After more than a century, a hero from Almonte gets his headstone
On Sunday afternoon, in a quiet cemetery outside of Almonte, a dead, forgotten hero will live again in stone.
A monument to George Eccles, who helped save more than 200 lives during a shipwreck in 1909, will be unveiled at the St. Paul’s Anglican Church cemetery on Wolf Grove Road.
The Almonte native was the first radio telegrapher to die at sea — bravely sticking to his post, summoning help — after the SS Ohio, a 340-foot steamer, struck a rock off the coast of British Columbia in the dead of an August night.
In the roughly 30 minutes before the sinking, Eccles, then 36, was able to contact two nearby ships and 208 souls were safely disembarked. But, with water lapping at his feet, he stuck to his station, even going below decks to look for a shipmate. His dramatic death was reported around the world and his funeral in Almonte brought the town to a standstill.
There was a wooden sign marking the birthplace of Eccles — a nearby farm — but it had become weather-beaten and difficult to read. Local resident and actor David Frisch spied the old sign one day and began to investigate the forgotten saga.
A new, more durable sign was erected last November, but it opened a fresh mystery: why was there no headstone for Eccles in the family plot at St. Paul’s?
Enter Reg Gamble, the semiretired founder of C.R. Gamble Funeral Home and Chapel, and his friend, John Bowes, at Kinkaid Loney Monuments in Smiths Falls. Gamble said they read the Eccles story in this newspaper and decided “within about two minutes” they needed to do something.
“I said this is an absolute travesty that this man has been buried under Lanark County sod for over a century and virtually nobody knew about him,” Gamble said this week.
So the parties shared the $4,000 cost of the granite headstone, etched with a summary of the high-seas rescue. “A Hero Rests In This Grave,” reads the front of the Balmoral red stone, above the image of a hand tapping a telegraph.
“It almost brings me to tears,” added Gamble. “This man gave up his life. Think of it. There must be 1,000 offspring running around the face of this planet because George Eccles didn’t cut and run.”
The group tried to find direct Eccles descendants to take part in the unveiling — and for permission to place the stone — but were unable to find any. So they just went ahead.
Local dignitaries, an Anglican minister and a bagpiper were to attend the unveiling. “We wanted to do it right,” said Gamble.