MOST British schoolchildren celebrated the end of the war in 1945 with their friends and family.

But one ten-year-old boy from Sunderland was stranded thousands of miles from home on the other side of the Atlantic.

Richard Baillie, who now lives in Barnard Castle, County Durham, was one of thousands of children evacuated to Canada at the start of the war.

Mr Baillie was only five when he was put on a ship to Saskatchewan, in Canada, in 1940.

He said: "It must have been very hard for my parents at the time when they put me on the ship to Liverpool. They probably thought they were never going to see me again.

"My father joined the navy and so my mother spent the war on her own."

Many of the children on the boat to Canada had no idea where they were going to stay, but Mr Baillie was going to stay with family.

He travelled across the Atlantic in a convoy, but the ship that left immediately after his was on its own.

Despite being illuminated and broadcasting that it was carrying children, it was torpedoed and sunk.

Mr Baillie said: "My cousin was due to be on that ship, but because of a bureaucratic error, she did not make it.

"I have excerpts from the captain's log describing two young boys, a Cockney and a Geordie, and the Geordie must have been me."

One of Mr Baillie's strongest memories of his time in Canada is the day his aunt told him the war had ended.

He said: "I do not remember a lot from that time. My own diagnosis is that being taken from my parents at such a young age was so traumatic, I just blocked it out.

"But I do remember my aunt telling me one day that the war was over and I would soon be able to go home."