MANY a Black Country family have upped sticks and tried their luck abroad over the decades. Here, regular contributor Olive Bedworth of West Bromwich tells the story of how one branch of her own family set sail for a new life in the west, more than ninety years ago ...
"It must have been a dreadful journey in 1920 to emigrate to Canada by boat.
There were no modern amenities or stabilisers like there are today, and it took three weeks to get there. My Aunt Gert told us many years later what a terrible journey it had been.
She took with her four boys; the eldest was eleven years old, and the youngest, five; and she was seven months pregnant with her fifth child.
“My Aunt Gert was Gertrude Taylor, born at 35 The Fold, Overend Street. My ancestors had lived in that house since the eighteenth century.
Aunt Gert met and married Arthur Richards, whose family kept the Black Pony, between Messenger Lane and Reform Street. His family had emigrated to Canada some time before, then he decided to go and set up home for Aunt Gert and the family.
"But first, when they got married, they set up house in Morris Street on The Lyng, which is where the first son Alfred was born. Then they moved to 31 The Fold, to be near Aunt Gert's mother and family, where William, Arthur, and Harry were born.
When they emigrated, my father and mother took on the tenancy at number 31, which is where I was born.
"Before she married, my aunt worked at Chance's Glass, working in the Optical Department. My Uncle Arthur was a moulder working in phos bronze, he moulded a statue in bronze, I think in Toronto, though I'm not sure where.
"Two sons were born in Canada, but both died young.
Then, the last child was born, Barbara.
The family lived at 370 Woodfield Road, Toronto, which is where my aunt and uncle lived to the end of their lives.
War "Alf, the eldest, worked installing lifts in America and Canada, and when the last war broke out in 1939, he joined the Canadian Army and came over here and met the family he hadn't seen for many years. He still classed himself as English.
"William I think was a toolmaker; Arthur worked all his life for the Toronto Star newspaper, he started by selling them on the streets.
Harry, I am not sure what his trade was; Barbara married a Mr Stewart, they had three sons, one of whom went on to become a policeman."
On his death in 1998, almost twenty years after his retirement, Arthur Richards was given a tribute in the paper which he had served for much of his life.
Olive has a copy of it, and it reads as follows: Tribute "Art Richards knew Canada as well as anyone who worked at The Toronto Star. He began working for The Star before World War II, going door to door in Toronto, canvassing subscriptions ... by the time he retired in 1980, he'd covered every corner of Canada to make sure the readers were getting their copies of the paper and magazine — sold nationally and in its day among the most popular in the country — on time.
"'Art knew Canada from coast to coast', said Jim Robinson, a former director of circulation. 'He was always Country Circulation and he did a helluva job.' "'He was a good circulation man,' Robinson said, 'and he was probably the most dedicated Star employee I ever knew. It was nothing for him to work 70 hours a week."
Though they couldn't have envisaged all being together again when Gert left in 1920, the sisters were reunited over forty years later. In 1964, when Sarah Garbett was 85, Elizabeth Gardner was 82, and Olive's mother Emma Gallimore a mere 69, they left West Bromwich to meet up with Gert; Emma by ship, and her elder sisters by plane a few weeks later. International travel being such a rare thing in those days, especially for a couple of ladies in their eighties, their visit to Canada made the local papers in West Bromwich. We reproduce here a photograph from an unidentified paper, showing the three sisters walking down Overend Street, where they were all born.
