Established as a Directorate of the Adjutant General’s Branch at Canadian Military Headquarters, the Bureau was responsible for arranging dependent’s passage to Canada, collecting and caring for them en route to their ships and providing information and welfare services. The Bureau also encouraged the formation of wives’ clubs in the UK, where brides held social gatherings and listened to talks on life in Canada.
Although smaller numbers of War Brides and their children had made their way to Canada between 1942 and 1945, the overwhelming majority, (45,320 of 64,451), were brought to Canada in 1946 in a massive year-long effort that began with the sailing of the Mauretania on 5 February.
English War Bride Eswyn Lyster and her young son, Terry, came to Canada on the Mauretania which departed from Liverpool in the early morning hours. The Mauretania was ‘the vanguard’22 of more than 45,000 Canadian servicemen’s dependents scheduled to sail for Canada over the course of the next twelve months. A famous photograph of the ship’s departure paints a vivid picture of the huge vessel in the soft morning light, smoke billowing from its stacks as two tugs help it along its way. In this brief excerpt from her memoirs, Eswyn describes the five-day ocean voyage:
Terry and I sailed from Liverpool on the Mauretania in a group of about 1,000 Canadian War Brides, in the early hours of February 5th. This was the first dedicated War Bride sailing, although small groups had made the crossing while the war was still on. From the dock the Mauretania had looked like a floating warehouse, and most of us assumed that no amount of water could unsteady it. We were wrong.… The Atlantic in February gives a watery impersonation of the Canadian Rockies. The good ship Mauretania tilted much too far one way, slid into a valley; tilted as many degrees the other way, and rode a sloping wall of water until nothing could be seen from the porthole but sky. Not that anybody was looking. The process was repeated endlessly for five days with predictable results.23
That sailing marked the beginning of what the Canadian press affectionately dubbed ‘Operation Daddy’24 in reference to the thousands of women and infants on board the huge ocean-going ships. But for members of the Canadian Wives Bureau, the Immigration Branch, the Red Cross and for the women themselves, it was a huge logistical undertaking that took on the dimensions of a D-Day assault. By the time it was all over, 43,454 War Brides and their 20,997 children were transported to Canada.
The Darker Side
Interestingly, more than 4,500 of the 48,000 War Brides who married Canadian servicemen refused to take the government up on its offer of free passage to Canada. While it is true that about half of the War Brides who decided to stay in Britain and Europe did so because their husbands found employment, there is evidence of a seamier side to the War Bride story.
Riddled throughout the files of the Canadian Wives Bureau and Immigration Branch are the most personal and intimate details of these people’s lives, including lists of hundreds of War Brides who are either refusing to come to Canada because they are getting a divorce from their Canadian husbands, or who are being refused transport under the War Bride transportation scheme because their settlement arrangements have been deemed ‘unsatisfactory’ by the Immigration Branch. In the files are these couple’s full names, addresses and sometimes quite shocking revelations about the reasons why the women aren’t coming to Canada.
In a day when everyone seems to be so concerned about privacy, it’s surprising that the files are actually public record and open for anyone to see. Reasons given include everything from ‘husband in jail’ to the unsavoury ‘VDS’ (which stands for Venereal Disease Symptoms); from ‘wife insane’ to ‘divorce pending’; from ‘husband cannot be located’ to ‘husband doesn’t want wife’.
Although the reading may be titillating, the fact is that these five per cent of cases were rare in comparison to the ninety-five per cent of War Brides who did come to Canada to happily join their husbands. What happened when they got there is another story.
Boarding the Ships
Each wife had documents to provide, forms to fill out, medical appointments to keep, and more forms to fill out before packing her luggage and finally boarding a ship in Southampton or Liverpool. Each night before the ship would sail, wives and children would descend upon one of the brides’ hostels in London, such as the Mostyn Hostel, where they were organized by the Red Cross for departure to Canada the next day.
Unfortunately for those brides travelling between 1942 and 1945 the accommodations and services provided to dependents was by no means as impressive: sailing in wartime, on reconverted troopships with no special considerations for the needs of babies in nappies, and without the dedicated assistance afforded to wives in 1946 through the Red Cross Escort Officers and VADs (Voluntary Aid Detachments), the wives who came during the war years had a vastly different experience than those who came at the height of the War Bride transportation in 1946.
Doris Lloyd, an English bride who arrived in New Brunswick in November 1944, remembers how she and her daughter, along with twenty other War Brides and their children, ended up spending four days in a dismal Scottish hostel while waiting for a winter storm to break. Once on board their ship, the Ile de France, twelve women and their one or two children each were crowded into cabins with twelve bunks, one bed for each mother and her children. As seasickness set in, they approached the Red Cross for help and were told to take care of themselves. Doris was not impressed.25 By 1946, however, the kinks were worked out of the system and few brides would share that experience.
Travelling in style on refitted luxury liners such as the Queen Mary and the Aquitania, the War Brides who came to Canada in 1946 had a luxurious trip by comparison. For these brides, the transatlantic trip was equivalent to a modern-day cruise, with fine food, lodgings and services.
In this newspaper article dated 11 June 1946 the author makes it quite clear that the Wives Bureau had taken ‘every precaution’ to ensure the comfort of its special cargo:
Every possible precaution was taken to protect infants from accident or illness during the voyages … No children were allowed to travel in ships considered unsuitable, such as the Ile de France and the Lady Rodney which have steep companion ways and narrow alleys. Ships especially equipped for children are the Letitia, the Queen Mary, the Aquitania and the Lady Nelson. All have babies’ cots adjacent to the lower berths reserved for mothers, up-to-date hospitals, maternity wards and full staffs of doctors, nurses and Red Cross workers.26
But no matter if you were on the Ile de France in 1944 or the Queen Mary in 1946, seasickness was a serious problem for many on board and there was little that could be done except to lie in bed and suffer until the ship docked at Pier 21 in Halifax. English War Bride Pat Pyne recalls coming down with seasickness on day three of her voyage on the Letitia and in her diary she wrote:
Peg (another War Bride) and I were the only two at our table today for dinner and there were only a few at breakfast. Our steward told us not to take any sugar in our tea or coffee if we didn’t want to get seasick. We haven’t been feeling too good ourselves today but are both most determined to not be sick.27
Making matters worse for the seasick was their proximity in closed cabins to other sick wives along with their nauseated, crying children in nappies, not to mention the threat presented by stormy weather during the sometimes turbulent ocean crossings. In the diary she kept of her work as a Canadian Red Cross Escort Officer on board the War Bride ships, Kay Ruddick wrote of a harrowing storm that hit the Queen Mary on 27 August 1946:
Terrific sea; around midnight, wave hit the ship and was so huge, splashed into the portholes on top deck and hit the bridge, down the gangway into the Captain’s cabin … Electrical equipment put out of commission and ship stopped for two hours, bobbing like a cork … brides, babies (1000 brides and 1,000 babies on board) ship’s crew sick all over the place! Men, civilians and other passengers, turned to, to help us look after the babies. By morning the seas had calmed down and the ‘cleanup’ started … wet mattresses galore, not to mention gallons