Looking for Eliza

CBC

27-04-2025

She was sent as a child to work in Cape Breton. Her life was largely a mystery to her family back in England — until more than 100 years later.
Eliza Showell was born in 1895 in the Black Country, near Birmingham, England. She died in 1978 in Inverness, Cape Breton. Submitted by Liz Berry
Lindsay Bird | CBC News Apr. 27, 2025
The Malagawatch Cemetery isn't giving up any secrets to me on the February day I arrive.
The small, rural cemetery on the shores of Bras d'Or Lake is encased in cement-like snow. Locals tell me the recent combination of rain and freezing temperatures created the shell. Upright tombstones pop through the crust, but I can't find the flat plaque marking the grave of the woman I'm looking for.
Her relatives fared better on the May day they visited, back in 2010.
'To find this really small, plain stone, and with her name and her dates, it just really touched my heart,' said Liz Berry, a poet from Birmingham, England.
The name on the stone in question is her great-aunt's, Eliza Showell. She was born in 1895 in the Black Country, near Birmingham. She died in 1978 in Inverness, Cape Breton.
'We always knew we'd had a great-aunt that had emigrated to Canada, but I think we all imagined this was a very glamorous thing,' Berry said, recalling she'd pictured a grown woman, gripping the rails of a ship, holding her hat to the breeze.
In reality, Eliza was 12 when she crossed the Atlantic Ocean, newly orphaned.
Her brothers, all older, were left to fend for themselves. Birmingham at that time was both riding high on a booming coal industry and awash in poverty and pollution.
Eliza ended up in the Middlemore Children's Emigration Home, a charity set up by local philanthropist John Middlemore, which funnelled eligible impoverished children from the United Kingdom over to Canada to work until they turned 18. Middlemore was just one of many charities and agencies that did so, in a child migration movement that came to be known as the Home Children.
It's estimated about 100,000 of them came to Canada between 1869 and 1948.
'On paper, I can understand that dream of lifting them out, the utter crowding and smog and smut and poverty of the city, and sending them to this clean, rural, dreamy place. I can understand how that seemed like the right thing to do,' said Berry.
Admittance records to the home briefly catalogue some of the children's desperate circumstances. 'Children literally starving,' reads one note. 'Father prosecuted for positive cruelty to girl,' reads another.
Another reality was that Canada needed labour, particularly on farms and in domestic service, and applications for these children were flooding in, outstripping the available supply.
Eliza arrived in Halifax in 1908, and ended up on a farm in Cape Breton. Her crossing, arrival and details of her work placement still exist, in the bare bones of official record-keeping that Berry was able to collect.
'We were able to see where she'd been placed and a little bit about what was happening there. Was she still attending school? Was she still working for no pay, for board?' said Berry.
Somewhere along the way, Eliza's name changed to Liza, and records became harder to find.
'Really, the story goes cold,' Berry said.
One of Eliza's brothers had tried to find her after the First World War, sending a letter through Middlemore and writing, 'I have lost all trace of her.'
To Berry's knowledge, they never found one another.
All Berry uncovered was that her great-aunt never married and worked her entire life in domestic service. Her final years were spent in a nursing home, Inverary Manor, in Inverness, where she died. Her employers paid for her burial in Malagawatch Cemetery.
Writing history
The outlines and blanks of Eliza's life inspired Berry to create her poetry collection, The Home Child.
It takes the slim facts of her life, and imagines others, creating a life for Eliza through her migration and girlhood in Cape Breton. The book was released to acclaim in the United Kingdom, and won awards like The Writer's Prize.
'The thought that no one might speak Eliza Showell's name again, or talk about these children again, just seems so unbearable to me,' Berry said.
'So I knew that I wanted to write about her story in some way, and sort of catch it and bring it to life, so that other people could find out about her and about the Home Children.'
While Berry says the Home Children story isn't particularly well known in the U.K., in Cape Breton at least, it's touched many lives. In the same area of the Island where Eliza lived were scores of other Home Children, like John William Ellis, who came over on the same ship as Eliza — but a different crossing — in 1915.
His granddaughter, Charlene Ellis, scrolls through the passage records from his journey in her kitchen in Little Narrows. Eighty-three Home Children were on that crossing, some of whom were as young as six or seven years old.
John himself was nine. Before he'd left Birmingham, John's father had given him a pocket watch and a photo of his mother, newly deceased. Neither of those items made it across the Atlantic to where a man from Jubilee was waiting for John, having applied for help around his farm.
'According to my grandfather, it was a very good home,' said Ellis, adding John was treated like a member of the family.
One report from a Home Child inspector notes John as 'considered adopted.'
John went on to get married and see eight children through to adulthood. Ellis said he was always a cheerful and open-minded man — but that he also had questions about where he'd come from, and if he had any brothers or sisters.
'I mean, he had trouble enough just trying to get a birth certificate,' Ellis said.
The records she now has of his time as a Home Child were only made available long after John had died.
Ellis has combed through those reports. Others, too. She's seen records of terrible homes — children beaten, abused and starved. Historians today widely acknowledge the Home Child system was rife with abuse.
She realizes her grandfather had some of the most fortunate circumstances.
'That being said, it doesn't matter how good your home is when you're nine years old or you're 12 years old or you're five years old, and you're taken from your parents and you never get to see them again,' she said.
'I'm not sure how good that is, you know, for someone's mental, emotional, growth, right?'
Ellis is one of many Canadian descendants pushing for an official apology. While the House of Commons did adopt a motion of apology in 2017, she wants it to come from the prime minister directly.
'I think it was wrong, and I think it would just give some validity to us, as descendants,' she said.
The Prime Minister's Office did not respond to a request from CBC on the status of any such apology.
Recognition
In 2010, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown did apologize to Home Children and their families.
Liz Berry watched it at the time, and came back to it as she was writing about Eliza.
'It made me really aware of how powerful an apology can be and a recognition,' she said.
Her day in the Malagawatch Cemetery was as close as Berry got to Eliza on her Cape Breton trip. Berry traced her great-aunt's name in the stone and picked an impromptu bouquet of wildflowers for her. In the years since, she's never met anyone who knew Eliza.
'I think almost, there was a bit of me that didn't want to pry,' Berry said, feeling that tumble of emotions that can come with writing about someone else's life, and imagining onto it.
But those of us who call the East Coast home know that it's a small and interconnected place. And that surely, if Eliza died at Inverary Manor in 1978, there must still be someone around who knew her.
Enter Wilma Fontaine.
'We called her Liza,' Fontaine recalls.
Fontaine retired from Inverary Manor in March after 51 years of service starting in 1974. Despite what she claims otherwise, her memory is as sharp as a knife.
"She was one person that kind of resonated with me, because of her situation. I found her to be like a very cute little old lady, cute in her ways. And the other part of it was that she had nobody,' said Fontaine.
There may have been no visitors, but Fontaine remembers Eliza as a cheerful resident, fast friends with the woman she shared a room with. But Eliza was also non-verbal, save for a one-word request — 'candy' — when she wanted a sweet.
Fontaine shared these sparse details with Berry on a Zoom call one brisk March day, filling in a few of the blanks of Eliza's life.
'I was telling my little boys and they were so excited," Berry told Fontaine. "They couldn't believe it, that somebody had known the Home Child."
Even decades after Eliza's death, Fontaine said she could still envision her. 'I can just still see her in my mind. And she was such a sweet little lady," she recalled.
That vision of Eliza and her life on Cape Breton Island came more into focus on their hour-long call, even if so many of Berry's questions about her — like what remnants of an English accent her great-aunt may have had — went unanswered.
In the end, Berry has to make peace with that unknowability. And larger questions, too, like how to think about the Home Child scheme itself.
"We can't judge the past by the morals of the present. And that's something that I really sort of struggle with,' she said, noting she's spoken to descendants who condemn it as a human rights violation, while others see it as having helped children thrive.
'It really made me think like multiple things can be true at the same time…. It can both be a desperately sad story and the wrong thing to do, and it can both be a story of hope, and perhaps a saving of someone's life, and what felt like the right thing to do. Like it's so morally complex."
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