Person

George Barton senior and his wife, Eliza Barton nee Frost, had moved from Suffolk to Howden-le-Wear after their marriage in Suffolk in 1877. The coal seams around the village were close to the surface and of particularly fine quality for coke production which is where George Barton senior worked as a coke drawer. This was a man who drew the finished coke from the retort in which coal was heated to make the coke.

By 1901, when George junior was aged three, his older brothers also worked at the coke works. However, his father had had enough and moved the family, apart from the two oldest boys, to the wide open spaces of Canada. They sailed from Glasgow on board the SS Sarmation, a Scottish built iron hulled three-masted liner, arriving in Halifax, Nova Scotia on 31 March 1904.

George senior filed a Homesteader’s Grant and, by 1911, he and his wife Eliza and young George were living and working on a farm in Chamberlain, Saskatchewan. Daughters Harriet and Emily married the Spence brothers, Nigel and Hilton, in 1907 and 1909 respectively and farmed in the Penzance and Craik areas. In the wartime conscription debate of 1917 Canadian farmers pushed the government to acknowledge their important wartime work by exempting their sons from conscription. The government initially complied but ended the exemption in April 1918 in the face of continuing casualties overseas and recruitment shortages at home.

So May 1918 saw young George enlisting in the Canadian Expeditionary Force (CEF) in Regina, Saskatchewan and becoming Private 260212 in the 1st Depot Battalion, Saskatchewan Regiment. By mid August he was back in England and transferred to the 15th Canadian Reserve Battalion at Bramshott, Kent. He was then moved to the Canadian Machine Gun Depot (the machine gun training school) at Seaford, Sussex in September. George remained in Sussex until his return to Canada in 1919 and demobilisation on 25 June 1919.

George returned to the family farm and the 1921 census shows him still living there with his parents. Eliza his mother died in 1946 in Chamberlain and his father two years later. After this, George gave up the farm and joined one of his nephews in a garage business in Penzance. George himself died in 1982 and is buried in Craik Cemetery, Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan.

Civil Parish: North Bedburn

Birth date: 11-Sep-1897

Death date: 1982

Armed force/civilian: Army

Residence: 3 High Street, Howden-le-Wear (1897 birthplace)
Chamberlain, Saskatchewan (1911 Canadian census)
Sarnia, Saskatchewan (1916 census of Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Alberta)

Religion: Methodist

Employment: Farmer (1911 Canadian census)

Family: Parents: George Barton, Eliza Barton nee Frost
Siblings: Thomas James Barton, Ernest J Barton, Harriet Barton, Emily Barton

Military service:

260212
Private
1st Depot Battalion, Saskatchewan Regiment
Canadian Machine Gun Depot

Gender: Male

Contributed by Jean Longstaff, Durham