’ Don Cherry had personal connection to honoured children’s group
2014/08/02 2 Comments
One of the relatively less known stories in Canadian history (the Government did do a relatively minor commemoration when I was at CIC and the speech by Senator Gerry St. Germain, a former home child, was particularly moving):
About 118,000 British children — one was Cherry’s maternal grandfather and war vet, Richard Palamountain — were shipped to Canada between 1869 and 1948 to work as indentured farm hands and domestic servants.
The abuses many suffered in Canada were horrific. One of them, Arthur Clarkson, who arrived as a nine year old, was horsewhipped and made to live in an unheated barn, almost costing him his frostbitten lower limbs.
“It’s really heartbreaking to hear some of the stories. These kids were actually slaves,” Cherry told The Canadian Press.
“They had to sign something for so many years and most of them didn’t know what they were signing.”
Almost every one of the home children in Canada at the time — about 10,000 — signed up to serve during the Great War that began 100 years ago, including Cherry’s grandpa. More than one-thousand died in action, most at the bloody battle at Vimy Ridge. Many had no one to mourn them. Others died without notification to their relatives.
Don Cherry had personal connection to honoured children’s group.
About Andrew
Multicultural Meanderings 
This article was very interesting to me, Andrew, as my father and his brother arrived in 1925 from Scotland as part of what we now call “Home Children” on one of the boats chartered by Dr. Barnardo. Most of the children were English but the boat stopped at Greenock and picked up a group of Scottish children who met and stuck together on that boat. After arriving at Quebec, they were put on a train headed for the west to work on farms. The train stopped at Guelph where some farmers waiting to take the children from Lanarkshire they had heard were aboard
.
Those young Scots remained friends all their lives (I grew up knowing them as part of my extended family). The boys worked on dairy farms and the girls in the households of the employers on the estates north of Toronto and in their city homes. I never heard anything bad about their placements on farms – they all felt very fortunate to be there during the depression. Dad’s employers helped him to bring his mother and siblings to Canada as well over the next few years.
When war became imminent in 1939, my father, his brother and their friends all signed up and served in WWII, some returning with War Brides later, as was the case with my father.
All these years later, in my quest to get my citizenship back after it was taken in 2003, I was told by a CIC official that there was no way my father could have qualified as a citizen in 1947, as he had been out of the country for the five years prior (with the RCA in Europe) and because he had arrived, not as a legal immigrant, but as a Home Child. I thought at the time that the CIC person had not known what I meant by “Home Child” as I had to explain that to her.
Obviously, we’ve heard speeches and seen stamps issued for the “Year of the Home Child” but Canada does not really understand or appreciate what role those children played in the history and building of the nation. All the present discussion of Temporary Foreign Workers providing cheap labour, often on farms, and household help makes me think of my Home Children family and what wonderful citizens (yes, Citizens, no matter what the government says!) they turned out to be.
Thanks for sharing your personal story and thoughts. Powerful reminder.