Left: Me and my sister, the photo was taken just before I left to catch the train in October 1961 

I was born in Manchester on 27 January 1946. I have two older sisters and a sister who is 12 years younger than me. For the first five years of my life, we lived in a pre-war house that had been condemned for a number of years. The house didn’t have an indoor toilet and there wasn’t a bathroom at all There was a tin bath tub in the living room and we had to boil water on the stove to fill it. We all had a bath once a week, (whether we needed it or not,) using the same bath water. If you were the last one in, there was no guarantee that you’d come out cleaner! We weren’t poor, but we weren’t very far from poor.

When I was five years old, we moved into a new house on a new subdivision where all the houses were owned by the local council. I stayed there for ten years until I as 15 years old. My father worked for a printing company and my mother was at home or had casual jobs. She must have had quite a bit of work outside our home, as I remember my older sisters complaining a lot about how they had to take care of me after school.

I did well in elementary (primary) school and qualified to go to a grammar school after sitting the 11+ exam. I passed in the top third of the class in my first year of high school, which meant that I could study Latin. In my second year, I decided to stop going to school. I spent more time with the truant officer than my teachers. As a consequence, I failed all my subjects and was demoted to the bottom third of the class, which studied commerce. This still didn’t encourage me to go to school regularly, and the principal threatened to kick me out, which happened after the second year and I was sent to a comprehensive school.

I’m not sure why I decided to stop going to school. I was sent to see a psychiatrist, and he thought it might have been because my younger sister was born when I was 12 years old, the same year that I entered my second year at grammar school. He surmised that I sub-consciously resented no longer being the youngest and was trying to attract my parent’s attention. I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know why I decided to stop going to school. Once I turned 15 years of age, the psychiatrist told me that I wasn’t legally required to go to school anymore, and I could leave if I wanted to, which I did. (Ironically, now that I’m an adult, I’ve been trying to educate myself ever since. I think I’ve done more courses than I’ve had hot dinners!)

My parents accepted my decision, but now that I was no longer getting an education, they expected me to chip in. I got a low-skilled job at a dairy, bottling milk and loading crates of milk bottles onto the back of a truck. At this time, I had a good friend in the neighbourhood named Clifford Hawkes who was a year older than me and was planning to go to Australia with the BBM. After Cliff left, I realised that I wasn’t doing very much of anything, and that life didn’t feel great. I thought I might be happier in Australia with Cliff, so I applied to the BBM. Because I was under 21 years of age, my parents had to sign over my guardianship to the BBM, which they were not happy about. They said goodbye to me at the train station in London and I joined 16 other ‘Little Brothers’ on the P&O Iberia.

The sea voyage was like a six-week holiday. I’d barely left Manchester before this, so it was wonderful to be seeing the world. In those days, travel by ship was very class based, and the first and second class parts of the ship were locked off to peasants like us. Nevertheless, we all got to see the magnificent Sydney Harbour Bridge when we arrived in October 1961. Cliff Hawkes met me at the dock and stayed for a couple of days.

All the Little Brothers were taken straight to the training farm – we were not given a choice of working in the country or the city. I’d never been on a farm before and barely spent any time with animals. It was an experience getting up close and personal with cows and learning to milk them twice a day. I enjoyed my time there.

We all slept in one long dormitory and I remember that the farm was quite a long way out from the city.  I was there for a few months and became good friends with Bill Studley, one of my shipmates who came from Dorset. I have tried to find Bill many times over the years without success. I stayed on the training farm from my arrival in October until January 1962, when I was sent to work on a farm outside Gilgandra.

After a train journey that felt like an eternity, the boss’s wife met me at the station and took me to Aller Farm. It was a mixed farm on 1200 acres with about two thirds under cultivation (mostly wheat) and one third used for raising pigs, beef cattle, and sheep. There was only one cow, that was milked for the family, so my training on the BBM farm wasn’t much use. The farmer taught me how to ride a horse and drive a car and tend to the pigs. There were 25 sows in farrowing pens and one boar. I had to clean out their pens, replace the straw and feed them every morning. It felt like there was a sow giving birth every other day and so there were lots of piglets squealing and running around. I also learnt to drive a tractor so I could plough, harrow, and sow the fields. You name it, I did it.

I lived in a small hut that was about 9×12 feet and sparsely furnished with a bed, chest of draws and a cupboard. I recall the comforts of an electric light and a small radio. It was about 100 metres from the bungalow where the family lived. I joined them for meals, which were very good – the farmer’s wife was a great cook.  She didn’t like British people for some reason, but she was decent enough to me.

There were snakes and spiders on the property that could kill a small child with their venom. I was told to always carry a snake bite kit with me, because by the time you could get to a doctor in Gilgandra, which was about 45 minutes away on a dirt road, it may be too late. The kit had a scalpel in it that you used to cut the bite mark open, and then you poured crystals into the wound that would absorb the venom, hopefully before it got into your bloodstream. Having said that we never carried them!

There are several experiences on the farm that stick in my mind.  One day, I was helping to unload a large delivery of fertilizer. The truck trailer was long and low to the ground to spread the weight of the bags so that the truck wouldn’t get bogged in mud. There was a two-foot high step up into the woolshed where we were storing the fertilizer, and I couldn’t see where I was putting my feet due to the size of the bags I was carrying. As the driver and I unloaded the truck, it got harder to Iift the 112 pound bags as we had to bend down further to pick them up. I was a 16-year-old boy working with a very fit Australian man who was also a ‘gun-shearer’, which meant he could shear more than 200 sheep in a day. I kept going until we’d finished the job, even though it was exhausting. At the end, the driver came and shook my hand and said: ‘If you’re ever in the pub in Gilgandra, I’ll shout you a beer’. I knew it was the highest accolade you’d get in Australia and I felt proud that I’d earned it.

We used dogs on the farm to round up the sheep, and when one of them had a litter of pups, I was given the runt to keep. I used to shoot kangaroos and chop up the flesh to feed it. One day I was out on the tractor and I saw a plume of smoke near the homestead. I was worried that the house was on fire, so I ran the mile and a half back and was relieved to discover that the farmer had set some old truck tyres on fire to burn rubbish. Then I noticed that my pup was on the pyre. I was shocked, hurt and angry.  The farmer said that since he wasn’t a working dog, we couldn’t afford to keep him, and he didn’t want me using up so much of my time hunting, killing and preparing food for it. This was hard to accept, but it taught me that you don’t get anything for nothing, and you’re not owed anything.

Another time, I was helping to install a septic tank into a big hole in the ground. The concrete tank was heavy and you had to ease it carefully off the back of the truck with a tractor using long planks of wood. The truck driver’s teenage nephew was part of the crew and he made a mistake and the tank fell into the hole sideways. The driver went and gave him a thumping, which taught me that mistakes were not tolerated.

The boss didn’t work me seven days a week, so there was time for recreation too. I played a lot of tennis and helped the locals to build a tennis court. I remember that we helped a neighbouring farmer to plough or harvest his paddocks because he was away working as a wool-grader. There was a real sense of community – you relied on help from your neighbours and your family and didn’t expect the government to step in and provide things.

Through tennis, I met Keith, another Little Brother who was working on the neighbouring farm. He had a motorcycle and we used to drive 45 minutes into Gilgandra to go to the pictures. My mate Cliff was on a farm about half a day’s travel from Gilgandra. He came to see me once and I hitchhiked to visit him the following year.  I helped the boss to take the pigs to market in Dubbo and got to see the country that way. I thought it was terrific. Every day was new and a lot of fun. Australians were so open and accepted me the way I was.

Going to Australia, meeting the people I met, doing what I did, it probably saved me from going to jail in the UK. It was wonderful, I would not have traded it for anything. It was not easy, but it taught me some valuable life lessons that set me up for success later in life.

Despite these positive experiences, after about two and a half years on the Hoseguood family farm in Gilgandra, I decided to return to England. I’m not exactly sure why – perhaps it was because Keith was going back, or because I could not see myself progressing and I was looking at a future where I would always be a labourer on someone else’s farm.

Keith and I sailed on the same ship, possibly the P&O Arcadia in 1965, but this time it was different as I had my own money and I was 17 years old, which meant I could buy drinks and gifts for my family.  I don’t remember disembarking in London, but I do vividly recall catching a cab home with my father and younger sister who stared at me like I was a cave man. Diane was only three years old when I left to go to Australia.

I came back to live in the same house, but it was a different family. Both my older sisters had moved out and I had a new sister to get to know. I felt like I was putting on an old shoe that no longer fitted properly.

I was doing cruddy little jobs, whatever casual work I could pick up. After about 18 months, I decided to join the Manchester City Policy force. I was now a constable walking the beat. I saved enough money to buy a car and felt like I was making my way in the world. One day, one of the officers in the force asked if he could borrow my car to drive to Liverpool. I said that as it was my day off too, I’d drive him. He was going to the Canadian Embassy in Liverpool to do his medical tests so he could immigrate. That sounded like a good idea, so I filled in the paperwork while I waited for him. I was accepted as an immigrant, subject to passing the medical examinations.

Below: Beryl and Frank, March 1967

In the meantime, I met Beryl on a blind date and we were married on 18 March 1967 in Cheshire. She was working as a nurse in a local hospital. Beryl hadn’t been ten miles from her home and she wasn’t too keen on migrating half way across the world and flat out refused to come with me to Australia but she eventually agreed to Canada. Soon after we applied and passed our medicals, a brown envelope arrived from the Canadian Embassy marked: ‘do not open, give to a travel agent’. So, I didn’t open it and ignored it for a while. One day I was walking the beat and passed a travel agent. I went in to enquire about a holiday in former Yugoslavia for Beryl and I, and handed over the envelope because I wanted to know if our travel papers to Canada had expired. The travel agent said to me: I’ve got two plane tickets to Vancouver on 16 October, is that OK?

I went home and told Beryl and she was not happy. However, being a loyal wife she agreed to come. She didn’t pack her bags until midnight of the day before we left. Unlike me, Beryl was very close to her family and would miss them terribly. Once we arrived, we found a place to live in the West End of Vancouver Island, which was just 100 metres from the beach. Beryl would go and stand on the beach, looking out to sea and cry with homesickness and longing. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was looking towards Japan and not England.

We arrived with just two suitcases and three hundred dollars. As a nurse, Beryl found it easier to get work than I did, so she supported us in the beginning. This is when I really regretted leaving school early. The first job I got was on account of my British accent – I had to dress up as a Beefeater and open doors at a posh hotel for people who were attending a British motor show. I nearly didn’t get my next job as a trainee loan company manager on account of my British accent. I had my first interview over the telephone and was told that I couldn’t work in a bank as customers wouldn’t be able to understand me. I convinced the branch manager to let me come in for a face-to-face interview and he liked me and agreed to hire me.

After working as a branch manager for a year or so, I saw that a loan company in Vancouver were hiring folks in the UK for positions a Trainee Managers. I applied and was accepted and stayed with the bank for about 20 or so years, managing several branches and becoming Retail Branch Marketing Manager for all the branches in British Columbia.

While I’ve had 15 different jobs in my life, with patches of part-time or no work, Beryl has kept nursing over the past 40 years. Today she suffers from back pain as a result of all the walking and lifting and 12-hour shifts. I don’t know what I’d do without her. Together we’ve raised two wonderful daughters, Carolyn and Jennifer. In December 2023, I had a nasty accident which caused severe brain trauma and after discharge from hospital, Beryl nursed me at home. Unfortunately, the head injuries have affected my cognition, memory, and balance.

Below: Frank and his family, 1981

However, the experiences I had as a ‘Little Brother’ in Australia were so formative that I still remember them. It was the under-pinning of everything else that I’ve done in my life. It taught me respect for others, that hard work is rewarded, and that there is no ‘free lunch’. I learnt how to live a life that goes both ways – give and take. Sadly, I have lost touch with Cliff Hawkes, but I am so glad that I followed him to Australia with the BBM.

Below: Frank, 78 years

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