‘MOVING’ TRIBUTE TO FALLEN SOLDIERS
The Law Society of Alberta will honour 37 WWI troops this week
They were aspiring lawyers when they died in battle. Now, 37 lost soldiers will be posthumously admitted to the Alberta bar,
CALGARY— John William Gow Logan was a 29-year-old aspiring lawyer when he was shot dead in France on the last day of the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
His great niece, Leslie Lavers, got to know him over the years through letters, photographs and stories passed down in her family.
When she got a call informing her Logan would be posthumously admitted to the bar in Alberta 102 years after his death, she felt like he had been resurrected.
“I burst into tears,” she said. “It brought him back to life, you know, just for this point in time. There he is, he’s kind of reappearing after all these years.”
The Law Society of Alberta will admit 37 law students killed in battle, to the Alberta bar on Nov. 9, to mark the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
Current law students and families of fallen soldiers will be in attendance.
“It’s tremendously moving,” said Lavers, who lives in Lethbridge. “I think for the families of all of these men, it puts them into three dimensions again, after they had no opportunity to live their lives, get married, have kids, have their careers. It’s such a poignant thing.”
She said Logan’s death was a tragedy that cast a shadow over her family.
Before he left for the war, his father said he would not forgive anyone if his son dies because of the incompetence of the senior command — which, Lavers said, is exactly how Logan ended up dying.
Lavers’ grandmother was supposed to get married right around the time they got news of his death. His body was never recovered. “I had seen his letters. I had seen the actual telegram from the government. I had seen a letter from his father describing his grief and his anger,” Lavers said.
“He came from a family of nine with two sons, and he was the golden boy. He was just a lovely person. And they were just devastated. The whole family was just grief-stricken.”
Logan was raised on a homestead in southern Manitoba and was attending law school at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, when he enlisted as a private with the 50th (Calgary) Battalion in May 1915.
He was sent overseas to England in October that year, and then to France, where he was promoted to corporal. He was killed in action in November 1916 while going over the para- pet at Regina Trench in Courcelette.
His name appears on the Vimy Memorial in Pas-de-Calais, France.
Leslie Lavers, who majored in history in university, had recently taken on the task of compiling a family encyclopedia, and went through numerous historic family documents as part of the process.
She found Logan regularly wrote letters to all eight of his siblings and displayed a sharp sense of humour, even when he was writing from the trenches in the thick of the war.
“He was bright, he was personable, he had lots of friends,” she said. “He was just a family person through and through.”
Keith Marlowe, one of the ceremony organizers and part of the Legal Archives Society of Alberta executive, said four organizations put in a collective 300 to 400 hours in the past several months tracking down the names of students and their family members.
The project was dubbed, “We Have Not Forgotten.” They managed to make contact with 13 of the 37 families, and at least five of them — including Lavers — plan to attend the ceremony.
“We thought this would be a good year and a good time to pay tribute to the students who weren’t able to fulfil their dreams to become lawyers,” Marlowe said. “The response has just been way more positive, way more touching than I thought it was going to be when we embarked on this eight months ago.”
He has helped uncover some heartbreaking stories in the process.
Most of the students were in their 20s when they died, and some were as young as 18.
Joshua Stanley Wright left for the war with the 50th (Calgary) Battalion before his daughter was born, and he was killed at age 26 in the Battle of the Somme before he got the chance to meet her.
His daughter, Ellen Elizabeth Stanley Wright, grew up to be a captain in the Canadian military in the Second World War.
“There’s all these stories that really resonate,” Marlowe said.
A panel of judges will preside over the ceremony, and current law students will stand in for the soldiers to take the oath on their behalf, if they don’t have family members who can do it.
The ceremony will take place Nov. 9 at 4 p.m. in the Ceremonial Court at the Calgary Courts Centre.