It was not until 1997 when I contacted Project Roots that things started to progress. Until that date I was unaware of this service run by Olga and Lloyd Rains. Clearly, I now wish that I had heard of them earlier and the work they were doing, since, as it turned out, it might have given me the chance to meet my father.
As it was, in August 2001 Olga provided me with a very surprising and important lead that enabled me to trace a sister living close by in England whom I have now met. My sister, Jackie, turned out to be a lovely person, and when we met she recognized my father’s likeness in me. Through Jackie, I found out about my father’s Australian family and now, through our Canadian brothers, David and Wallace, I have a full picture of my father’s eventful life.
At the time of my birth, my father was thirty-one years old, and given the number of years that I had been unsuccessfully trying to locate him, there was always the chance that he had not survived. This indeed turned out to be the case. He died in 1992, aged seventy-nine, in Scarborough Hospital, Yorkshire, of heart disease. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered.
Although Jack always told my mother that it was his intention to settle in England after the war, it was a great surprise to learn how much of his life he did actually spend in England, totally unknown to me.
Jack was born John Wallace Eastwood Neale in North Vancouver on February 3, 1913, the son of Annie and Wallace Neale, emigrants from Yorkshire. Jack’s father was a plumber with his own business, and in the 1920s the family moved to Calgary.
In 1934, Jack married Hazel Ford in Calgary. Their first son, Wallace (named after Jack’s father) was born that year. At the time, Jack was a tradesman, like his father, but it was the Depression and there was little work in Canada. To get people out of the cities, the Canadian government opened up land for homesteading, and Jack and his wife were allocated 140 acres and ten dollars a month.
The land was twenty-three miles from Rocky Mountain House in Alberta. It was a hardscrabble existence: they cleared the land and built a log house, three miles to the nearest store and twenty-three miles to the nearest doctor. Their second son, David, was born in 1938.
When World War II came, it was a way out for Jack to enlist in the Royal Canadian Engineers and an opportunity to finally get some money. Jack sent money home for a while, but in 1939 he was posted to England, the money stopped, and he left his family without means of support and never contacted them again.
The family he left behind endured considerable hardship, his wife left out in the bush with two young children in the severe winter and illness to contend with. Eventually they had to move back to Calgary and stay with Hazel’s mother.
It is not known when Jack actually arrived in England in 1939, but like most Canadian servicemen during the war he was stationed on the south coast. This was where he met Nellie Godbold. On October 3, 1942, a son, Stephen, was born of this relationship. A few months later, in the early part of 1943, Jack was stationed somewhere in the Ipswich area, where he met my mother, and on March 4, 1944, I was born.
Later in 1944 my mother was informed by Jack’s solicitor that Jack was returning to Canada and that she would not be able to legally claim any further support for me. But if Jack did go back to Canada, he soon returned to England because he married Stephen’s mother at Brighton Registry Office on December 23, 1944. On the marriage certificate, Jack’s occupation was described as Sergeant M5030 in the RCE. Four months later, in April 1945, their second child, a daughter named Jackie, was born.
The family lived in Brighton and, with a partner, Jack started a motorcycle-courier business after he left the RCE. Quite commonplace today, in the late 1940s a courier business was unique and innovative and, as it turned out, quite successful.
But as the reader might judge up until now, Jack was not well known for family commitment and responsibilities; he liked to move on. Sure enough, in the early 1950s when Australia was encouraging immigration with cheap assisted passages, Jack left his family in Brighton with the aim of a new life in Australia. He promised that when he had his feet on the ground he would send for them.
Jack being Jack, he met a woman on board ship and they started a relationship, even though she was with her husband. When they arrived in Australia they set up house together.
Jack certainly got the new life he wanted, but he forgot about the family he had deserted back in Brighton. Bearing in mind that in those days there were no social or welfare programs like today, life was very tough for Stephen, Jackie and their mother. With no income from Jack, the family was reduced to living, eating and sleeping in a single room. I thought my mother and I had difficulties at times, but they were nothing in comparison to Jackie’s family. The experience of being deserted by his father apparently affected Stephen the most and was difficult for him to bear.
Meanwhile, Jack had settled in Australia and set up home with his new partner, although his wife Nellie in Brighton did not divorce him until 1967. He and his partner had a son, Robert. Surprisingly, the family stayed together for some twenty years before his Australian wife died of cancer in the mid-1970s. It is typical of Jack’s lack of concern for others that, during the last two weeks of her life when she was in a hospice, he never visited once.
Although Robert had lived with his father for a long time, Jack had never talked about his past, so Robert was totally unaware of his father’s Canadian family or me in England. Stephen, in the meantime, couldn’t settle and decided to go to Australia to see if he could join up with his father, but apparently it didn’t work out; they just didn’t hit it off together.
After Jack’s wife died in Australia, he asked his English ex-wife, Nellie, to re-marry him. He was now in his sixties and probably looking for companionship in his old age, and being Jack, thinking of himself again. Despite reservations from her family, Nellie remarried Jack in January 1977, in Busselton, Western Australia. In 1984, they returned to England and lived in North Yorkshire until his death in 1992.
I have met my sister Jackie and I would also like to meet my Canadian brothers at some stage, and indeed they would like to meet Jackie and me. My only regret is that all the time my father spent in England, knowing full well of my existence, he never once attempted to make contact. I think that says a lot about the man and his track record. On the face of it, he appears quite a selfish man, thinking mainly of himself and not at all shy about walking away from his responsibilities and the unhappiness he caused to so many others.
Jack Neale as he appeared later in life.
Tears of Torment
by Jill
My name is Jill. I was born on March 6, 1943, in a small coal-mining village in England. I was eleven years old when I found out that my real father was a Canadian soldier.
My mother was a married woman whose husband was a prisoner of war of the Japanese when she met my Canadian father. I was three years old in 1946 when my stepfather returned from the war. I will never forget his violence towards my mother, how he locked me up in cupboards and how he sexually abused me time after time when I was a child. I never understood why all this happened, and I always thought the reason he hurt us was that he had been tortured by the Japanese during the war.
I remember the first time I heard that my stepfather wasn’t my real father. I was about eleven years old, and one of the girls at school said in a nasty way, “Your father isn’t really your father.” She said she had overheard her mother talk to others about it. I remember running home that day to tell my mother what the girl had said. She told me the girl was lying and just wanted to tease me, so I went back to school after lunch believing my mom instead.
Jill never found her Canadian father, but she has a new family in Olga and Lloyd Rains.
My grandmother was a widow who had her own home, and she had to work to keep everything going. She would