Scoundrels, Dreamers, and Second Sons: British Remittance Men in the Canadian West

W.J.C. Cherwinski is a history professor at the Memorial University of
Newfoundland and the co-author of Lectures in Canadian Labour and
Working-Class History.

The great wave of immigrants that washed over Western Canada in the late
19th and early 20th centuries to satisfy the new Dominion’s need for
people and Britain’s desire to find safe Imperial haven for surplus
population also brought with it some human flotsam and jetsam. The
best-packaged of these were the infamous remittance men, who were exiled
to the colonies for their failed ways, or just because they did not fit
into aristocratic and upper middle-class British society. This lively,
well-illustrated account of their experiences is based on documentary
residue left by the handful of them who had sufficient time, energy, and
sobriety to commit their observations to paper.

These unfortunate young men, many just the victims of primogeniture and
a new merit system that diminished the importance of class and family
name, were more suited to games and classical literature than to hard
work in a frontier environment. Nevertheless, they set forth for what
they foresaw as an exotic adventure equipped only with a resolute chin,
a sizable bank account, and a conviction that the British way was the
only way. Their end, according to the author, was too often to while
away the time between remittance payments with others of their kind,
gaming, hunting, and drinking, often to excess. Local residents quickly
turned them into inept caricatures of Imperial decadence. Even those who
tried to “make good” were subjected to exorbitant prices for what
they considered substandard goods and services, and bilked out of their
small fortunes by more worldly wise locals too willing to introduce them
to “Canadian ways.” By 1915 most of them were gone, called to serve
“king and country,” to uphold the social structure that spawned
them.

Scoundrels... is a very good read but includes little that is new.
Moreover, it fails to address logical questions like the extent to which
these Imperial anomalies contributed to the realization by Canadians
that they were different from the British and proud of it.