When we posted a notice on the website for our book The Sugar Girls calling for stories of British women who had become GI Brides, we never expected to find a woman who was both – and yet that was the case of Frances Pelling. Her daughter Lynn contacted us to tell us her story.
Frances was born in 1923 and grew up on Eastwood Road in Silvertown, a stone’s throw from Tate & Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf Refinery. At the age of fourteen she left school and took a job as a sugar packer on the Hesser Floor. After her father had walked out on the family, she had been raised by her mother, who was deaf, and her elderly grandfather, and as an only child she was the main breadwinner of the family.
Tate & Lyle’s Plaistow Wharf Refinery
During the war, the family would gather at a shelter in Lyle Park, although Frances always worried that being deaf her mother would not be able to hear the sirens. The first she would know of the bombs falling was the vibrations that she could feel – one time she got up to answer the door convinced that someone was knocking, only to find it was a raid.
Frances met her GI husband, Richard Ross, at the roller-skating rink at Forest Gate. A corporal in the US Army, he was based at the docks, where he helped supervise the ships that were bringing in supplies for the Americans. At the skating rink, Frances felt sorry for him, since he seemed to be spending more time on the floor than he did skating around. They got talking, and arranged to see each other again. Soon they were dancing together at American Red Cross clubs and playing darts in the local pubs, as well as walking for miles around and ending up on a bench in Lyle Park.
Frances and Richard in Trafalgar Square
In less than a year Frances and Richard were married, in a Baptist church in Plaistow. Strangely, she had been warned that she would marry a foreigner – by a tea leaf reader she had visited a few months earlier. The woman had told her she would move to a different country, never see her mother again, and almost die in childbirth. Frances was so terrified she vowed never to see a fortune teller again.
Richard was from Brooklyn and when Frances told her mother that she would be leaving Silvertown to live with him in New York, the poor woman was devastated – as a deaf single mother she had always relied on her daughter’s help and support and she was worried about how she would cope on her own.
When the war ended, Richard was shipped home and Frances awaited passage as a war bride. But she was already pregnant, and gave birth to baby Lynn before she could be reunited with her husband. She developed pre-eclampsia and was seriously ill for several weeks, so Lynn went to live with her grandmother.
It was almost a year later that Frances finally made her way to the United States, on a liberty ship, the George Washington Goethals. Like many women, she was upset at the way she was treated by the American authorities, who were often suspicious that GI brides, particularly those from poorer backgrounds, were using marriage as a ticket to a richer country. ‘I was made to feel like a tramp’, she later told her family.
It was a stormy crossing, and Frances was badly seasick. At one point the ship rocked so violently that her daughter’s crib broke loose of its fixings and careened across the deck and into a bulkhead, leaving the baby with a nasty cut to her chin. Frances was filled with relief to finally arrive at the pier in New York, where Richard came running up the gangway with a beautiful cocker spaniel puppy in his arms. (His mother had given him some money to buy a new suit for the occasion, but he had decided that a new dog was much more suitable!)
Frances and Richard went to live with his mother in her small apartment in Brooklyn. It was a difficult time for Frances – Mrs Ross felt that her son had married beneath himself and largely ignored her new daughter-in-law, although fortunately she adored baby Lynn. It was a relief when they were able to move out and go to live with Richard’s grandmother in Milford, Connecticut, in a house just a block away from the beach.
When the old lady died, Richard and Frances remained in her house, and they stayed in Connecticut for the next fifty years. Richard got a job in the paint department of Sears Roebuck, where he worked his way up to become manager. When he retired, the couple moved to Florida.
At first Frances found it hard to adjust to life in America, and she felt that people she met were so fascinated by her English accent that they didn’t bother to listen to what she was saying. She was shocked when she saw her first teabag and avoided ‘foreign’ dishes such as pizza and spaghetti. But in time, she found a group of British women in Milford, the British-American Club, which became one of the focal points of her life.
Although Frances grew to enjoy life in America, her great regret was for her deaf mother, left behind in England. She wrote to her regularly, and sent pictures every few months, but she was unable to travel home to visit until the 1950s, when her mother was dying. For the rest of her life, Frances felt troubled by guilt at having left her mother behind when she became a GI bride. But she had come to love life in America, and was happily married to Richard for 64 years.
Frances died in 2009 at the age of 86. Her relatives brought some of her ashes back to England and scattered them in Lyle Park.
Yesterday we posted our live interview with Robert Elms on BBC London. Now here is the pre-recorded interview with GI bride Sylvia O’Connor, which Robert broadcast earlier in the show. Sylvia was speaking down the phone from Baltimore, where she has lived since 1946. She told Robert about how she met her husband Bob while working as a volunteer in the an American Red Cross club in the West End, and how she adapted to life in America after the war.
Sylvia recalled the awful heat that hit her as soon as she arrived in America – so much so that by the time she met her in-laws for the first time she was dripping with sweat and had broken out in heat-bumps. She told Robert that it was only in later years that she realised how much she had given up in agreeing to marry an American – and how, if she was given the chance to live her life again, she would have stayed in England, with all her friends and family.
The interview is split into two parts, and you can listen to them here:
[audio:https://www.gibrides.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Part-One-Sylvia-OConnor-on-the-Robert-Elms-Show.mp3|titles=Part One – Sylvia O’Connor on the Robert Elms Show]
[audio:https://www.gibrides.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Part-Two-Sylvia-OConnor-on-the-Robert-Elms-Show.mp3|titles=Part Two – Sylvia O’Connor on the Robert Elms Show]
Today, we were guests on Robert Elms’ show on BBC London, which had ‘GI Brides’ as its topic of the day. Earlier in the programme, Robert had broadcast a pre-recorded interview with Sylvia, which we’ll be uploading shortly.
Robert encouraged listeners to call in with their family stories of GI romances and GI brides, and received some fascinating responses. One man said that both his mother and his aunt had been dating GIs at the same time, although in the end only the aunt went through with an actual marriage and sailed off to America.
You can listen to our interview with Robert (in two parts) here:
Many GI brides adjusting to life in America in the Summer of 1946 found themselves celebrating Independence Day on July 4th for the first time, along with their husband’s family. For some, the sound of the Fourth of July fireworks inevitably brought back memories of the bombing they experienced during the Blitz.
GI Bride Rae Brewer attended her first Fourth of July fireworks display with her husband Raymond in South Park, near their home in Hackett, Pennsylvania. The noise of the rockets exploding triggered the PTSD she had suffered since being bombed out of her home in North London, and she instinctively dropped to the floor, her hands on the back of her head. To this day, she avoids fireworks displays, and still ducks whenever she hears a loud noise.
However, Rae never lets her PTSD get in the way of her patriotism. She became an American citizen in 1950, and now flies both the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes in her garden. At the World War II War Brides Association’s annual get-togethers, she always leads the singalong, belting out many war time songs, as well as the national anthems of both her homeland and her adoptive country.
On Monday, one of our Sugar Girls, Eva, introduced us to a good friend of hers who we were keen to speak to for our next book, which is about women who married American soldiers during the Second World War. Alice ‘Jimmy’ White is now 88 but can still vividly recall her experiences in the war, and in particular the American and Canadian soldiers who came to Britain and caused such a stir among the English girls.
Jimmy got her nickname because her mother, Edith, had always wanted a boy. Her father, a gas fitter, had died when she was just five years old, and she had grown up a headstrong, determined girl.
Jimmy was 15 when war broke out, living on Beaumont Road, Leyton, and witnessed her entire street ablaze with fire after an incendiary bomb attack. A couple of years later, when her mother sent her out to buy a sack of potatoes, instead of the potatoes Jimmy returned with a form and asked her mother to sign it: she had volunteered for the army even though she was underage. Her mother knew there was no dissuading her, and signed it.
Soon Jimmy was sent off to Scotland, along with other girls from East London, for 12 weeks of basic Army training. After a hard day’s work the girls headed to the local pub, only to be told: “Sorry, the pubs here are for men only”.
Jimmy was put in the heavy artillery, where her job was to calculate the height of enemy planes to be shot down. The girls were sent to stay near Beverley, Yorkshire, and on their nights off would gather in the market square and dance with foreign soldiers who were stationed nearby – Canadians, Americans, Free French and Poles. The heavy artillery wasn’t far from the barracks where the Canadian soldiers were housed, and every time they shot down a plane, the poor Canadians would get showered with shrapnel.
Betty, Jimmy’s friend, was in charge of driving a truck into the village on errands and frequently fetched fish and chips for the Canadian soldiers. The truck had gained the nickname the Passion Wagon, and Betty had already started seeing a Canadian called Bill. One day she convinced Jimmy to join her and Bill in the truck on a fish and chip run, along with a friend of Bill’s who she said wanted to meet her.
Jimmy agreed and was introduced to a tall, blue-eyed young man Henry, who had joined up to get away from life on his parents’ farm in Canada. The two of them soon started courting and were still together six months later, long after Betty and Bill had broken up.
Henry had two left feet on the dance floor but he was a crack shot as a sniper. Soon he was sent off to Belgium, and the couple stayed in touch by letter. While he was abroad, he bought an engagement ring in exchange for several hundred cigarettes from his rations. It was 24 carat gold and raised such suspicion back home that Jimmy was followed and questioned by the CID about how her boyfriend could have purchased such an expensive piece of jewellery.
Henry and Jimmy got a special license so that they could marry quickly when he came back on leave, and Jimmy excitedly ordered the ingredients for her wedding cake from the bakers. But each time the date drew near his leave would be cancelled and the ingredients would have to be given away for another girl’s wedding cake. Meanwhile Jimmy was injured in the shoulder while shooting down an enemy plane and was given heat treatment. She was taken off the guns and put into the pay department.
Eventually, the day came when Henry was allowed back on leave and the two were finally married. They spent the night in Leyton, in the house of her grandmother – who gave up her bed for the newlyweds. Unfortunately the feather mattress was so soft that when the two of them went to lie down it completely swallowed them up!
When the war came to an end, Jimmy got a letter telling her she would be setting sail for Canada on the Aquitania in a week’s time. It was a mad rush to get ready and say farewell to all her relatives before she left to join her husband and start her new life. Jimmy and a group of other war brides were taken to a hotel where they spent the night before boarding the boat the next day.
As she waved goodbye to Britain, little did Jimmy know that Henry was on the same ship, on his way to be demobbed. The couple were reunited and spent the voyage planning their new life in Canada.
Do you know anyone who dated or married an American or Canadian soldier in the Second World War? If so, we would love to hear their memories for our new book. Please get in touch at warbridesbook@hotmail.com.
