EPISODE 397 GEORGE EVERRIT GREEN, BORN FEB. 8, 1890, DIED Nov. 8, 1895 — STARVATION, ABUSE AND NEGLECT
alan skeoch
July 2021
My wife Marjorie does not want me to tell this story again. In the 1990’s I researched and wrote about poor, fragile, handicapped, unwanted George
Everitt Green. The story haunts me to this day. In 1895 the story of his tragic death was known by all Canadians. Today his story crops
up now and again. In 1992 I wrote and delivered a short version of the story over CBC Radio Noon. The story does not rest well in Canada. Best forgotten.
Not long afterward my CBC producer told me over the phone, “We do not need you anymore.” I suspect the two events are
connected.
I spent a lot of time and a fair bit of money putting the story together. I even travelled to Liverpool, England to confirm the records. Mike Brillinger
and I made a videotape on the desperate farm in North Keppel Township, Grey County, Ontario, where George was starved, beaten and
mistreated horribly by Rose Findlay for the seven months
of his life in Canada. Why did she treat him so miserably? She said to neighbour that she rather liked beating him.
When the coroner was called to examine George’s body, he was horrified. George was curled up in a kind of fouled straw nest. His body was bruised and
cut, He was emaciated. His straw nest was also his toilet. What I remember from my manuscript was the strange red dots on his body.
Rose Findlay was subsequently charged with murder. Her court case was big news across Canada. Most startling was the fact
that the jury could not agree that George was murdered. Rose got off.
My manuscript goes into great detail as the court record reveals. Was George diseased when he arrived in Canada as a Barnardo child?
Dying? Or was he just a shy, little, abandoned boy…blind in one eye and crooked in the other eye. A London street waif at 6 years of age.
A slum child among the 30% of the population of England living in poverty.
Have I got the guts to tell the story once more?
FRONT PAGE OF MY 1992 MANUSCRIPT
1992 September
“No sign of life. In the garish light of a late September afternoon Mike Brillinger and I walked the unadorned
fields of the old Findlay farm, North Keppel Township, Grey County, Ontario. No buildings remain…no foundations…
just a small dump with rusted pots and broken dishes. It was here I believe George Everett Green was
murdered on November 8, 1895. His death remains a mystery. Helen Rose Findlay was charged wth his
murder but never convicted because the Owen Sound jury was split. Subsequently she was charged with
the lesser offence of child abuse and child neglect but she disappeared. What happened that November
when George died? There is lots of hearsay evidence in the court records.”
“Just waking these desperate abandoned fields now overgrown with wild apples,burdock, goldenrod and
red clover has been an experience I cannot forget.”
CONTINUED…MAYBE