At the dawn of the age of mass communication, impresarios in Europe and North America fed audiences a steady diet of theatrical entertainments on non-European themes. Although cast mostly with white actors made up to look like [caricatured versions of] people of non-European heritage, from time to time, genuine performers of colour were also cast to lend these productions a spurious air of authenticity. Thus was born the concept of “real” and “stage” performers of characters of non-European heritage. However, this contrast was itself largely spurious as real performers of colour were required to play “stage” versions of themselves for the simple reason that this is what audiences in Europe and North America wanted to see.

In some cases, the tension between the truth of performers of colour’s lived experiences and the caricatures they were required to play on stage took its toll, and in this article, I explore the story of a performer of North American Indian heritage who was ultimately destroyed by the disconnect between his image of himself and the version of himself that the public wanted to see. At the same time, I hope to demonstrate that some of the wounds that he suffered were self-inflicted, born of his single-minded pursuit of a life in the public eye whatever the price the people around him had to pay. This then, in all its innate complexity, is the story of John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero.

Although plays with a “frontier” theme had been a feature of North American life since the early part of the 19th Century, their heyday was the 30 years that followed the end of the American Civil War, buoyed by the success of the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show—where Buffalo Bill Cody went, plays with a frontier theme followed, including all the way to Europe. Frontier plays either covertly, or, as was the case with Buffalo Bill Cody, overtly, preached a message of white, more particularly, Anglo-Saxon supremacy over the heathen races, and presented North American Indian characters in ways that reassured their audiences that subduing the non-white people of the earth was a good and proper ambition and not the morally suspect act that some liberals claimed [1].

One of the most successful Frontier plays of this period was “On the Frontier”, which premiered in 1887, three years after Buffalo Bill launched his first Wild West Show. “On the Frontier” was based, very loosely, on the works of J Fenimore Cooper, and was produced by and starred the ‘husband and wife’ team of James M Hardie and Sara Von Leer [2]. Although still only in their thirties, Hardie and Von Leer had been acting separately and together for close to 20 years, without much success, before they co-produced “On the Frontier”. The play gave them the break they sorely needed, becoming a runaway touring success and playing across America and Canada for the next four years.

Haymarket Theatre, Chicago, On the Frontier (January 6, 1889), Chicago Public Library Digital Collections. No known copyright holder.

Deseret evening news, 18 December 1909. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress. Public Domain.

In the play, Hardie’s character, Jack Osborne, becomes tangled in conflict between the US Army and “renegade Indians” who had been incited to violence by a villainous white man, Bill Morley. At several points in the play, Osborne is rescued from certain death by the intervention of “Blue Flower”, an “Indian Princess”, played by Von Leer. After the climactic battle, defeat of the “renegade Indians”, and capture of Bill Morley, it is revealed that Blue Flower is, in fact, a white woman who was kidnapped as a baby by the “Indians” [3]. This last-minute twist simultaneously reaffirmed for its white audiences their prejudice that courage and virtue were characteristics unique to the white race and allowed Jack and Blue Flower to pledge their hearts to each other without raising the spectre of miscegenation. It was the classic Frontier play denouement.

One of the play’s selling points was the employment of performers of genuine North American Indian heritage as entr’acte entertainment and extras in the climatic battle, and when Hardie and Von Leer took the play to the UK in 1891 (six years after Buffalo Bill’s first visit to the country), their North American Indian performers went with them—13 in total, identified on the passenger list of the SS City of New York, the ship that transported the company from New York to Liverpool, as an “Indian Musical Troupe”—although it is impossible to say how much faith can be placed on the relationship between the names recorded by an anonymous landing officer and the actual names of the performers [4].

“On the Frontier” would go on to be as successful in the UK as in America and Canada, touring provincial theatres for at least six years and earning Hardie and Von Leer money enough to buy the lease to a Salford theatre, the Regent, which became the company’s “home base”. There was, however, one key difference between the stagings of “On the Frontier” in the US and the UK. In the US, all the speaking parts, including those of the North American Indian characters, had been played by white actors, while the genuine North American Indian performers provided only musical entertainment and cannon fodder for the final battle; however, once in the UK, several of the genuine North American Indian performers were promoted to speaking roles.

The first North American Indian member of the Hardie–Von Leer Company whom we can identify as taking on a speaking part is ‘Kanantakonra’, who played the principal North American Indian character in the play, “War Eagle”, in its opening season in the UK (1891), and would continue to play the part, off and on, for the next five years. Kanantakonra was one of the North American Indian performers who came over with the company from the USA, as recorded on the City of New York passenger list. In later years, his name would also be rendered in the press as “Ra-nan-to-ko-ra”; he was also, possibly, the “V Whua Rma Bronco”/“V Bronco” associated with the role in 1895 (in 1896, the role was played by “So-se-so-tein-ton”, who may be the ‘Doce’ on the City of New York passenger list). There was a “Kanentokonra” family in Quebec in this period, and one member of it, Jean Baptiste Kanentokonra (b. 1868), son of Kanentokonra, was the right age to be “our” Kanantakonra; however, this is a highly speculative attribution [6].

Leigh Chronicle, 8 September 1893. Image created by British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

Curiously, Kanantakonra was not one of the two North American Indian performers claimed in an 1893 ad for “On the Frontier” to be “THE ONLY INDIAN ACTORS IN THE WORLD” [7].

‘Edward Bero’, aka Looking Sky Bero aka L S Bero was almost certainly not related to Sitting Bull in any way. He would remain with the company until at least 1895, and, as I have written elsewhere, even turned out for the company cricket team, and perhaps even the company baseball team [8]. He may be the ‘Bedonquod’ on the City of New York passenger list.

‘John Sero’ aka John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero may have had a better claim to have been a descendant of Joseph Brant; certainly, his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography accepts this as true [9]. Brant-Sero is the only North American Indian performer of the “On the Frontier” company who can conclusively be said to have achieved fame outside the production. His Dictionary of Canadian Biography entry describes him, based on his letters, as an “articulate, likeable, and romantic character whose passionate attachment to the British crown and his Mohawk heritage gained him many admirers during his lifetime.” However, a closer examination reveals a darker picture. Brant-Sero was a man with demons, conjured by the distance between his image of himself and the version of his North American Indian identity that white society was prepared to accept—and support financially. I will examine his life and career in detail here.

The first mention of Brant-Sero being in the cast of “On the Frontier” appears in 1892, during the play’s second season touring the UK, at which time he went variably by his registered name, John Sero, and his Mohawk name Ojijatekha. However, later reports indicate that he was also a member of the cast during the play’s first season in the UK. This suggests that he may be the ‘Ohshadogea’ on the City of New York passenger list. From the earliest reports, he is singled out for his intelligence and command of English, as might also be deduced from his being trusted with the role of the chief protagonist of “On The Frontier”, the villainous Bill Morley. Eighteen Ninety Two was also the year that Sero was inducted into the Actors Association, and he would in future years add “AA” after his name when communicating on theatrical matters (or requesting work) [11]. As we have seen, by 1893, he and Looking Sky Bero were being featured prominently in the promotional material for the play. Sero would remain with the company until the summer of 1896, at which point he left to get married.

And it was Sero’s marriage that gives us our first hint that he was a man with a problematic if not outright dark side. It was not that he married a wealthy widow twenty years his senior only a few months after meeting her; it was that he was in a relationship with someone else at the time, the mother of his child, and he walked out on them both—without a word—to marry his new partner.

Detail, birth certificate of John Edward Sero, February 1894; son of John Brant-Sero and Mary McGrath. Crown Copyright

Sero’s bride was Frances Baynes Kirby, a 49-year-old vicar’s widow who had inherited her dead husband’s missionary zeal—and money. She met her future second husband when he and his fellow North American Indian cast members were parading through Preston to promote On the Frontier (a regular feature of the show when on tour). Sero was 29, and on his marriage, he adopted the form of his name that he would keep for the rest of his life, being rechristened into the Anglican Church under the name “John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero”. He gave his occupation on the marriage register as “divinity student”. He would later admit this was not true but would characterise this lapse as simply him getting ahead of himself, stating an aspiration as a fact [12]. This would not be the only time that Brant-Sero would use that language to explain away the gap between things he claimed to be the case and reality.

Within two months of his marriage, Brant-Sero had left the Hardie–Von Leer Company and embarked on what would be his main occupation for the rest of his life: delivering paid lectures on North American Indian history and customs [13]. However, almost immediately, something would happen that would cast these events in a different light, as, on 21 July 1896, Mary Ann McGrath, a 25-year-old Blackburn tailoress of Anglo-Irish heritage [14], took John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero to court for breach of promise.

As Mary McGrath explained in her evidence, she and the then John Sero had met in 1891 when the Hardie–Von Leer Company performed in Bradford. The two stayed in touch by letter (Sero, as we will see, was an inveterate letter writer), and, in 1893, Mary travelled to Salford (to the Regent Theatre, where the Hardie–Von Leer Company was based) to meet Sero a second time. While there, Sero took her to Liverpool to go through what she believed at the time to have been a form of marriage service. She then began travelling with her new ‘husband’ as the company toured the UK, being introduced to others as his ‘wife’. In February 1884, Mary gave birth to a son, who was christened John Edward Sero, after his father. Sero rented a house in Bradford for his new family, and they then settled into a pattern of Sero being on the road for much of the year but returning to Bradford between tours to stay with his wife and child. However, in late 1895, Sero suddenly told Mary that he was planning to return to Canada—alone—to become a farmer but would send for her and the child as soon as he was set up. He also informed her that the marriage service they had gone through in 1893 was “not quite correct” and they would need to remarry once they got to Canada. In the spring of 1896, he duly left to “go to Canada”. However, Mary soon learned that he was still to be seen in Salford, now in the company of an older woman. She went there and confronted him. He claimed that the older woman was training him to be a missionary so that he could convert his brethren on his return to Canada and she—Mary—should regard the older lady as his—Sero’s—mother. Mary was persuaded to return to Blackburn; however, very shortly afterward, she read in the newspapers that Sero and the older lady had married [15].

The truth of Mary McGrath’s story was evident from the contents of the letters she had received from her ‘husband’ (addressed to ‘Mrs Sero’). In his statement, Brant-Sero—giving his occupation as “gentleman”—admitted to the facts and claimed that he and his new wife wanted his son, John Edward, to come and live with them so he could be raised as an “English gentleman”. However, when Mary refused to countenance this and the court instead ordered Brant-Sero to pay her a weekly allowance to cover the cost of raising the boy, Brant-Sero turned around and claimed that this was impossible as he had no job and no income, seemingly oblivious to the contradiction in claiming poverty mere minutes after presenting himself as having the means to raise his child as an “English gentleman”. An order to pay Mary 2s a week for the next 16 years was made.

What are we to make of these events? On one level they simply reinforce how desperate Brant-Sero was to leave behind the life of a “stage Indian” and embrace an identity that was closer to his own image of himself (gentleman, man of letters, advocate for his people). However, it cannot be ignored that there was a price to pay for doing that, and Brant-Sero expected his partner and child to pay it.

As would seem to have been the plan all along, within a few months of the end of the court case, John and Frances Brant-Sero relocated to Canada. It would later be revealed that Brant-Sero stopped paying Mary McGrath child support as soon as he left the country.

Waterbury evening democrat, 11 July 1900. Image courtesy of Library of Congress. Public domain.

There are two versions of the next period of John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero’s life. That period would last from 1896 until 1906, and in the official version of Brant-Sero’s life, as recorded in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, it began with John and Frances Brant-Sero settling in Hamilton, Ontario, and becoming the toast of the town. Brant-Sero established himself as an expert on the history of the Six Nations and was employed as an interpreter and advisor by eminent academics; he was also elected to prominent positions in local historical societies. However, by 1900, he had given all that up to embark on a lecture tour of the USA followed by a journey to South Africa to join in the fight against the Boers in the Second Boer War. However, there, racism denied him an opportunity to take up arms and he was instead relegated to a civilian role at a remount depot. He returned to England in late 1900/early 1901, where he was reunited with Frances and embarked on a series of lecture tours, living first in London but settling eventually in Bridlington, Yorkshire. At some point, John Edward, Brant-Sero’s son by Mary McGrath, came to live with the couple [16].

It is worth examining some major elements of this first version in depth before continuing, starting with his time in South Africa and service in the Second Boer War. Brant-Sero gave an account of his service—and his ultimately failed attempt to be allowed to fight—in a letter to the Times published on 2 January 1905 [17].

In the letter, he said he arrived in South Africa in “about the middle of August”—he does not say of what year—and attempted to join the Mounted Rifles only to be turned down because of his race. He instead found employment on the civilian staff of Queenstown Remount Depot No. 4, where his duties involved taking horses up to the front and being in charge of African levies. The experience gave him his share of “tent life, Army rations and dodging sandstorms”. He then went on to recount two adventures that he had had during his service. In the first, he sneaked past the Boer Lines at “Bethulie Bridge” with 200 entrained mules just before the Boers “blew the rails”; in the second, “just after the siege of Philippolis”, he was mistaken for a Boer, captured by a British sentry, and his African levies had to vouch for him to gain his release. He then resigned from the remount depot and made his way back to Cape Town, where, after another futile attempt to join the Mounted Rifles, he embarked on a ship for England.

The first thing to say about this account is that British Army records confirm that Brant-Sero did see service in the Second Boer War and was employed at Remount Depot No. 4 [18]. It is also easy to believe that, from what we know of Brant-Sero’s image of himself (a “gentleman”), he had arrived in South Africa with a plan to instead join an Army regiment. However, beyond this, there are some irreconcilable differences between what Brant-Sero claimed and what we know to be true. Brant-Sero described sneaking past the Boer lines at Bethulie Bridge just before the Boers blew up the rails. Boer Commandos blew up the Bethulie Rail Bridge in March 1900 [19]. If Brant-Sero was already in South Africa by that date, that would mean that his arrival “in the middle of August” must have happened the previous year, implying over a year of service—which would seem to tally with his claim to have seen his share of the trials of Army life. However, we know from the 1900 US Federal Census that Brant-Sero was in the USA between March and June 1900 and only made the journey to South Africa sometime after this [20]. If by “the middle of August”, he meant the middle of August 1900, he could not have been in the country when Boer Commandos blew up the Bethulie Bridge.

Similarly, his Army records show that he was discharged from Remount Depot No. 4 on 3 October 1900, which would have been a scant six weeks after he arrived in the country if he had arrived in the middle of August 1900, which does not chime with his claim to have experienced his “share” of the trials of Army life. What’s more, Brant-Sero also claimed to have been captured by a British sentry “after the siege of Philippolis”; however, the siege of Philippolis did not begin until the last week of October 1900 [21], by which time, Brant-Sero had left the Army and returned to Cape Town.

We are left with the conclusion that Brant-Sero greatly exaggerated his length of service and accomplishments to add weight to his very real anger at the Army’s refusal to let him take up arms. This is a telling example of an occasion when Brant-Sero was sincere in his advocacy for fair treatment for North American Indians but utterly insincere in his description of how he was personally related to the issue at hand. Still, the effect that the letter to the Times had—the effect that Brant-Sero had clearly hoped for—was to give him a platform from which to present his views on the treatment of the Six Nations peoples by the British Empire.

In one case, this was literally the case, as he was invited to be on the podium for a ceremony to say farewell to a Canadian army unit that had recently served in South Africa and was resting in England before returning home. The unit was Strathcona’s Horse [23], and the ceremony took place in Liverpool in February 1901. Brant-Sero gave a speech and then ceremonially bestowed on the Lord Mayor of Liverpool a Mohawk name before inducting him into the Six Nations. The event was to have a sobering sequel, however, when it was revealed that when news of the ceremony had reached the Six Nations, a council of tribal chiefs had been called, as a result of which a “Mr F O Loft” had written to the Lord Mayor of Liverpool to state that the ceremony was a “mock one” as Brant-Sero was “a mere warrior” and not a chief and, therefore, had no right to bestow a tribal name on anyone [24]. “F O Loft” was almost certainly Frederick Oglivie Loft, [genuine] Mohawk chief and activist, demonstrating the seriousness with which the Six Nations leaders regarded the issue [25].

In what appears to be an indirect reference to these events, in a speech in London later that same year, Brant-Sero informed his audience that the Mohawk Nation was a matriarchy (true [26]) and when his uncle, the current “Chief of the Mohawks” (questionable), died, the old women of the tribe would elect a new chief and he “stood a good chance of being elected” (improbable) [27]. So, like claiming in the marriage register that he was a “divinity student”, his claim to have the authority to induct the Lord Mayor into the Six Nations was to his way of thinking, not a lie, but simply him getting ahead of himself.

Another past bad faith act came back to haunt Brant-Sero the following year when Mary McGrath took him to court for unpaid child maintenance. In court, Brant-Sero gave his occupation as “anthropologist”. However, when describing his field, he used language that is puzzling given his advocacy for the dignity of his people, but perhaps can be seen as playing to the prejudices of the court to curry favour, calling it “the study of the backward races (American Indians in particular)”. He also claimed to be “a chief of the Mohawk tribe”—the first time that we can definitively point to him making this claim, although the events in Liverpool the previous year hint at it, rather than simply having it said about him—and to have “recently” married a woman in London who had a small income. We know from subsequent events that he was still married to Frances Baynes Kirby at this date, so this was not true. His request to be allowed to return to London to find the money to pay the arrears was turned down—the court simply did not trust him to return—and he was initially ordered detained for three months; however, within minutes of being sent down, he was brought back up to the court and bailed for one month on the payment of £3 10s toward the arrears and the understanding that he would “do something tangible” to pay off the remainder [28]. (The next month, he advertised for sale a sketch of himself, seemingly in an attempt to meet the latter demand. [29])

In many regards, this is simply another example of the distance between the image Brant-Sero wished to project—gentleman, man of letters, advocate for his people—and the reality—a man living largely off the income of his wife. However, there is an element of his defence in this case that I think gets to the heart of the man and speaks to his relevance to the subject of this article; early in his evidence, he described himself as having been “a student all his life but in a conservative country like England, it was almost impossible to make money.”

Brant-Sero was a North American Indian who wanted to be taken seriously as an expert on North American Indian matters but in the society in which he lived, this role was reserved for white men. The only public role for Brant-Sero that this society was willing to support was that of “stage Indian”. It was his resistance to being defined in that way that shut Brant-Sero off from a ready source of income in this period of his life. However, at the same time, it must be acknowledged that it was his personal failings as a human being that allowed him to view as a solution living off others and abandoning them when they ceased to be of use to him, rather than finding a way to advocate for his people that did not depend on being so constantly in the public eye—such as writing books or through correspondence. He did not choose how society treated him but he did choose how he reacted to that treatment.

The next few years would see Brant-Sero continue to try to turn infrequent paid speaking engagements into a steady source of income by following trends in England’s engagement with North American Indian-centred subjects. Thus, by 1904, he was billing himself as “Hereditary Chief Hiawatha John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero”, exploiting the success of the Coleridge Taylor cantata cycle, and delivering commentaries on the Longfellow poem alongside his usual talks on life in the Six Nations. He would later add the life of Canadian runner, Olympian, and member of the Six Nations, Tom Longboat, to the list of topics he felt qualified to speak on [30]. He appears to have also had some tangential involvement with the “Indian Village” established as a spectacle at Earl’s Court by F B Burton in 1905 [31].

Detail, postcard, “Indian Village”, Earl’s Court 1905. Author’s own collection.

He and Frances—accompanied by John Edward, his son by Mary McGrath—were living in Bridlington, Yorkshire by this time and it was at Bridlington that two events would occur that would fully expose the dark side of Brant-Sero’s character and lead to a reassessment of this period of his life.

On 29 September 1906, Frances Baynes Brant-Sero filed for separation from her husband. The picture she painted of Brant-Sero in the subsequent court proceedings [33] was that of a man who was unfaithful to her from the earliest days of their marriage, a drunken bully who squandered her money and then sold her possessions to convince Hamilton society that he was a man of substance, and when the money and possessions ran out, deserted her. Thinking she was free of him, she returned to England to live on the tiny annuity that she had managed to preserve, only for him to track her down there and re-enter her life in order to gain access to even these meager funds. To be rid of him a second time, she paid his fare to America, only for him to return once more the following year, and this time with his “illegitimate” son in tow, whose education she then had to pay for. This pattern of Brant-Sero leaving Frances—and the boy—behind once he had extracted enough money from her to cover his expenses only to return once the money had run out carried on for a further two years, punctuated by violent outbursts that on two occasions left Frances bloodied and in need of medical care. Finally, Frances could take no more and she applied for a separation order.

Brant-Sero appeared without counsel. In his evidence, he admitted to being dependent on his wife for money but claimed that she used this fact to “nag” him. He claimed that she was the one with the drinking problem and passed off his own conviction and fine for being drunk while the couple were living in London as a “mistake”. He admitted to “slapping and spanking” his wife but again claimed that this was because she had become a “nag”. He also admitted to once breaking a door down to get to her but claimed that this was because he mistook her prayers for her having another man with her in the room. He also claimed that it was his wife speaking out against him that had forced him to leave Hamilton in 1900. It was in his cross-examination by his wife’s counsel that he admitted that he had lied about being a divinity student on the marriage register. His ambition, he said, was to be a “literary man”, but could not get articles published because of his difficulties with the language. One interesting observation that he made is his characterisation of his wife as having married him to achieve “notoriety”. Whether this was true we cannot say, but it does demonstrate that Brant-Sero was aware that in this period, North American Indians were viewed as desirable “accessories” by some sections of English society. Was he conscious of this when divining the motives of people who sought his acquaintance—was this one of the sources of his frustration? At this remove, we cannot tell. The final thing to note from his evidence is that he said he was concerned for the wellbeing of his son if the separation order was granted. We will see shortly how much truth there was in that.

The separation order was granted and Brant-Sero’s marriage to Frances ended.

The final period of Brant-Sero’s life, which lasted from his divorce in 1906 until his death in 1914, was one of a continued single-minded pursuit of relevance in the face of indifference which, thanks to having lost access to his wife’s earnings, was played out against a background of abject poverty. He relocated to London and returned to writing letters to the newspapers and giving speeches. He also involved himself in the anti-vivisectionist campaign and even acted as a guide to a party of visiting chiefs of the Sioux Confederacy [34]. However, by 1908, he was reduced to appearing in a Male Beauty Contest to win a prize that he could sell (he came second), and by 1909, he was evidently too poor to afford to travel by public transport, as, after appearing at a church parade in Westerham, Kent, he “set off for London […] on foot” (a distance of 25 miles) [35].

Yorkshire Evening Post, 21 January 1912. Image created by the British Library Board. No known copyright holder.

In 1911, he was invited to speak at a conference in Germany only to be taken to court for fraud by a Berlin landlady when he tried to leave without paying his bills—image and reality colliding once more [36]. Later that year, he was forced to return to the stage, to play the character of ‘Matawah’ in the play “Queen of the Redskins” [37]. He did still, however, manage to secure speaking engagements, although with a strange choice of venue—going, for example, from delivering a talk to a gentlemen’s club on 24 October 1912 to speaking at a meeting of European anarchists three weeks later. By 1913, he was advertising his availability for stage work [38]. And by the following year, the final year of his life, he was working as a song-and-dance man.

In the end, he just could not escape being seen only as a “stage Indian”.

John Ojijatekha Brant-Sero died in London on 5 May 1914 of meningitis contracted while suffering from pneumonia complicated by diabetes. He was just 47.

His obituaries in the English newspapers ignored his stage work and instead spoke only of his membership in learned societies and skills as an “elocutionist and linguist” [40]. He would have been pleased by that. In this respect, he could perhaps be said to have had the last laugh, as it is this image of him that has passed into history, as his entry in the Dictionary of Canadian Biography makes clear. However, as I hope this article has made clear, this image needs re-evaluating in light of his treatment of those around him—the price he expected them to pay for his attempts to burnish his reputation. In that light, it is fitting to end this article by turning the clock back to 1906, and Brant-Sero’s remarks in court after his wife Frances’s application for an order of separation.

Readers will remember the concern Brant-Sero expressed for the wellbeing of his son if his wife’s order for separation was granted. The terrible truth is that once the order was granted, he deserted the boy—then aged 13—leaving him homeless and starving in Bridlington while he returned to London. This fact emerged when the woman who took in John Edward Brant-Sero after his father deserted him was prosecuted for putting the boy to work in breach of the Factory Act [41]. John Edward Brant-Sero would go on to serve in the Royal Navy from 1912 until 1922—including active duty during the First World War—rising to the rank of Petty Officer [42]. He got married—to Mabel Anderson—in 1919, and the couple had a son, also named John, in 1921. In 1923, he became a naturalised Canadian and started to divide his time between England and Canada, working as a salesman. By 1926, Canada had become his permanent home, and Mabel and John joined him there. When he crossed the border between the USA and Canada on business that same year, he gave as his contact person in Canada, his uncle, also named Brant-Sero [43]—possibly the half-brother of his father who owned the farm that his stepmother Frances had partly paid for. He had found the family life that his absentee father had denied him. Out of the public eye [44].

Jamie Barras, March 2025

Banner: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/EA_Am-G-N-2346 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Shared under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence.