From the Archives: John Trott, Farm Help

Stuart Clarkson

Community Archivist at Rideau Archives

In 1914, Robert Frost published a long poem entitled “The Death of the Hired Man,” about a farm labourer who returned home to work for a farmer he had abandoned. Instead, here is a look at the life of a young man who, around that same year, left his home in England and tried his hand at working on a farm across the sea in North Gower Township, in the end only to be carried back home to England by the tide of worldwide events.

John Trott was born in Robertsbridge, Sussex, England on 11 October 1894 to Joseph and Sarah Elizabeth Trott, one of the younger of their many children. John, like his father, worked as a farm labourer, starting at age sixteen. His elder brother William had become a florist. But times were difficult then for rural labourers in England – it was the end of what has been called the Great Depression of British Agriculture. William left on the SS Lake Manitoba in 1910 to try his chances in Canada, living in Berlin [now Kitchener], Ontario until 1912. He then returned to his family in Sussex and, with the help of the Salvation Army, which assisted less-well-off emigrants, William and his brother John boarded the SS Ascania at Southampton on 3 April 1913. Disembarking in Portland, Maine, they headed for Toronto on the Grand Trunk Railway, proposing to look for general labouring jobs.

But on their way the brothers made a change, probably at the train station in Montreal, and headed to Ottawa instead. It is quite likely that the brothers boarded on Creighton Street with the family of Dennis Awcock, who had travelled with the Trott brothers from Sussex. William Trott married Eva Bessie Awcock in Ottawa in 1914 and remained living with her family until he enlisted to serve in the First World War in 1916. Meanwhile John Trott had taken a position in North Gower as a farm hand, with either the Fennells or Mackeys, probably to help with the harvest season in 1913. But John did not stay on the farm for long, and he seems to have left sometime in 1914, moving to Guelph.

John was there working as a box-maker at the time of his own enlistment in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on 18 January 1915, at the age of twenty. Before reaching France, he moved between 108th Regiment, 34th Battalion, 23rd Battalion, and 3rd Brigade Signallers (attached to the 39th Reserve Battalion), finally joining 13th Battalion in the field on 31 July 1916. Just eleven days later, on 11 August 1916 he was admitted to No. 8 Stat. Hospital, Wimereux suffering from shell shock. North Gower folk who remembered him might have read the announcement of his wounding in the Ottawa Journal on 21 August. He moved between convalescent depots until arriving at Base Depot in Harfleur on 17 September 1916. Having complained about his feet since arriving in the field, due to long route marches on the Somme, he was found to have flat feet and was transferred back to England for the remainder of the war, serving with 1st Quebec Regiment and 53 District, Canadian Forestry Corps.

Meanwhile, on 26 December 1917, he received approval to marry Emily Elizabeth Ide. Discharged in England on 13 May 1919, he joined his wife in Worthing, Sussex, where he stayed until at least 1936, later dying in Brighton in 1950. At some point during the Great War, though, he had gotten a “hands across the sea” tattoo, bearing it thereafter in memory of his short stint in Canada, helping on the farm in North Gower, and leaving for us here today one photograph.

In the included photograph, note the lack of decoration in the studio scene and the careless inclusion of the scene edge at the photograph’s right side – indicating perhaps that Panel & Ping Pong was affordable for low-income wage earners like John Trott but also that it was not professional enough to remain long in business. Like Trott, Panel & Ping Pong Studio seems to have appeared in Ottawa in late 1913, taking over Donaldson’s Studio, but, again like Trott, it had moved on after only a year or so.

Sources: Canadian and American immigration records [via Ancestry]; British emigration records [via Ancestry]; English census records [via Ancestry]; CEF military personnel records [LAC]; Ottawa Journal; Ottawa City directories.