What is Remembrance Day, and what is its significance here in Canada – and at Shawnigan?

 

For those unfamiliar with Remembrance Day – which officially takes place on November 11 each year – it is a memorial day, observed in some countries since the end of the First World War in 1918, to mark the end of hostilities and to remember those who died in the line of duty.

 

This year will mark 106 years since Armistice and the end of the First World War.

 

Our founder, C.W. Lonsdale, established Shawnigan in 1916 – a phoenix from the ashes of this turbulent period of history.

 

In Canada, November 11 focuses on remembrance for the men and women who have served, and continue to serve, this country during times of war, conflict, and peace – and those who have lost their lives in the service of peace, at home and abroad.

 

Shawnigan lost 45 alumni and staff in the Second World War.

 

There is a commemorative plaque in the Chapel that marks and honours them, and during the week prior to Remembrance Day each year, the School places 45 white crosses in the Quad to mark their sacrifice.

 

On Wednesday, November 13 (when the School community is back from November Break), we will hold our annual ceremony in Chapel and in the Quad and two prefects will read the Roll of Honour.

 

These members of the Shawnigan community served in the Canadian Air Force, Navy and Army and in many theatres of the Second World War – they were lost in the Atlantic, at Dunkirk and Normandy, in the Middle East, in North Africa, and over mainland Europe.

 

All were men.

 

This year our special Remembrance Week will place a focus on Sonia d'Artois (code-named Blanche), who was an agent of the clandestine Special Operations Executive during World War II – and was the grandmother of four Canadian alumni of Shawnigan Lake School, Patrick Murdoch ’96 (Lake’s), Eric Murdoch ’00 (Lake’s), Michaela d’Artois ’08 (Groves’) and Sonya d’Artois ’11 (Groves’).

 

Leading up to the 80th anniversary of D-Day (June 6, 1944), Nahlah Ayed wrote and published this previously untold story of resistance, love, betrayal, danger, and of two agents operating behind enemy lines in Nazi-occupied France.

 

Reconstructed from hours of unpublished interviews and hundreds of archival and personal documents and with invaluable support from Nadya (Sonia’s and Guy’s daughter), The War We Won Apart became a No. 1 bestseller in Canada in the summer of 2024.

 

Ayed, an award-winning writer, broadcaster, and currently a producer and host of CBC’s Ideas, will be at Shawnigan on Tuesday, November 19 for an event hosted by our English Department – a wonderful opportunity for our students interested in World War II and a career in journalism.

 

Each year, I head down to the Shawnigan Archives and Museum as preparation for Remembrance Day and discover something new each time.

 

I was unaware that the Pacific Theatre of War extended to Vancouver Island and that a Japanese submarine attacked the lighthouse at Estevan Point in 1942.

 

Some of our readers will have discovered and explored the plane wreckage outside Tofino – as the Lamont family has. My research revealed that a Shawnigan alum, Lance C. Lake (1933-42) was the co-pilot of this RCAF Canso which crash-landed near Tofino in 1945 whilst on anti-submarine patrol. Armed with depth charges, the plane suffered an engine failure after take-off which forced the crew to ditch the depth charges and crash into a hillside. All crew members survived!

 

At this time of year, I always think of Wilfred Owen’s poem, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” Owen takes the biblical story of Abraham and his son Isaac and converts it into the landscape of the First World War. The angels exhort Abraham to offer the “Ram of Pride” as a sacrifice, but diverging away from the Genesis storyline, “the old man would not so, but slew his son, / and half the seed of Europe, one by one.”

 

Chillingly and hauntingly, the final rhyming couplet captures arrogant militarism and emphasizes how mass slaughter is made up of individual deaths.

 

It will be read by a Grade 12 student in Chapel on Saturday, November 16.

 

For me, Remembrance Day is both a time to honour those men and women (including civilians) who have fallen in conflicts and those who survived – on either side – and also to remind ourselves that we must strive constantly to find paths of peace.

 

In a darkening world in 2024 where so many lives have been lost and so many are suffering, displaced, and frightened, we can only hope that there can be an end to the senseless violence and loss of innocent lives.