Archive for November, 1997

There’s an old black and white photograph at the British Columbia Archives that shows a group of men standing next to a team of oxen. Most of the men are loggers and their hardened looks resemble the very stuff they are harvesting from Canada’s West Coast forest. One man is leaning on an axe, two more are standing on top of logs that appear to be 1.2 metres in diameter. The old photograph also tells us something about the crucial role Canada’s West Coast timber industry [...]

by Bill Fairbairn The Canada Museum in the Flemish village of Adegem, Belgium, portrays much more than the village’s liberation by Canadian troops in September 1944. It also embodies a local man’s promise to his dying father, paying tribute as it fixes a part of WW II history in the minds of its visitors. So it was when the 1997 Dominion Command Youth Leaders Pilgrimage of Remembrance to Europe reached the museum 16 kilometres outside of Brugge on July 14. An enthusiastic Gilbert Van Landschoot greeted the Legion party of 31 at the entrance to the museum he opened two years ago, keeping [...]

by Ray Dick The weather was clear and hot when the ferry from Newhaven, England, arrived at the French port of Dieppe. It was August and several of the men lining the rails were Canadian veterans who on a similar morning, 55 years ago, landed on the rock-strewn beach. But back then it was a living hell that greeted the Canadians as they rushed ashore into vicious German machine-gun fire. With that memory intact, the Dieppe veterans would once again revisit some dark moments in their lives, but they would also see a new Dieppe and witness the solemn commemoration of their [...]

On a cold and wet November day in 1922, a young farmer arrived at the newly constructed Coliseum in downtown Toronto’s Exhibition Park. His name was Alfred Ahiers and he was going to try and win a trophy for his poultry at the first-ever Royal Agricultural Winter Fair. After bracing himself against the blowing snow, Alfred, then 15 years old, unloaded his chickens from the back of a truck and continued to pray for success. Seventy-five years later, Alfred is still alive and the Royal Agricultural Winter Fair is considered by many to be Canada’s best-known agricultural exhibition. Indeed, it has [...]

Bold strokes and hot colour characterize the work of C. Anthony Law. From top to bottom: Survivors, Normandy, Off Le Havre; Windy Day In The British Assault Area; Decommissioning, Rainy [...]

The actual terrain over which a battle is fought may be the most important primary source of information available to the historian, but ground must be related to weather. Canadians who visit Italy’s Adriatic coast are unlikely to arrive in the grey of winter, when the rains turn rivers into racing torrents and the ground into thick, clinging mud. Yet this was the reality that confronted the men of the 1st Canadian, 8th Indian and New Zealand divisions in their struggle for Ortona, Villa Grande and Orsogna in December 1943.It all began with General Dwight Eisenhower’s telegram to Winston Churchill, [...]