At the end of 2001 I retired from a working life of travel abroad, and in the summer of 2002 my wife and I visited Canada to meet my father. I do not possess the literary skills to describe how much it meant to both of us. Suffice it to say it was a memorable trip. We visited the places of my father’s childhood, and he provided me with a wealth of background information on my roots.
I can say that the whole experience has exceeded by far any hopes that I might have had when I embarked on my search, and I cannot thank Olga and everybody at Project Roots enough.
*John is a pseudonym
Still He Eludes Me
by Sheila Blake
My name is Sheila Blake (née Shoulders). I was born in England on March 3, 1944, in the small village of Shottermill, near Haslemere, Surrey, in a beautiful house called Ridgecomb.
I was thirty-seven years old when I first heard that my father was a Canadian. Although it was a shock, in retrospect I was not the least surprised.
My mother’s name was Eileen Patricia Ayling. During the war, she lived at Park Road as well as Worthing and Dolphin Road, Shoreham-by-Sea, Sussex, where I was raised.
I believe my Canadian father, Gavin McGuire or McGurk (spelling?), may have been based in Surrey, probably Hindhead. His uniform indicates he was an engineer and served with the Royal Canadian Engineers; however, he was also known as Gunner McGurk, possibly because he was initially with the Royal Canadian Edmonton Regiment (Artillery).
Sheila Blake’s father, Gavin McGuire or McGurk, may have been an engineer with the Royal Canadian Engineers. He joined up in Edmonton, Alberta.
He was six feet tall, red-headed and very well built. His eyes were blue. Not surprisingly, my son has red hair and a lazy eye, just like my father and myself. I know what he looks like, but am uncertain of his name. An elderly family member told me my father was Gavin McGuire or McGurk and that he came from Edmonton, Alberta.
Apparently, my father was badly injured during the D-Day landings and was shipped back to Saskatchewan. His mother wrote to my family with news of his condition, as she was concerned he would not recover from a severe head injury.
I’ve been told he survived the war and returned to the U.K. to be reunited with my mother and me. However, my mother had already married Frank Shoulders and was pregnant with my brother, so she stayed with her husband.
The portrait of my natural father came into my possession in November 1999, while I was visiting my family in Sussex, England.
My mother passed away in 1985, and before she died I believe she tried to tell me something about my father. However, she was so heavily sedated with morphine that she was unable to bring the memories back.
When I finally saw my father’s portrait fourteen years later, it dawned on me what she had been trying to say on her deathbed. I’ve just become a grandmother, and my grandson is the image of the man in the photo.
I do hope someone will recognize my father’s picture. I have a file that is now a good four inches thick, but am no nearer to discovering his whereabouts. It seems unbelievable that I can have a photo clearly showing his uniform and regimental badge, a probable name, a U.K. location during the war, and yet still he eludes me.
Sheila and her mother, Patricia Ayling. Sheila’s father was injured in the D-Day landings and was shipped back to Saskatchewan. In his absence, Patricia married another man in England.
Better Off without Him
by Alan Franklin
The ironic thing about my Canadian father is that sixty years ago he was stationed in the area where I now edit the local newspaper, writing stories about Canadian fathers who abandoned their British offspring sixty years ago.
I was born on February 11, 1946, exactly nine months after Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945. I was a victory celebration baby, born into austere postwar Britain, where cold houses, rationing and shortages of everything were our way of life.
Meanwhile, back in Canada with his English wife, my father Patrick Johnson (not his real name) was setting out on a successful career which ended, I am told, with him working as head foreman of the Vancouver water company. He had four children, two boys and two girls, one of them born around the same time as me.
Alan Franklin is the editor of the Surrey-Hants Star in Aldershot, England. His Canadian father has refused contact.
My mother had married another Canadian soldier, Corporal Franklin of the Paratroop Regiment, who also swiftly followed the pattern of the abandonment of British wives and girlfriends at the war’s end. So we were left to manage as best we could, my mother working at the post office telegrams department, doing administration for the Surrey Police and other office jobs to support us both. Meanwhile my grandmother kept house and cooked meals for my mother and me, my grandfather (a steam-engine driver) and my aunt (a civil servant).
Single parenthood was not fashionable then, and I knew no other boy without a father present. Sometimes I wondered who and where he was, but questions were discouraged and I just got on with my life until, in my teens, as a young reporter, I interviewed a private detective. This man traced missing relatives. I asked him to trace Corporal Reginald Franklin, not knowing then that he was not my real father. He did, with a “last trace” of him detected through a contact with the Canadian Legion.
When I revealed my research to my mother she was horrified; Franklin was even more of a dead loss than Johnson, whose last communication with my mother, some months before I was born, was a card posted from Canada in 1945 “wishing you well next year” — at my birth. This was the full extent of Johnson’s help to his secret English family.
My attempt at tracing Franklin flushed out the hitherto-unsuspected existence of Johnson. My mother was a little hazy about where he had come from and, Canada being a large country, I presumed I had no hope of finding him, so I forgot all about it until 1984, when I had just been appointed to my present job as editor of the Surrey and Hants Star in Aldershot, Hampshire, England.
Stories of the Canadian war children appear frequently in the Surrey-Hants Star.
My colleague John Walton, an experienced journalist and formerly the deputy editor of Soldier Magazine, also based in Aldershot, said he was off on a trip to Canada and would look up Johnson in the phone book. As he was headed for Vancouver he immediately discovered P. Johnson — there was just one in the phone book — and returned with his address. I then wrote a simple letter to my father, asking him to get in touch. He never did, although he subsequently claimed that a letter had been sent to me and that he even tried to visit me at my home in Alton, Hampshire.
This seemed unlikely, as I have never been hard to trace, being a well-known local journalist all my adult life, with my byline and picture appearing in papers going through tens of thousands of doors. Additionally, when I was a reporter I called every day at all the local police stations, so I was not exactly unknown to them! Neither did a letter come back marked “address unknown,” so my letter was certainly delivered.
Having deduced that my father didn’t want to know me, I again got on with my life, enjoying my family and career. Then, in 1998, Mark Maclay wrote a book called Aldershot’s Canadians, which told the stories of the 330,000 Canadian servicemen stationed in the Aldershot area during the war years. I reviewed it and sent a copy to Lloyd and