WALKING DISTANCE: The life story of Sidney Lee Gregory

The following is the story of Sidney Lee Gregory, a man whose life spanned continents and cultures, woven into a narrative of adventure and displacement. He was my grandfather though I never met him. But I have found out sufficient detail to write the man’s biography – a book called “WALKING DISTANCE”.

The Boy of the Woods The story begins in the dappled sunlight of the Hampshire heaths, where young Sidney Lee Gregory learned the world through the scent of woodsmoke and the rhythm of the "peregrinations". Born in 1875 to a Romani family, Sid was a "Traveller’s Traveller," his early years spent helping his mother, Ellen, hawk baskets and beehives at cottage doors. His father, Alfred, was a shadow of a man, consumed by a wasting cough that finally claimed him in a paroxysm of blood in the woods of Odiham.

At twelve, Sid’s life took a sharp turn when two local ladies, impressed by his sharp mind at Sunday School, recommended him to the philanthropist Dr. Thomas Barnardo. His mother, stoic but heartbroken, watched as a man in a horse and gig—a Barnardo’s agent named Mr. Barltrop—spirited him away to London. Sid traded his diklo (neckerchief) and the open sky for the towering stone walls of Stepney Causeway and the promise of a trade.

The Great Crossing In 1888, Sidney was part of a "special experiment". Along with 162 other boys, he was marched to the Liverpool docks to board the Sarmatian, an Allan Line steamship bound for Canada. The voyage was a microcosm of Victorian society: while Lord Stanley of Preston (the future Governor General) lounged in the port-side saloon, Sidney and his friends were packed into the stifling heat of Steerage.

Sid arrived in Quebec on a rainy Saturday, his head spinning from the novelty of the sea. He was quickly indentured to James Elliott, a farmer in Midland, Ontario. But the call of the wild was in Sid’s blood. He often vanished into the Canadian forests, building "bender" tents from old tarps and alarming his master with talk of roaming as far as Manitoba.

Timber and Near-Death As he grew into a "fine, healthy, strong lad," Sidney found his true calling in the logging camps of Spanish River. He became a "shantyman," living in log cabins where the only law was the word of the foreman. Life in the woods was perilous. During the "spring freshet" of 1892, Sid was working a dangerous log jam when the cry of "Fire!" went up. A dynamite blast freed the timber, but Sidney was swept away in the crashing, colliding trunks. His companions reported him dead, but Sid had the "luck of the Gypsies"—he was found miles downstream, unconscious but alive.

The Sisters and the City of Fog While working in Wyebridge, Sid encountered a travelling "Medicine Man Show" featuring two Cree sisters, Nitanis and Kimowan. Both were survivors of the brutal residential school system, "neither here nor there" in a society that reviled them. Sidney helped them escape the show, and together they formed an unlikely team, the girls cooking for the lumberjacks while Sid mastered the "steam mule" engines.

When the industrial empire of Francis Hector Clergue collapsed in 1903, Sidney and Nitanis headed west to San Francisco. Sid found work as a boilermaker at the Union Iron Works, joining the US Navy as a "landsman" to earn a better wage. They lived high on Potrero Hill, watching the sunset over the Bay, until the morning of April 18, 1906.

The earthquake didn't just shake the ground; it tore Sid’s life apart. He returned from the shipyards to find his tenement engulfed in flames. Nitanis’s body was pulled from the ruins—she had been trapped inside when their landlord, O’Shaunessy, torched the building for insurance money.

The Mountie and the Mystery Grief-stricken, Sid eventually sought solace with the younger sister, Kimowan, and discovered he had a son, Howard. But their peace was shattered in 1912 when a red-coated Mountie arrived to take the boy to a residential school. A desperate scuffle ensued between Sidney Lee Gregory and the lawman—who, in a bizarre twist of fate, was also named Sidney Gregory. This "other" Sidney, Kinnaird Gregory, was a man of conscience; he helped the family escape to a Cree reservation in Wood Buffalo, disappearing into history shortly after.

The Return and the Endgame When World War I erupted, Sidney felt the pull of his mother country. He stepped onto a San Francisco cable car offering a "Free Trip to Europe" for those who enlisted. He returned to England as a Royal Engineer, eventually finding his way back to his mother, Ellen, who was camping along "The Devil’s Highway".

To keep him in England, Ellen engineered a marriage between Sidney and May Gibbons, a woman who had been tragically cast out of society herself. They settled into a derelict cottage, raising three children in the shadow of the Great Depression.

But Sidney’s luck finally ran out. May died of cancer at 35, and without her "strong hand on the tiller," Sid spiralled. He lost his children to council care and descended into the life of a "stroller," a tramp reciting Shakespeare in pubs for pints of beer.

In October 1952, an old man keeled over while selling roasted chestnuts at Twickenham stadium. He died in a hospital as a man of "no fixed abode," his identity a mystery to those who found him. It was only years later that his grandson would uncover the truth: that this old vagrant had been a Barnardo boy, a lumberjack, a boilermaker in the US Navy, and a survivor of the greatest earthquake in American history. He was the fulcrum upon which a Gypsy family turned and became settled, a man who had lived an "un-translatable life".