War Brides. Melynda Jarratt
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