Many saw the war as a ‘horrific holocaust’
They’ve successfully petitioned community council to change the street’s name, just as Keddie did nearly 90 years ago.
Approved Feb. 21, Glenhurst Ave. is now ceremoniously called Vimy Ridge Way — a year after the battle’s 100th anniversary, and just before the centennial commemoration of the end of the First World War.
The street will remain Glenhurst Ave. legally, and residents will keep their mailing address, but additional signage will be added with its secondary name, Vimy Ridge Way.
In 1918, almost a year after the “stunning but costly victory,” local developer Jethro Crang named the street in his new subdivision Vimy Ridge Ave., said a Toronto staff report.
But the report sheds no light on the name change.
Perhaps as families, including veterans, moved into the area following the First World War, they experienced feelings of regret, or questioned if a decorated war hero had needlessly destroyed lives, or simply did not identify with Vimy Ridge as Canadians do today, historians say.
“This (story) fits with the incredible pushback against the romanticization of the war in the 1920s and ’30s,” said Ian McKay, a professor at McMaster University and co-author, along with James Swift, of The Vimy Trap: Or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Great War.
“In the aftermath of the war, many Canadians and a vast population of veterans, including those who fought at Vimy Ridge, came to regard the First World War as a horrific holocaust.”
The same month the petition was presented to township council, April 1928, a highly publicized libel trial began involving “Canada’s greatest battlefield general” Sir Arthur Currie, said historian Tim Cook, author of The Madman and the Butcher: The Sensational Wars of Sam Hughes and General Arthur Currie.
Currie was fighting a newspaper over its editorial that said he had wasted human life, and that “in countless and relentless battles, particularly in the 100-day campaign, he was guilty of killing off his own soldiers,” Cook said. Some veterans agreed.
At least one Vimy Ridge soldier, George Van Wyck Laughton, lived on Vimy Ridge Ave. in 1928. It is not known if he signed the petition. Van Wyck Laughton moved there with his wife and son, after he was awarded the Military Cross “for gallantry shown during the Vimy Ridge engagement . . . possibly for his work holding the village of Gavrelle,” the Toronto Daily Star reported on June 14,1917. He suffered from “shell shock and exposure” and was transported home for medical attention.
Van Wyck Laughton’s grandson, Richard Laughton, said he does not think his grandfather would have signed the petition in 1928, although he “may have considered that the name was not important to him.”
He would have identified more with the larger Battle of Arras, which Vimy Ridge was part of, Laughton said, or perhaps he and other men returning from the war wanted to forget about it, rather than remember it. “My grandfather (nor grandmother nor father) never spoke to me about the war, although I knew him very well and visited often.”
In fact, it wasn’t until 1929 (a year after the Vimy Ridge Ave. petition), when the famous novel All Quiet on
“This (story) fits with the incredible pushback against the romanticization of the war in the 1920s and ’30s.” IAN MCKAY PROFESSOR, MCMASTER UNIVERSITY
the Western Front by Enrich Maria Remarque was published, that soldiers began to talk about the war, Cook said.
“They talk about the death and destruction, despicable conditions in the trenches with the rats and the lice and there’s a change. People look back on the First World War and think, what was it for? Why did this happen?” Cook said.
Vimy Ridge also wasn’t nearly as well known in 1928 as it is today, said Terry Copp, a Wilfrid Laurier University professor and Canadian military historian.
It wasn’t until 1936 — with the unveiling of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France and the Roy- al Canadian Legion-sponsored pilgrimage — that the process began of Vimy Ridge becoming “the central focus of Canadian war memory,” Copp said.
In more recent years, public figures ranging from Hockey Night in Canada host Don Cherry to former goveror general David Johnston have spoken of Vimy Ridge and the First World War as “virtuous undertakings for the best of intentions,” said historian James Swift.
Although they took opposite approaches, perhaps Vimy Ridge Ave. residents in 1928 and Vimy Ridge Way residents 2018 had the same goal: “to make sense of events that are essentially senseless,” Swift said.