REMEMBERED IN STONE
Book tells the story of Canada’s war memorials
Cape Breton families mark Vimy sacrifice.
Sacrifices made by soldiers from communities across Cape Breton Island are well known by their families.
Alan MacLeod, who has a summer home in Big Bras d’Or, has penned “Remembered in Bronze and Stone,” a tribute to Canada’s war memorial statuary as a way to ensure a greater audience will have an opportunity to learn of the men and women who died in service of their country.
The first Scots settler at Boularderie was MacLeod’s greatgreat-great-grandfather Angus Livingstone, who was also the first person buried at the St. James Cemetery in Big Bras d’Or.
The subject of the book, published by Heritage House, is a war memory, specifically Canadian war memorials featuring the artists, the communities and the fallen.
In the 1920s, immediately following the 1918 First World War Armistice, there were war memorials of all types being erected in communities across Canada.
MacLeod said at that time in many cases, as at Big Bras d’Or, a community war memorial took the form of a bronze tablet listing the names of those who died and sometimes also those who served.
Twenty-two men from Boularderie and surrounding communities who died in the First World War are listed in the middle panel of the bronze tablet hanging inside near the main door of St. James Church.
A second, more modern polished granite monument was erected on the church grounds by friends and loved ones and was unveiled in a ceremony in 2009 honouring the men and women of Boularderie Island and nearby New Campbellton and New Harris who served in the world wars.
Seven of the 22 men listed in the middle panel are MacLeod’s relatives.
“There are five Livingstones and two others. Many of them are men having highland Scot names, names beginning with Mc. But there are other names — Brush, Hayden, Hutchens — that would have been unfamiliar in Cape Breton in the war years. These names reveal an interesting facet to the story of the Boularderie fallen.
At least six of the 22 who died were British ‘home children.’
There is a third family war memorial to the Livingstone brothers at the back of St.
James Church.
Two of the Boularderie 22 died at Vimy Ridge on April 9, 1917. One was MacLeod’s cousin Campbell McAskill, the other a home child, Leonard Brush, a native of Birmingham, England.
Like tens of thousands of other English children who were orphans or whose families were not able to look after them, Brush had been shipped to Canada at age 11 to help out on a Boularderie Island farm.
“He was killed in action April 9, McAskill has a known grave. Brush is one of more than 11,000 listed on the Vimy monument who have no known grave.”
Some 3,279 soldiers in the Canada Corps died on Vimy’s slopes in the four days of the battle, from April 9-12, 1917.
“Numbers of Cape Bretoners were among the attackers and numbers of them died on April 9 and the three days that followed.”
MacLeod noted that like many Cape Bretoners of the time, McLeod had gone to the Boston States to seek his fortune. He came home from Boston to enlist.
“Many, perhaps most, of the Cape Bretoners were coal miners at the time of their enlistment. Most of the miners swapped their digging tools for rifles, but some carried on as miners, albeit miners of a very different sort,” he said.
“In Flanders and France it was not coal that young Henry James Murphy, 18, was mining. He served in the No. 2 Tunneling Company. His role was to dig tunnels under enemy lines, tunnels that were packed with high explosives that would
be detonated at some opportune time to blow great numbers of the enemy to kingdom come.”
“Remembered in Bronze and Stone,” which has been long listed for the Canadian George Ryga Award, is available at the Indigospirit bookstore in the Mayflower Mall and Mr. Fi’s Framing in North Sydney.
MacLeod has finished the first draft of a second book about the 22 Boularderie fallen including one of the home children, Harry James. He died in the fighting for Hangard Wood Aug. 8, 1918. He had come to Cape Breton at the age of seven to start a new life on a Cape Breton farm.
"Many, perhaps most, of the Cape Bretoners were coal miners at the time of their enlistment. Most of the miners swapped their digging tools for rifles, but some carried on as miners, albeit miners of a very different sort."
Author Alan MacLeod