Archive for March, 1997

For Saskatchewan the beginning of the 20th century was a time of optimism. The land was free and there was money to be made by anyone willing to work. Hundreds of thousands of settlers poured into the province and there seemed no bounds to the growth. Even the Palliser Triangle, the west’s most arid region, filled up with farmers. The elaborate celebrations in Regina on Sept. 4, 1905, inaugurating Saskatchewan as a province and attended by Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, reflected the [...]

Pierre Camu, 73, of Ottawa, had no problem deciding what to buy his two youngest grandchildren last Christmas. The gifts were personal and affordable; for each he donated $36 towards building a new national dream known as the Trans Canada Trail. In return, both grandchildren will have their names permanently inscribed in a pavilion located somewhere along the trail because each $36 donation builds one metre of trail. Earlier, Camu donated a total of $252 for his other seven grandchildren. And so together, Camu’s nine grandchildren, who live in Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, will have their names attached to nine metres [...]

Campbell Tinning’s watercolor work includes from top to bottom: In The Vault Of The Cemetery; an illustrated letter to his mother and father; Drifting Down. Although Canadian war artist Campbell Tinning witnessed the horrors of WW II, he managed to maintain a quiet sense of objectivity in how he viewed it. In a 1979 interview with Joan Murray, the director of the Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa, Ont., Tinning said war was “just happening to you. We couldn’t know what was going on all the time.” While in Italy he climbed up onto a burned out tank and looked down the hatch. [...]

Kenneth Forbes was able to depict the reality of WW I. His work includes from top to bottom: Portrait of Cpl. William Metcalf, VC. Metcalf earned the award on Sept. 2, 1918, during the Second Battle of Arras; Canadian Artillery in Action. You only have to glance at the work of Kenneth Forbes to see his love of traditional oil painting. He has a lush and sensual style that is stirring and powerful when contrasted with the horror of WW I battlegrounds. Born in Toronto on July 4, 1892, Forbes attended Westmount Academy in Montreal before moving on to art schools in [...]

One of the most enduring myths about Canadian military history is that historians and the general public have concentrated their attention on the campaign in Northwest Europe ignoring the “D-Day Dodgers” and the battles in the Mediterranean. This view persists despite the popularity of Farley Mowat’s books, the high quality of the official history of the campaign and the excellence of the popular history The D-Day Dodgers: The Canadians in Italy 1943-45 by Daniel G. Dancocks. The Canadian role in Italy is also the subject of some of our best memoirs including Sydney Frost’s Once a Patricia and Strome Galloway’s [...]