Perrybar, yes, that was the town, on the outskirts of Birmingham. Birmingham is the centre and then about two miles out you have all these little towns... Oh, that’s about a hundred miles north of London, in the Midlands. Pretty close to the Atlantic Ocean and Wales.

I was with an Auntie Fanny and her husband, Uncle Frank, we called him. We were there, I guess, a couple of years with her. There was just myself and Victor.

There was a fella came to the house, an inspector, and he asked us would we like to go to Canada. The Middlemore Home gathered up these waifs, if you want to call them that, orphan children, and sent them out to Canada. I have a book on that. And I said, yes, I’d be willing to go to Canada, but Victor, he said no, he didn’t want to go. So, they put us in this orphanage, this Middlemore Orphanage. That’d be January, 1910. And then, in May, they sent us out to Canada here. Me and Victor.

I never saw my father after that, after we left in 1910.... He used to come to visit us at the home and bring us out treats. I suppose that he came out once a month or so, every two weeks or so. But there was one thing about that home there. As far as I know, he paid our way there. We weren’t there on welfare or whatever you want to call it. I don’t know what you called it at that time. But as far as I know, he paid so many shillings a month to keep us there till we were sent out to Canada.

We left Jack and Gwendolyn... See, Jack would be only a couple of years older than Gwendolyn. We left them with some aunts there, and then when Jack grew up to be 18 he joined the army, and he went out to Greece and Israel, Jerusalem, and all places like that. I have pictures here that he sent me of places that he was in.

I don’t know anything about [my mother]. I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t know what the family troubles was, you see. I don’t know what caused this split—up. I went over to see [Gwendolyn in England] in 1972..., basically to get a background on my life.... I tried to find out my relations and who I was and who my mother’s people were, my father’s people. But right there in Handsworth — that’s where she was — there was all kinds of Davies there but I couldn’t get no connection.

The Voyage

I think it was around the 24th of May that we left England. There was 60 boys in this orphanage, and then there was 40 girls came from what they called a cottage home in Scotland. So there was a hundred of us came to Halifax on the ship Mongolia, SS Mongolia.

102 BELFAST PEOPLE