This book is about those young women who married Canadian soldiers, sailors and airmen and went to live with them in New Brunswick.

New Brunswick is in Eastern Canada and is one of the Atlantic provinces at the mouth of the St Lawrence River and the upper reaches of the Bay Of Fundy. Many of the communities make their livings from farming, fishing and forestry and in the 1940s it was a remote and difficult area in which to live.

War wives and children began arriving in New Brunswick in 1942. At first the numbers were very small as these people had to make their own way there with no government assistance and the journey was often very difficult. In August 1944, with the end of the war in Europe in sight a decision was made to give available space on troopships to servicemen’s wives. From then on the numbers of dependents making their way to Canada began to rise steadily. In 1946, when all the men had been repatriated home , the trickle of war brides turned into a flood.

By March 1948 43,454 war brides and 20,997 children were brought to Canada. New Brunswick is one of the smallest provinces but it’s servicemen married more than 1800 war brides who brought 900 children to the province. Most came from England and Scotland; a few came from Ireland and Wales; fewer from Western Europe such as The Netherlands and Belgium; and fewer from Italy and Austria. They were all young, many just teenagers and despite attempts by the forces to prevent, or slow down the rate of marriage by creating rules which gave the soldiers a cooling off period between falling in love and getting married, and other devices , the number of marriages increased.

The reason for so many marriages to Canadian troops were varied, but there were some recurring themes. The Canadian troops were the first Americans to come to Europe. They came first to Britain and many were here for a long time. They were all over the country in a variety of jobs and were able to travel about the country freely and easily. This was a time when most British men were away fighting in Europe; family life was disrupted and life was full of uncertainties. The country was suffering all sorts of hardship from rationing to bombing and into this depressed situation came these fresh faced troops with their cheeky attitudes and plenty of money; and access to luxuries unavailable to local people. The unsettled nature of wartime life in Britain put a premium on living for the moment. Dancing was probably the most popular pastime , and dance halls were a great place to meet the opposite sex, though people met in all sorts of places and under all sorts of circumstances. The funniest one described took place in a cinema. A young lady was sitting on her own watching a film. Elsewhere in the auditorium was a Canadian serviceman on his own. The air raid siren sounded but because there were so many false alarms no one moved. A bomb hit the cinema and the young lady was thrown into the air and landed on the serviceman’s lap, and that was the beginning of that romance.

The length and intensity of the Second World War created a time when people threw caution to the winds. The spirit of living for the day led to short, intense and very passionate relationships, some hasty marriages, and equally sudden pregnancies.

As mentioned already, the obstacles thrown in their way did nothing to stem the number of marriages and the flow of war brides across the Atlantic. As the years went on travel became easier and more comfortable. The Canadian Wives Bureau was set up to deal with information, welfare and civilian repatriation. War brides clubs were set up to give people a chance to meet one another and to learn about Canada. Members of Volunteer Aid Detachments such as the Canadian Red Cross helped out on the Atlantic voyage. The women and children were well cared for. Once they reached Canada special trains transported them to all parts of the country. Wives heading for New Brunswick had a short trip of about half a day and an overnight stop before they were taken to the more remote parts of the province.

Many of these young women had no idea of what kind of life faced them in Canada. Most had come from towns and cities and went to rural settlements where the house had no running water, no electricity, no inside toilet and a wood burning stove. That took a lot of adjusting to, but most of them did make the adjustment. They were welcomed into the local community. They stuck at it and learned to live off the land, storing up food to last through the long severe Canadian winter and bringing up large families. Many were homesick at first but most got over it and learned to enjoy their life in Canada. There was no question of divorce for most people in those days. The social stigma would have been awful and there would have been no way of bringing up their families on their own.

Not all marriages were a success and some wives had to flee abusive and drunken husbands. Others just stuck it out. Many of these ex-servicemen were suffering from what are now known as operational stress disorders, but this was not recognised as such then. There were no social support services for the wives and families for many years and neither was there the support of the wives‘ extended families as they were too far away, so they had to struggle on on their own. Some did make their way back to Britain, but most were stuck in Canada.

The early interest in the war brides waned as the years went by and the meetings and parties which were arranged in the later 1940s became fewer and fewer. The ties that bound these women together weakened over the years. Weekly meetings shifted to monthly and later to yearly before they petered out altogether. There was a resurgence of interest in the 1970s with the publication of a book entitled “The War Brides” by Joyce Hibbert who was the first to tell their stories; both the good and the bad. 2006 was designated as the Year of the War Bride, but their numbers are dwindling in every province and those who remain are in their late 80s. Their children and grandchildren realise that it is important to get their stories about such an unusual chapter in the history of the country before they die and the stories are lost.

Captured Hearts by Melynda Jarratt

Melynda Jarratt and Zoe Boone return to Glasgow to tell us more about the experiences of British and European women caught up in the dramatic reality of war who fell in love with and married soldiers from a foreign country. When the war ends, they leave behind all they’ve ever known — family, friends, and way of life — for a new life in Canada. Arriving in a mainly rural country, these city girls faced culture shock, and social, religious and linguistic differences that would have tested the mettle of many relationships.

More than sixty years later, their stories paint a compelling portrait of love, passion, perseverance, and hope in a world torn apart by war.

Join us for readings from the author, alongside short exerts from “The Forgotten Brides” documentary and the chance to hear from Mrs Boone, a real life war bride. Copies of the book will be available to purchase at the event and have signed.

Thursday 26 May, 6pm to 7.30pm

To register for this event please complete the quick booking form below. If you don’t have a GWL number you can join the Library using the form here.

This event is free to attend. Click here for more information on our new streamlined booking system and to join the library.

Melynda Jarratt is a leading authority on Canadian War Brides of World War Two. She was born in Bathurst, New Brunswick, Canada. Melynda obtained a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History from the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton in 1986 and wrote her Masters Thesis in History in 1995 on New Brunswick War Brides. She went on to obtain a diploma in Digital Media and Design in 1999. Melynda is the co-author of Voices of the Left Behind (Dundurn 2005) which was a Book of the Month Club selection. In 2007 she wrote War Brides: The stories of the women who left everything behind to follow the men they loved (Tempus 2007 / re-released by Canada’s Dundurn Press in May 2009). In October 2008 Goose Lane Editions released her latest book, Captured Hearts: New Brunswick’s War Brides as part of UNB’s Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society NB Military Heritage Series. Melynda runs the authoritative website on Canada’s War Brides www. CanadianWarBrides.com and appears frequently in the media, on television, radio and film as a subject matter expert. She is currently writing a biography of Don Chapman, the leader of the Lost Canadians – Canadian born citizens and foreign born children of Canadians, such as War Bride children, who were stripped of their citizenship due to outdated provisions of the 1947 Citizenship Act. She is also writing another book on the Canadian Forestry Corps in Scotland in World War Two for which she has received financial support from the New Brunswick Arts Board.

Mrs. Isobel Boone was born in Aberdeen, Scotland in 1922. She fell in love and married a Canadian serviceman, Cpl. Marshall Boone, of Rowena, New Brunswick (population 100). Marshall was taken Prisoner of War in Sicily and after he was liberated they married. Mrs. Boone moved to Canada in 1946 and his lived in Rowena ever since. She and Marshall had two children, Gordon and Stephen, and after her husband passed away she became involved with the New Brunswick War Brides Association, eventually holding the position of President. Mrs. Boone speaks frequently to groups and organizations about her experiences as a Canadian War Bride. She appears in Melynda Jarratt’s two books on War Brides as well as the documentary film “Forgotten Brides”.

Captured Hearts: New Brunswick’s War Brides
by Melynda Jarratt
Imagine you’re a young British or European woman caught up in the dramatic reality of war. You fall in love with and marry a soldier from a foreign country. When the war ends, you leave behind all you’ve ever known — family, friends, and way of life — for a new life in Canada. This is the story of nearly two thousand war brides who made their way to New Brunswick to join their servicemen husbands at the end of the Second World War.

Melynda will be bringing Mrs Boone with her to the library, a wonderful women and war bride, originally from Scotland who has been living in Canada for over 50 years and is willing to share her experiences and stories with Glasgow Women’s Library.

This free event is taking place on:
Friday, 24 July 2009 at 2pm

For bookings and more information: please call 0141 552 8345 or contact Laura at the Library.

This event is running as part of the Women Make History project.

Poetry for me functions as a touchstone, something I turn to when I need to check out my understanding of life’s big questions of birth, death, loss, love, identity, cruelty, how we fit with nature, how nature fits with us… Poems provide me with little portals into this world from new angles that render all that’s familiar strange again. They make the ordinary miraculous and the miraculous ordinary.

Take the poem, The Barrel Annunciation by Kathleen Jamie, from Jizzen 1999. What’s the story behind it? After a spring storm, the poet finds she’s pregnant and imagines that it is the act of emptying the pail of rain water into the rain barrel that has cast a spell and caused her to conceive unexpectedly. Linking the two events, she instils in the poem a kind of fairy tale magic, full of wonder, but also a bit creepy.

When terrible things are happening in the world, Margaret Atwood’s poetry helps me to face them without covering my eyes and sticking my fingers in my ears. Her poem sequence, Four Small Elegies, from Two Headed Poems, 1978, has provided me with the words I quote most often when trying to comprehend human cruelty to other human beings: ‘Those whose houses were burned / burned houses. What else ever happens / once you start?’; ‘Again / those who gave the orders / were already somewhere else, / of course on horseback.’; ‘His hatred of the words / that had been done became children … he told them / one story only.’ The poems in the sequence are almost unbearable in their depiction of cruelty. And yet, Margaret Atwood must have had to imagine her way into the lives not only of the people who fled but the people who torched the houses. She allows the reader to feel sympathy for the Glengarry highlanders who, themselves victims of the Highland Clearances, emigrated to Canada where some of them took part in the massacre. It is her evocation, in simple, vivid detail, of the poverty and desperate hunger of the perpetrators that makes their cruelty almost inevitable.

I read this recently and was transported to Canada in 1867, to the wilderness and terrible weather which was endured by the many Scots who emigrated there. The book is mainly an account of a woman, regarding a mystery surrounding a murder, possibly involving her son. The author is a Scottish woman, it’s her first novel but you’d never think so.

This book came to me in a wonderful sequence of synchronicity and serendipity. Five participants of a book group I attend picked 2 titles each that they would like to read during the next 12 months. We have very eclectic tastes and there are no bounds on what can be selected. The titles were then randomly allocated into a sequenced reading list. This book, one of my recommendations, fell to be read directly after James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Amazingly, in The View from Castle Rock, Hogg, ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ is revealed as one of Alice Munro’s direct ancestors.

Munro’s series of tales is full of such happenstances and fateful events. It tracks the migration of her foremothers and fathers from Illinois to Canada and these are stories rich in detail as Munro has a remarkable cache of writings that she has been able to mine. But this is not merely a series of real, stirring and sometimes harrowing accounts of pioneers. Munro has chosen to write short stories throughout that draw on this history but embellish the real with what could have been.

I found this book astonishing and poignant and one that will resonate with all those of us with migrant ancestors.