IN late May of 1976, Swindon was visited by a foreign dignitary.

George Kingsmith was mayor of Milo, a small village in Alberta, Canada.

It wasn’t an official visit, however; the 83-year-old was here to see his childhood home town for the first time in 66 years.

The memories he shared paint a vivid picture of a Swindon which was gone long before the century even reached its mid-point.

We said: “Before he left in 1910 to emigrate to Canada, he used to walk down the hill in Lansdown Road through fields to the Red Cow (now Princes Street) and the old farmhouse at Eastcott Farm - now the Southern Electricity Depot in Manchester Road.

“He recalls not tarmac but dirt roads and horses and carts.

“When he went on his nine-day transatlantic steamship passage from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia, his emigrant ticket cost £5.

“Last week for £100 he did the return trip on an eight-hour jumbo jet crossing.

“He’s staying with his niece, Miss Jean Claughan, at South Marston, and flies back on Monday.

“He has another niece, Mrs Sheila Whitfield, who lives at Shrivenham.

“He’s been to see the house where he was born in Devizes Road. And the other houses where he once lived, too, in Lansdown Road and Victoria Road. They haven’t changed as much as the town. And his old school, too, King William Street.

“But the VWH Horse Repository in High Street, where he worked until he was 16, that’s disappeared. In its place stands Skurray’s Garage.”

We added that Mr Kingsmith’s early years in Canada were spent as a prairie pioneer, and that he then became a mining engineer before retiring in 1958. He worked for a firm called Cominco.

He married a Norwegian fellow immigrant, and by 1976 the couple had six children, 44 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren.

Born in 1893, Mr Kingsmith lived until 1979, and is buried in Hope Lutheran Cemetery in Milo.

The Adver recently approached the local Vulcan and District Historical Society for information about Mr Kingsmith, and they passed our message on to local librarian Joanne Monner.

She sent a passage from a history book: “After George retired from Cominco and took up residence in Milo, he spent his time puttering around his yard and enjoyed his garden, always experimenting with something new, even trying to grow potatoes in a bed of straw.

“They didn’t turn out too bad either, a little green but tasted good.”