So how has the experience been for you the outsiders here????
Largely a good one.
I came out to Manitoba Canada from Great Britain with my wife, a British nurse, as a young physician in 1970.
Having been raised in the frenetic South East of England and resided for six years in the greater London area, coming to the Canadian Prairie was quite a change of gear.
However, in those days about 30% of British graduates went to the dominions. The great majority of the physicians in the Brandon area were from the British Isles at that time, so that ameliorated the situation considerably.
Within a few days of our arrival, we were invited to a barbecue at the home of a physician who had emigrated five years earlier. I grew up in the village of Frindsbury, at
Rochester. This physician was from the village of Wainscot in sight of my bedroom window. His family was well known to ours.
That glorious summer night was my first introduction to North American beef. I confess that was the one and only time a consumed two T-bone steaks!
We came to Canada planning to stay three to five years. When we told the assembled company of British expatriot medical families of our intentions. They said save your money! The return to England and back was known in those days as the $1000 cure. We met a number who had taken the cure.
I think it dawned on us then, that England would never be our home again.
A couple of years after we left, my wife's father received the golden handshake as a senior telephone engineer with the Royal Post Office. Prior to Margaret Thatcher, the telephones were controlled by the Royal Mail. wages were low and service terrible. For instance when you moved house you went to the beginning of the cue to get telephone service, which meant you took two to three years to regain telephone service after a move.
Anyhow Jack took a job with Associated Electrical Industries in Winnipeg, and so my wife's parents emigrated. They loved Canada, and for the first time built up significant savings, and had a far better standard of living than they enjoyed in England.
At the end of 1976 my wife and I and our three children born in Canada emigrated to Grand Forks ND. We lived in Grand Forks until just over a year ago. Our fourth child was born in ND.
Our children love England, but state they are very glad we emigrated and that they did not grow up in England.
Obviously this is a very different immigrant experience to yours. For one thing the culture of the British Isles, is much more similar than South American culture, to say nothing of language. Both our legal systems are based on British Common law rather than Roman law.
The major reason for this countries constitution and Bill of rights, being they way they are is a direct result of the last British civil war between 1642 and 1649. The mistakes leading up to that war, the failures of Oliver Cromwell's Commonwealth, the restoration of the monarchy and its aftermath, were ever present in the minds of the framers of the constitution. Although they were Cromwell's men, so to speak, they learned the lessons of what had gone wrong very well. For that matter so did British leadership following the War of Independence.
So in some ways it is hard for us to feel foreigners here.
This is well highlighted by an incident just a few years ago. I looked after an old Swede during a very long illness. He was from Thief River Falls MN, which he and the other old Scandinavians, pronounce Tief River Falls.
I had to take a leave for a few days, and he went on a rant about how he did not want to be looked after by any foreign doctors! I told him he had been looked after by a foreign doctor for years. He replied that they did not, and would not, regard the English as foreigners round here, and to never refer to myself as a foreigner again!
So we have had a good life here. In the circumstances of my family we have been able to visit the UK and my siblings and families have visited here. Until recent years my parents made many visits over here, and my wife's sister, husband and children have visited. We have kept many family traditions, especially at Christmas time, and our children are carrying on many of the traditions. We have made many US and Canadian friends. We still have close English friends as well. We are close to a couple, both physicians who emigrated to Southern Manitoba from Yorkshire. They came out five years before us. They still work in Brandon for part of the summer, and live most of the year in white Rock BC now. They visit us here often, twice in recent weeks.
So I personally have no regrets, I am quite content. My wife I know still harbors some ambivalent feelings about family separation by distance.
However I did at one time harbor an inclination to retire the British East Anglian coast. Specifically to the fishing
village of Walberswick in Suffolk. This is very close to my families summer home on Eastern Bavance just north of
Southwold, the other side of the River Blyth from Walberswick. One other interesting factoid: the village of Southold on Long Island NY, was founded by Southwold stock. For some reason they left out the w. Many of the families have stayed connected over the years, and you will find memorials donated from either side of the Atlantic in both towns. My wife however was adamant that there would be no more family separations.
The upshot of this is that when we bought this place on Benedict Lake ten years ago my wife named it Walberswick, so that we would get to retire at Walberswick!
