Lawrence Walker (3)

After his year in the Middle East, which included more than a few brushes with millipedes, scorpions and other foreign-to-him bugs, Lawrence went back to England. He was reunited with Sheila, whom he'd known since their grade school days. They got engaged immediately and were married nine months later.

In 1955, he was offered a job with Algoma Steel in Sault Ste. Marie. “I liked (Canada) when I was here, and I felt it would be a good place to come raise a family.” “The industry was just building up in the Sault and they were looking for management people from the steel industry in the UK,” says Marc. “So you saw a lot of people from the UK moving into the Sault at about the same time.”


The Sault was a whole other world when the family arrived in the 1950s. “It was not a very impressive place,” Margaret remembers. “Not when you're used to living by the river. No bridge. You had to take a ferry across the river. One TV channel, if you were lucky. We lived in an apartment. We'd never lived in an apartment, any of us, in our whole lives. We'd always had a fairly nice house in a seaside village in England. It took a lot of adjustment.” There was a road to get to Toronto but not Wawa. Arriving by plane meant landing in Sault, Michigan and hopping on the ferry. Lawrence worked for two years at Algoma as a shift foreman until he was promoted to assistant. When he retired in the mid-1980s he was works manager and had helped set up many of the area mills.

Today he lives in a retirement home in the south end. Sheila passed away in 2012 and amidst his Spitfire collection is photos of her, as well as some of her paintings, hanging on the pristine white walls. Margaret, also an artist, sells her work at a gallery in Little Current on Manitoulin Island. “We weren't quite sure where we landed that day in 1955. It was so different,” she says. “But Canada gave us a good life in the end.”


Click on the link to view a gallery of photographs
of Lawrence Walker’s RAF service:


Click on this link to view a gallery of excerpts
from Lawrence Walker’s Logbook between
January 1945 and September 1946.

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