Arrival in Canada
On July 31, 1947 Eric arrived in the city of Toronto, Canada. He immediately started his new position with the pharmaceutical company he had worked with in England. Though Eric was making more than he had in England, he soon learned that the cost of living was much higher in Toronto than in London. 
He found himself struggling to save enough money to support his wife Bobbie and son David to Canada. A single room in a boarding house was all he could afford as he waited for Bobbie and David to join him. Meanwhile, his new job was not all that it promised to be. Eric’s manager was incompetent and both the company and his job were in jeopardy. Eric realized that soon he would have to move on from this job and take his chances elsewhere. However, he was not worried; the Toronto newspapers were full of ads offering employment to meet the demands of the city’s post-war economic boom. Rather than return home to England, Eric and Bobbie decided that Canada was now the place he wanted to call “home”.
Cleverly, Eric found a way around the English restrictions that prohibited him from taking money out of the country. He was able to bring part of his life savings to Canada which he used to build his first piece of Canadian property. Bobbie’s parents also had purchased a nearby plot of land in Swansea, a suburb of Toronto and every evening after work Eric grabbed a sandwich and walked 2 miles to the construction site where he worked with his father-in-law until late at night helping to build a bungalow for them. This was completed in about 6 months and the whole family then moved in there while Eric and his father-in-law built a house for Eric and his family on a piece of land nearby. This was competed by the end of 1948.
"I worked like a sieve in those days..."
In 1949, two years after arriving in Toronto, the company Eric worked for closed down causing Eric to look for work sooner than he expected. Eric started applying for many jobs advertised in the Toronto papers but he found there was considerable discrimination against Englishmen who were accused of taking jobs from the locals despite the fact that the population was mainly of British descent in those days. During this period of unemployment, his daughter Rosemary was born in May, 1950, which made his position even more precarious as his savings were quickly disappearing. Eric and Bobbie started to fear that they would have to leave their new home in Canada. Eric’s sense of humour and his ability to adapt were tested in those early years in Canada-but his qualities of humour and adaptability also served to cushion his initial struggles to adjust to Canada.
