If you find these stories interesting, why not drop Mr. McCutcheon a line and let him know you appreciate his contribution.

WAR BRIDES: THEY CAME ACROSS THE ATLANTIC...AND SETTLED A NEW FRONTIER WITH THEIR MENby Michael Erskine
MANITOULIN-- Romance flowered amongst both the bomb blasted ruins of the industrial heartland of an embattled Britain and the quieter English countryside, where men and women prepared to repel the foe with, in the words of the ‘British Bulldog’ Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “blood, sweat and tears.”
Thousands of young women, in England, Holland, France and Belgium met their Canadian husbands while carrying out volunteer civil defense duties, tending the wounded or at that ubiquitous English social tradition, the tea.
Between 1942 and 1948, over 64,000 ‘war brides’ and their dependents made the long ocean journey from England’s shores to the ‘wilds’ of Canada, which was in those days still very much a developing nation and frontier.
Betty Timmermans of Little Current met her husband Gerry during the war while Mr. Timmermans served in the Royal Canadian Air Force overseas.
“It was at an afternoon tea,” she reminisced, “it was a favourite place for people to go in those days.”
Mrs. Timmermans remembered her parents in Yorkshire reacting to the news that she had met someone she quite liked.
“I remember telling my mother, ‘I met a really nice guy today, mum,” she said, “and my mother said to my dad, ‘I bet you she is going to marry that man, and he said ‘no way.’ It was kind of difficult, in a way.”
It was at a meal at home that Irene Dockrell, also of Little Current, met her first husband, Stan McDougall, “My mom used to invite some of the wounded boys up for a meal and he was the military escort for those visits,” she said.
Mr. McDougall was serving as a police officer with the 19th Canadian General Hospital Corps when he and his future bride met.
“I was just 17 when I got married,” said Mrs. Dockrell. “My mother wasn’t happy about my going to Canada at all. She said I couldn’t go unless it was on a large ship. When the word came, the ship I was going across in was the Queen Mary, and she couldn’t very well argue with that.”
Mrs. Timmermans also came across by ship, and while Mrs. Dockrell had a relatively smooth sailing, Mrs. Timmermans had a severe bout of seasickness.
“I was so ill, it was terrible, I lay in my room at the bottom of the boat for days before anyone found me,” she said. “When I finally landed in Blind River, my clothes were just hanging off me.”
“I was lucky I didn’t have any children when I came over,” said Mrs. Dockrell. “A lot of women did.” The experience of arriving in a new country, trying to get your land legs back after weeks at sea, was made even more difficult by having to contend with very small children, who were also experiencing the effects of sea travel.
Mrs. Dockrell, Mrs. Timmermans and many thousands of other young brides of Canadian service men landed at the famous Pier 21, in Halifax, where they were met by female escorts who directed them to the trains which would take them into the interior of the country they would now call home.
Mrs. Kitty Hocken, another Little Current war bride, on the other hand, travelled to North America by air, an unusual mode of transportation even in the early forties.
“I had never been in a plane before, and it was not very big inside,” she said. “It took us 13 hours to get to New York, and then we flew on to the airport in Malton. I was so tired I never even saw the Statue of Liberty,” she recalled.
“We flew to New York at first, and then on to Toronto,” explained Mrs. Hocken. “I took the train to McGregor Bay Station from Toronto. “There was nothing there really, no station house or anything, just the highway in the middle of the bush.”
Mrs. Hocken met her late husband Lloyd through a family gathering. Mr. Hocken served as a sapper throughout Holland and the low countries, but he was called back early by his father, Norman, who needed him to help run the family sawmill. Mrs. Hocken followed shortly after.
Mrs. Hocken worked in the Marconi plant during the war, although she could only work part-time, as the rest of her time was spent caring for an ailing aunt. Everyone “did their bit” for the war effort in those days.
Mrs. Timmermans was nursing wounded soldiers when she met her future husband. “It was very hard,” she said, “I saw some terrible things.”
Most of the bombing was carried out against urban centres, far from Mrs. Timmermans’ Yorkshire home, but she did get caught in one bombing raid while on a visit with her husband to Manchester, near Leeds, and found the experience terrifying, but took it all in stride.
“You get used to these things when you are young,” she said.
Mrs. Dockrell was working in a munitions plant in Manchester, the industrial heartland of England, and served as a volunteer civil defense ambulance worker in the evening.
“At 14 years old I was Rosie the Riveter,” she laughed. “We were putting rivets in tanks. We worked right in the middle of Manchester, in a big industrial complex. Before the war the company made cars, then it was turned into war production and we made planes, tanks, munitions and boats, everything you could think of, our company made it. Our division made tanks.
Mrs. Dockrell also saw many of the horrors of war while serving as a volunteer ambulance worker, in the evenings.
“I usually travelled on the back of a motorcycle, I didn’t have my license yet, I was so young,” she said. “We would go down to the train station to bring the wounded to the hospital. Sometimes we would go out after the bombing stopped. I saw a lot of terrible things, especially the children. It was not a very nice job, but you did what you had to do. It was the times.
The terror of what might happen to your children during the regular bombing raids was an experience most peacetime parents never have to contend with. Even when your children were older, you were still gripped with a cold hand around your heart when the bombs begin to fall.
“We were in charge of the keys to the public air raid shelters, and we would unlock them when there was a raid,” said Mrs. Dockrell. The shelters were kept locked during the day, “to prevent any goings on,” she explained. “My mother would get very upset. She was in the shelter with my brothers and sisters and I would be gone; it must have been very hard for her.”
The new life that greeted war brides was different in many ways than the life they had left behind.
“My mum and brother came to Canada to visit in 1952 and they couldn’t believe all the food that was in the stores,” said Mrs. Dockrell. Europe had experienced rationing, from the onset of the war, and the deprivations continued well in to the 1950s.
Another pleasant difference she noted was the relative lack of social stratification in her new home. “There was no class distinction,” she said. “In England there was a definite class difference, there still is to some extent.” She found the people to be generally very friendly.
Mrs. Dockrell did find her new home very different from what she was used to. “You want t believe it,” she laughed. “I came from a large industrial city, where there was a bus every two minutes.” Her new home had no hydro, no running water and was very much a “bachelor farm.”
“I had to take a horse 14 miles into town to get the mail,” she laughed. “When we moved to Shining Tree, I even had a dog sled. My mother couldn’t believe the things I was doing. You became very self reliant, you had to be, the nearest neighbour was 14 miles away.”
The newlywed had a number of experiences that would be familiar to women of any period. “My first batch of bread was really quite something,” she laughed. “They set the loaves on fence posts and shot at them with rifles.”
Despite the deprivations and some minor homesickness, Mrs. Dockrell soon became very attached to her new country. After the death of her infant son, she returned to England for a visit in 1947. “After three weeks I was ready to come home,” she said.
Mrs. Timmermans also found her new home very different from the small town in England in which she was raised. “The food and everything was so different,” she recalled. “But Gerry’s mom was from England, and she cooked much the same way we did back home, so some things were not too different. There was a lot of rationing in England, though. We would get one egg every two weeks, Gerry would come back from leave with all kinds of things He still likes to shop, and does the groceries every week to this day.”
Mrs. Hocken also found that there were differences in diet. “I had never had corn on the cob before,” she said. “I liked that, but I wasn’t as fond of homemade mushroom soup, at first, now I quite like it. It is funny how things change.”
Mrs. Dockrell’s life in the wilds of Ontario’s North was completely different from her life in England however, including brushes with the local fauna.
“We had a rasher of bacon on the front porch, and one day I found a bear eating it,” she said. “I opened the window and shot it with a pistol. What else could I do? We needed that food,” she said. “I skinned the bear and tacked the hide up on the garage door, I hated the sight of that thing.”
For many young women, marriage was an escape from the pressures of family and a culture that dictated their every thought and deed.
“It was quite different in those days,” said Mrs. Dockrell. “I would take my pay packet home and give it to my mother. She would give me an allowance, and sometimes I wouldn’t have enough for bus fare; then I would have to beg for more. When I asked if I could ‘keep myself’ as we used to call it, she wanted more for room and board than I made. Now kids see their pay cheques as their own money.”
The new lives that Manitoulin’s war brides made for themselves left them with few regrets. “It has been wonderful really,” said Mrs. Hocken. “It has been quite lovely, really.”
Asked if she had any regrets, Mrs. Timmermans said, “Absolutely none. We have been married 56 years last May.”
Mrs. Dockrell found her life, mixed as is any life with tragedies and setbacks, a rewarding experience nonetheless. “I have worked as a waitress and a housekeeper, all kinds of things really,” she said. “But I have also been a member of the War Brides Association in Lively, the Chair of Ontario Housing, and on the Little Current Place board of Directors. I was the supervisor of elections as well, starting out at the very bottom and working my way up to supervisor.”
The many thousands of war brides that made their way to Canada after the war have added an immeasurable dimension to the fabric that is Canadian life, contributing to the growth of the country into a major industrial nation, both as companions and helpers to their husbands in civilian life, and as individuals in their own right, making their marks as could only be expected of brave and self-reliant people.
Manitoulin Expositor
Women of Valour
September 12, 2001

Background provided by

COPYRIGHT All rights reserved. Use of the information contained on this site for PERSONAL Genealogical research is acceptable, however, the information MAY NOT be uploaded to any commercial database or used for commercial purposes without the express written permission.
© 2001-2004 Manitoulin Genealogy

---

RootsWeb is funded and supported by Ancestry.com and our loyal RootsWeb community. Learn more.

About Us | Contact Us | Copyright | Report Inappropriate Material
Corporate Information | Privacy | Terms and Conditions | CCPA Notice at Collection