Six decades of Dutch life in Canada

BY WENDY ELLIOTT

Kings County Register

Sixty years ago March 12, Liz Vermeulen left Rotterdam on the S.S. Kata Intern. After a dreadful 10-day voyage, she and her family - along with 18 Dutch immigrants, arrived at the port of Halifax. An article in The Chronicle-Herald describes blond-haired children chasing each other excitedly around the deck in wooden shoes. “We were the first since the Dutch war brides,” says Liz. The wooden shoes were a necessity, she recalls, due to the grease and seasickness on that old troop vessel. “We all slept in hammocks. The men were in one section and the women in another. It wasn’t much better than the Mayflower. That rotten old boat.”

The Vermeulens had decided to leave their farm behind. Their house had burned due to a chimney fire five days after liberation. Liz is sure the blaze was due to cracks in the chimney from to bombers passing overhead. “There was no reparation.”

The Vermeulens cleared immigration and headed out on the train for the Annapolis Valley, among the first of 500 newcomers expected from the Netherlands that year.

The family was met at Lawrencetown by the late John Shaffner, who became Lieutenant Governor. Liz’s father had agreed to work for his employer, M.W. Graves, for a year at $75 a month.

After 12 months, the Vemuelens relocated to Canaan, where Liz grew up. Nathan Isnor sold them a farm in 1950.

Her parents, who paid for their own relocation, never expected to see the Netherlands again. “They got no government aid and they did well. I learned a lot growing up on a farm.”

Most Dutch youth went into the work force after high school, but Liz remembers her mother keeping her three daughters in school. She went to a one-room schoolhouse and was in the first graduating class from Horton. She later taught there and at Acadia University.

Albert Vander Mey’s book on postwar immigration, To All Our Children, includes the newspaper photo of the 23 new arrivals 60 years ago. Now retired, Liz says she can trace three of the five families. One was her aunt and uncle’s.

She doesn’t expect any celebrations to mark the anniversary of the postwar wave of Dutch immigration. “People will get together, but we’re low key. We’re too Canadianized.”

Liz went back to the farm she was born on in 1976, looked up relations and shared memories of the war with cousins. She also returned for the 60th anniversary of the Dutch liberation.

Wolfville photographer Dick Groot, who first came to Canada in 1967, is working on a portrait documentary of Dutch immigrants to the Annapolis Valley between 1948 and 1958. Liz will be one of his subjects.

Influx of families boosted Canadian agriculture, industry

According to University of Calgary research, the Canadian government actively recruited preferred immigrants, such as the Dutch. The “Netherlands Farm Families Movement,” an initiative begun by the federal government in 1947 to entice Dutch farmers to come to Canada, attracted thousands.

The Dutch came to Canada to escape intolerable living conditions. Holland was crowded: it had managed to sustain a fairly high birth rate throughout the war years. The country was war-torn: tens of thousands of hectares of land had been submerged under seawater by the invading Nazis.

The Dutch were considered “preferred” immigrants because they had a long and positive history as immigrants, thought of as hard-working with similar religious, social, political and economic institutions. The Dutch assimilated quickly and provided a ready labour source for Canada's agricultural and industrial industries. Between 1947 and 1970, almost 185,000 Dutch immigrants entered Canada: the fifth largest ethnic group to arrive through Halifax. Among the first were 2,000 Dutch war brides who had married Canadian service personnel.