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Our great aunt and uncle, Ethel and Ernie Deverill, came to London, Ontario, from London, England, in the 1920s, two young single people with relatives on either side of the ocean, none of whom could have afforded to help pay their way. Domestics and farm labourers were in demand in Canada at the time, and a variety of emigration schemes existed to match people to available jobs. Though it has never been determined with certainty that Ethel and Ernie came here under one of those programs, it’s likely, since Ethel’s entry documents claimed she would be working as a domestic with a job awaiting her, and Ernie’s showed that he had already been hired as a farm labourer, despite having little or no experience. Essentially, they came with scant possessions, and enthusiasm for a new start. Almost twenty years earlier, the fact they were from one of the have-not boroughs of London would have singled them out as undesirables, two among thousands of London poor broadly labeled “the degenerate ‘Cockney’.”

 

 

Since at least the 1860s, charitable organizations operating in London’s East End, the Borough, and other impoverished areas of the city had been sending London’s poor to Canada in large numbers. The Salvation Army, the East End Emigration Fund, the Charity Organisation Society and a handful of other philanthropic agencies developed various schemes to facilitate the transportation and resettlement of prospective emigrants. And while Canada needed and wanted the influx, many of these new arrivals were not the choice candidates sought, and were often looked on with suspicion and even hostility, an attitude indicative in part of a class prejudice that assumed these immigrants were not only lazy, weak, ill and incapable, but included an intrinsic criminal element.

Until 1906, Canada’s immigration policy had been relatively open, and British people, given the historic, matriarchal relationship between the two countries, had been preferred. Reverend James Shaver Woodsworth,

a Methodist minister and politician who would become a major influence on Canadian social policy, summed up the view of many when he wrote: “We need more of our own blood to assist us in maintaining in Canada our British traditions and mold the incoming armies of foreigners into loyal British subjects.” But assisted immigrants, Woodsworth maintained, and particularly those from London’s poorest warrens – Whitechapel, the Borough, Shoreditch and the like – were not what he had in mind. In his book Strangers Within Our Gates, or Coming Canadians, Woodsworth gave the example of a young family from Whitechapel, the husband a dyer, the wife a lace-maker. Together with their children, they arrived in Canada thanks to a charitable organization program, ostensibly to farm on the prairies, but, as Woodsworth writes, “They never got beyond Winnipeg. The man was not strong enough physically to farm, and his eyesight was defective. Before many months the wife was in the courts accusing her husband of assault. The children were sickly; after about a year it was discovered that the little boy was weak-minded. The ‘home’ was a copy of the homes in the slums of East London.”

A correspondent for the Times of London, writing in 1908 from Toronto and quoting a Canadian newspaper proprietor, agreed.

One hears the same thing everywhere – the Englishman who succeeds [in Canada] is hardly ever a Londoner; the Englishman who fails completely is almost always a Londoner. … It is these people who are the curse of the Empire, who are the cause of the “No English Need Apply” advertisements, who are doomed to fail wherever they go, who are, and must remain, helpless, shiftless wrecks. For many years the philanthropists, the clergy, the students of sociology have been declaring that “something must be done” for these poor stunted victims of generations of city life, of heedlessness and misgovernment. Recently the “something” has taken the form of assisted emigration, under the pitifully mistaken idea that clearer skies and more generous space and unvitiated air will transform a man or woman who has attained full growth from a useless to a useful member of the community. It will not do. In the second generation, perhaps, there may be a change, for, after all, there is good stock in these “submerged” millions. In the meanwhile, however, they are a burden on communities that can ill afford it, and they are becoming a source of irritation on the part of the Colonies toward the Mother Country.

This “irritation” had translated into legislation in Canada, aimed at curbing what J.S. Woodsworth called “the “dumping” of these unfortunates into Canada. In 1906, the Canadian government had tightened its immigration laws to try to encourage the arrival of persons with qualifications more suited to the country’s needs – mainly farm labour – and the emigration agencies in London made at least a perfunctory effort at complying. But the observations of the correspondent from the Times in 1907 and letters such as the one sent by the Ontario Department of Agriculture in Toronto and published in the East London Observer in 1907 complaining about a group of recent arrivals from Poplar, illustrated their meagre success.

On Sunday night there arrived here thirty-one men, bringing cards of introduction from L. Leopold [the Official Labour Representative in Europe for the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association.] I interviewed some of [the men] yesterday morning, and, picking out the one that appeared least drunk of the lot, I learned that they had been engaged on some farm colony for some three or four months. They received an express order when they landed, which they cashed in Toronto, and immediately proceeded to get drunk. At the lodging-house last night they raised such a disturbance that they had to send for the patrol wagon and send several of them to the police station. We sent a few to Harrowsmith this morning, and they will probably work in some mine; but I do not think they are at all fit men to send to farms, although they are said by Leopold to be wanting farm work. They did not want to go on farms, and I do not think they would be the kind of men whom it would be safe to send into a farm house. They are, without exception, the toughest lot that I have seen for years.

Still, the agencies in London soldiered on, and reported their own statistics to demonstrate the success of their ventures. The Daily Telegraph Shilling Fund and its associated charities suggested that “a better, fitter set of emigrants had never been selected to leave our shores,” while other reports stated that a full 90 per cent of Salvation Army emigrants had found success in agricultural jobs in Canada.

The key, they believed, was in “raising the standard” of the emigrants, and providing prior training on farm colonies. But Canada saw the issue differently. Of the 6,096 emigrants sent by the East End Emigration Fund in 1906/7, almost 250 were denied entry to Canada upon arrival, and returned to England immediately. The following year, 70 per cent of all deportations from Canada were British.

The First World War put a halt to most emigration, but when the war ended there were new challenges. With so many unemployed, the British government began to take an interest in emigration, an area previously left, for the most part, to faith-based and philanthropic organizations like the Salvation Army and Girls’ Friendly Society. The government held a conference on Empire settlement, and invited Canada, Australia and New Zealand to the table, coming away with an understanding of their intersecting goals: in Britain, to facilitate the assisted emigration of their unemployed and strengthen allegiances within the Empire, and in the Dominions, to attract preferred immigrants – men with employable skills or those who would farm the land, and healthy women with domestic skills, all preferably British and white, so as not to dilute their culture.

The outcome was the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, a compromise meant to address the fact that Britain did not want to give up her skilled workers, and the Dominions did not want paupers. Training programs for farm work were set up, and although they’d existed prior to this – the Salvation Army, for example, ran Hadleigh Farm; the Waifs and Strays Society had a colony in Staffordshire – the government hadn’t contributed funding. The result was a sort of partnership between the government and the already existing agencies, and although it’s not clear if any of them facilitated Ernie and Ethel Deverill’s move to Canada a few years later, he as a farm labourer and she as a domestic, however their immigration came about, it was a different experience from that of our great grandfather, George Cartwright, who’d emigrated from London, England in 1907.

Family lore recounts George’s struggle to find employment once in Canada, recalling the window signs warning that “Englishmen Need Not Apply.” After traipsing over much of southern Ontario in his search for employment he eventually found maintenance work in London at McCormick’s Biscuit Factory, the so-called “Sunshine Palace,” with its hundreds of sparkling windows and its pristine white walls. Ernie Deverill, perched on a different limb of the family tree and arriving in Canada nearly twenty years after George, was almost certainly unsuited for the farm job he’d come to do, but he too soon found work that was a better fit, mopping and scrubbing his way from the offices and hallways of that same factory to the homes of the company’s managers.

Though neither George nor Ernie were ever going to make it as farmers, and Ethel did not labour long as a paid domestic, neither were they “degenerate ‘Cockney[s]’”. George was by all accounts an honest and loyal man, and a hard worker. A photograph of him at work bears the caption “Who keeps Mc’s going? Pa!” Ethel married within months of her arrival and became a domestic of a different sort, running a household and raising a family of Canadians. Ernie, small and humble, might not have been shocked to know that the poorest Londoners hadn’t been welcome in the country he’d come to. After all, he’d grown up as one of them and had seen the ways of the drunk and the destitute. But he’d been given a chance and he’d taken it, and though he never aspired beyond his brooms and buckets, he worked at the same factory his whole adult life, a Londoner who succeeded where many had expected him to fail.

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Sources

“The Out of Work Englishman in Canada – An Indictment of the Londoner.” Yorkshire Post, December 7, 1908.

“Exporting “people of British stock”: training and immigration policy in inter-war Britain.” Field, John, University of Stirling, Scotland, 2010.

Strangers Within our Gates, Woodsworth, J.S., The Missionary Society of the Methodist Church, 1909.

“Emigration.” East London Observer, June 1, 1907.

“Prosperity follows settlement in any part of Canada: Letters from satisfied settlers.” Minister of the Interior, 1909.