- June 12, 2015
University of Manitoba Press invites you to join us as we present:
Murray Watson
discussing his new book
Invisible Immigrants: The English in Canada since 1945
When: Friday, June 12, 2:30 pm
Where: Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 (1055 chemin Marginal Road, Halifax, NS)
Cost: FREE
About the Author
Murray Watson is an honorary research fellow at the University of Dundee. His first book, Being English in Scotland, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2003. Watson currently lives in his native Scotland but makes annual trips to Canada to work on research into English migration to Canada and to teach at Carleton University. Watson’s mother became a Canadian landed immigrant in her 70th year, settling in British Columbia.
About the Book
Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, the story of the English has been all but untold. In Invisible Immigrants, Marilyn Barber and Murray Watson document the experiences of English-born immigrants who chose to come to Canada during England’s last major wave of emigration between the 1940s and the 1970s. Engaging life story oral histories reveal the aspirations, adventures, occasional naiveté, and challenges of these hidden immigrants.
Postwar English immigrants believed they were moving to a familiar British country. Instead, like other immigrants, they found they had to deal with separation from home and family while adapting to a new country, a new landscape, and a new culture. Although English immigrants did not appear visibly different from their new neighbours, as soon as they spoke they were immediately identified as “foreign.”
Barber and Watson reveal the personal nature of the migration experience and how socio-economic structures, gender expectations, and marital status shaped possibilities and responses. In postwar North America dramatic changes in both technology and the formation of national identities influenced their new lives and helped shape their memories. Their stories contribute to our understanding of postwar immigration and fill a significant gap in the history of English migration to Canada.
