‘The War Brides are Coming’ marks 80 years since VE Day

The War Brides are Coming marks 80 years since VE Day and the arrival of Canada’s war brides.

Eighty years after the end of the war in Europe, Calgary’s Unicorn Collective is revisiting a chapter of Canadian history many families still carry — the arrival of 65,000 war brides brought back from overseas.

The company’s artistic director Gail Whiteford has written and directed The War Brides Are Coming, a play inspired by her own mother’s experience immigrating to Alberta after the Second World War.

“I write plays because I love researching,” she said. “And this all started with my father who was a military buff because he was in the military.”

Whiteford founded the company five years ago and stages one production each year, often drawing on personal or little-known wartime stories.

The play follows two women — one English, one Dutch — confronting prejudice and starting over in a prairie town. One of the stories, a personal one, is central to the production.

“My mother was a war bride. She came to Canada from London. She had had an interesting time. She was a soldier — she drove tanks from the factories to the ships off the English coast and she was quite active and she met my dad when my dad was singing in a pub,” Whiteford says.

As her father continued to serve in England, Mrs. Whiteford was transplanted from bustling London to Olds, Alta., “to a farm with no running water, no indoor plumbing, no electricity, no heat.”

And she was not met with a friendly welcome. “My grandfather hated her. When he met her for the first time he looked at her and he said ‘So you’re my son’s English whore, are you?’ And it got worse from there,” Whiteford recalled.

The Unicorn Collective produces one show a year that is written based on Whiteford’s interest and research in military history.  The War Brides has been staged before, but is being remounted to mark the 80^th anniversary of their arrival.

She hopes the production encourages families to talk about what those years meant.

“Sixty-thousand English and European women came to Canada … and they changed the course of Canada no matter where they lived and we should be damn thankful that they came,” she said.

The War Brides are Coming runs Nov. 7–8 in Calgary with a performance Nov. 22 in Olds.

More information at can be found here.