Jean Longstaff has submitted the following:-

John William Cameron was born on 5th October 1866 in Felling to labourer Hugh Thomas Cameron and his wife Elizabeth (nee Snowball) two years after their marriage. By 1881, aged 14, John was working as an assistant chemist and his older brother Alexander was a barrel maker. Seven years later on 20th June 1888 John married Scottish born Jessie Milne Forbes in Gateshead, and their first child, a daughter Elizabeth, was born two years later. John was now working as a metal moulder at an iron foundry and they were living in Rawling Street. Their family grew with the birth of Ethel in 1894 (died aged 6) and Hugh in 1899 and they moved to a larger house in St. Rollox Street, Hebburn, near the children’s school, where Mary Alexandra was born in 1902 and John born in 1904, who also died young.

1911 was a momentous year for the Cameron family. In January oldest daughter Elizabeth married Septimus Drummond, who also worked at the iron foundry and two months later on 25th March John and his new son-in-law arrived in Halifax on board the SS Megantic with the intention of travelling west to Vancouver. Having settled in British Columbia, where John was again working as a moulder, they were joined in August by Jessie and the two younger children Hugh and Mary. Elizabeth and her new baby arrived to join her husband Septimus the following year.

February 1915 saw John, Jessie, Hugh and Mary return to England and a house in Stuart Street, Felling where they remained when thirteen months later John returned to Vancouver alone. John found lodgings on Clark Drive, Vancouver and returned to his job as an iron moulder until he enlisted in the Canadian Expeditionary Force on 20th September 1916. He became Private 1048793 in “F” Company, 242nd (Forestry) Battalion.

Although he lied about his age on his enlistment paper, making himself younger than he actually was, a Medical Board found him fit for overseas duty, although his vision had tested as 20/100, it was not considered bad enough for a medical rejection; nor was his being overage.

At the end of November, he sailed with the Battalion on the SS Mauretania arriving in Liverpool on the 30th and an onward posting to Witley, Surrey. At the start of the New Year he was posted France and attached to 19th Company, Central Group, Canadian Forestry Corps for three months before being transferred to 20th Company working in the Bordeaux Region in Foret de Perseigne. Granted leave at the end of the year he spent New Year of 1918 with Jessie and the children in Felling, rejoining his unit in France in mid January.

Private Cameron left France for good in December 1918 when he was posted to the CFC depot at Sunningdale, Berkshire and then Buxton, before returning to Canada, along with Jessie and Mary on the SS Miniedosa, arriving for demobilization in New Brunswick on 17th March 1919. Their son Hugh had married in the January and remained living in Felling with his new wife.

John and his family stayed with their eldest daughter Lizzie and her family in Vancouver, until they returned to England on 27th February 1920 and returned to live in the house on Stuart Street.

Jessie Cameron died in 1937, leaving John and Mary living in the same house in Felling until John’s death on 22nd July 1942.

John William Cameron is remembered in Felling on F32.07