Home children remember, part 2

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board. "Instead, most of us went to isolated rural farms where we were forced to do the dirtiest farm jobs, often seven long days a week. Rarely were we let off the farm or taken to town or allowed to go to school after the age of 14, the legal age to which Canadian educators ruled that children must attend school." What happened 60 and 70 years ago to the Home children couldn't h a p p e n t o d a y , says Joyce Turnbull, assistant executive director at the Children's Aid Society of Ottawa Carleton. "The whole balance of society has changed," Turnbull says. "Documented children's rights that now exist make the events world's apart. At the turn of the century, parents' rights were front and centre and people didn't react to child abuse as they do now." But in 1904, even the Children's Aid Society which was founded in Ottawa in 1893, took a hands off approach towards boys and girls sent here from Britain. Society president, W. L. Scott warned staff at the annual meeting that year against appearing to be too exacting of foster parents . . . "in view of the fact so many immigrant children are being brought to Canada by other socie- ties and placed with people under less onerous conditions." Phyllis Harrison who wrote The Home Children after finding references to them in Children's Aid Society files in Ottawa where she worked as a social worker in the late '60s, discovered that the surviving Home children who responded to her call for letters about their teenage experiences in Canada developed overwhelming qualities of durablity. "A quality, "she writes " that has been passed on to the second generation.' Price's own experience proves her point. 1920s from one farmer to another. The trade seemingly turned out for the best, the story goes. In time, the second farmer left the immigrant first option to buy the farm in his will. Also in Belleville, 77-year-old Winifred Smith still mourns the loving care she never had as a child growing up in an orphanage, dispatched into domestic service at the age of 12. Smith describes herself as determined. "Bullheaded, actually, "she laughs about herself. Today she finds it hard to take orders after a lifetime in domestic service. Nor does she own any black or white clothes. "I spent too many years from the age of 12 on wearing black dresses and white aprons, and then a white uniform to even own those, basic colors," she laughs. "I'm willing to do anything a person asks, but it's hard to get me to tell me to do anything." With good reason. At six years of age she was expected to polish shoes and dust stairs every day. Each year she was given more and more domestic tasks, in preparation for service in Canada. She arrived at the Dr. Barnardo Home in Peterborough the day before her 13th birthday. Smith spent her first year in Canada in Preston with a family of 11 and was allowed to go to school only after breakfast dishes and household chores were finished each morning. A year later she was moved to Chatham, to live in a household where the wife was slowly recov- Dr. Barnardo's charges included Winifred Smith (inset) Besides serving as Arnprior reeve for the last six years and planning to run for office for a third term this fall, Price was with the town's Canadian Tire store for 30 years, first as manager and later as owner. He also operated a book store in Arnprior until 1980. His family's accomplishments and successes are a matter of inordinate pride. His twin daughters Joan and Joyce are married and live in Ottawa. One is a teacher, one a civil servant His eldest son, Robert is Gloucester library director. Daughter Lorna is a nurse in Arnprior. Cathy works in day care and Gwyn is a librarian at Carleton University . One son, Brian, a professor of French literature at Kent State University, died earlier this year of leukemia. Bernice Batchelor at the Hastings County Museum in Belleville, says she heard of one young immigrant who was traded in the city's market area in the early

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