It is true that the Canadian Parliament unanimously voted for a State Funeral for the ;last surviving veteran, but however they have declined it.. A petition is being organised The Wikipedia site quotes two surviving Canadian War veterans, one of whom is Gladys Powers of the WAAF. She did not serve in the WAAF, which was not formed until 1939. but served in the WAAC which was formed in 1917. However I do not think that she is recognised as a surviving veteran. The other was Percy Dwight Wilson who enlisted in 1916 at the age of 15 in 69th Battery C.F.A., and was shipped to France where his true age was discovered and he was returned to Canada. He later re-enlisted but again his true age was discovered and he was discharged There is also John Babcock who at the age of 15 1/2 enlisted in 69th Battery C.F.A. He was shipped to England where his true age was discovered and he was transferred to the "Boy's Battalion" to await his coming of age but the war ended before that happened. There was another who died quite recently on 21 Feb 2007 Lloyd Clement enlisted in 1916 at the age of 16, He served in the 93rd and 109th Bn, and although in France by Jull 1917 did not serve in the front line. David ----- Original Message ----- From: "John Wilson" <hugo@actrix.gen.nz> To: <greatwar@rootsweb.com> Sent: Thursday, April 05, 2007 9:38 AM Subject: Re: [GREATWAR] Surviving WWI Veterans > Hi All: > > Here is a Wikipedia list of surviving WWI veterans from several > countries, verified and (seperately) unverified. Note that Canada has > two, and the last one to die is promised a State funeral. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surviving_veterans_of_World_War_I > > Yours, John Wilson > >> 1. Fw: VA Searching for Last World War I Vets (Delilah) >> 2. Last Navy WW1 Veteran Dies (Delilah) >> 3. living WW1 Veterans (Delilah) > >> Subject: VA Searching for Last World War I Vets >> >> Recent VA News Releases >> >> To view and download VA news release, please visit the following >> Internet address: >> http://www.va.gov/opa/pressrel >> >> VA Searching for Last Doughboys of World War I >> Only Four Believed Still Alive >> WASHINGTON (April 4, 2007) -- With the number of known living American >> veterans of World War I now standing at four, the Department of Veterans >> Affairs (VA) is seeking public assistance in determining whether others >> are still alive. >> >> "These veterans have earned the gratitude and respect of the nation," >> said Secretary of Veterans Affairs Jim Nicholson. "We are coming to the >> end of a generation that helped bring the United States to the center of >> the international arena." >> >> Nicholson noted that VA usually knows about the identity and location of >> veterans only after they come to the Department for benefits. None of >> the four known surviving World War I veterans has been on the VA >> benefits rolls. >> >> The Secretary asks members of the general public who know of a surviving >> World War I veteran to contact VA. To qualify as a World War I veteran, >> someone must have been on active duty between April 6, 1917 and Nov. 11, >> 1918. VA is also looking for surviving Americans who served in the >> armed forces of allied nations. >> >> Information about survivors can be e-mailed to ww1@va.gov; faxed to >> 202-273-6702, or mailed to the Office of Public Affairs, Department of >> Veterans Affairs (80), >> 810 Vermont Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20420. >> >> About 4.7 million men and women served in the U.S. armed forces during >> World War I. About 53,000 died in combat, with another 204,000 wounded. >> >> The four known surviving World War I veterans are John Babcock, 102, >> from Puget Sound, Wash.; Frank Buckles, 106, Charles Town, W.Va.; >> Russell Coffey, 108, North Baltimore, Ohio; and Harry Landis, 107, Sun >> City Center, Fla. >> >> Babcock is an American who served in the Canadian Army. The other three >> survivors were in the U.S. Army. >> >> >> Article published Apr 2, 2007 >> Last known WW?I Navy veteran dies at age 105 >> >> Charlotte Hall, Md. | Lloyd Brown, the last known surviving World War I > Navy >> veteran, has died. He was 105. >> Brown died Thursday at the Charlotte Hall Veterans Home in St. Mary's >> County, Md., according to family and the U.S. Naval District in > Washington. >> His death comes days after the death of the last known surviving American >> female World War I veteran, Charlotte L. Winters, 109. >> The deaths leave three known survivors who served in the Army, and a > fourth >> who lives in Washington state but served in the Canadian army, according > to >> the Department of Veterans Affairs. >> Brown was born Oct. 7, 1901, in Lutie, Mo., a small farming town in the >> Ozarks. His family later moved to Chadwick, Mo. In 1918, 16-year-old Brown >> lied about his age to join the Navy and was soon on the gun crew on the >> battleship USS New Hampshire. >> "All the young men were going in the service. They were making the >> headlines, the boys that enlisted," Brown told The (Baltimore) Sun in a > 2005 >> interview. "And all the girls liked someone in uniform." >> Brown finished his tour of duty in 1919, took a break for a couple of > years, >> then re-enlisted. He learned to play the cello at a musicians school in >> Norfolk, Va., and was assigned to an admiral's 10-piece chamber orchestra >> aboard the USS Seattle. >> When Brown ended his military career in 1925, he joined the Washington > Fire >> Department's Engine Company 16, which served the White House and > embassies. >> He had married twice, and had a son and daughter from one marriage and two >> daughters from the other. >> Even after reaching 100, Brown remained independent, living alone in his >> Charlotte Hall bungalow and driving a golf cart around his neighborhood >> >> If there are any living WWI Veterans or anyone knows of any, must of been > on >> active duty between April 6, 1917 and Nov 11, 1918, please send me the > info >> and I will send to the VA. >> >> Also looking for surviving Americans who served in the armed forces of >> allied nations, I would imagine this also is WW1. >> >> You can e-mail me the info or if you prefer to snail mail it, write me >> off-list for the address. >> delilah evans >> > > > ------------------------------- > To unsubscribe from the list, please send an email to GREATWAR-request@rootsweb.com with the word 'unsubscribe' without the quotes in the subject and the body of the message

Vimy's monumental artist TORONTO STAR FILE PHOTO Vimy Ridge Monument. Email story Print Choose text size Report typo or correction Email the author Tag and save Vimy, Gallipoli: Two battles, two nationsSouvenirs from the trenchesVimy Ridge: The CrucibleWalter Seymour Allward Born: Nov. 18, 1875, in Toronto Died: April 24, 1955, Toronto Education: Left school at 14 to apprentice with Toronto architectural firm of Gibson & Simpson. Left architecture to become a clay modeller with Toronto Brickworks. There, his exceptional sculptural skills became evident and he began modelling classes at the New Technical School in Toronto. Work: Among his best-known early pieces, many of which can still be seen around the city and province, are: The figure of Peace, part of the North-West Rebellion Monument at Queen's Park (1895); The Old Soldier, which commemorates the War of 1812 (1903), in Portland Square, Toronto; and the statue of General John Graves Simcoe at Queen's Park (1903). Also in 1903, Allward was elected an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy, and became a full member in 1918. Until he began work on the Vimy Memorial in 1921, he produced many busts and statues of celebrated people, including Sir Oliver Mowat, Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Sir Charles Tupper and even Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Other memorials include the South-African War Memorial at University and Queen (1910), The Boer War Memorial Fountain in Windsor (1906), the Bell Memorial in Brantford (1917), and the Baldwin-Lafontaine Memorial on Parliament Hill in Ottawa (1914). Apr 01, 2007 04:30 AM Christopher Hume In an age of irony such as ours, there is no room for an artist like Walter Allward. The great Canadian sculptor, who lived from 1875 to 1955, was the product of a different time, one in which art served not just as a means of self-expression, of celebration and social criticism, but of commemoration. Allward's art was, in the most profound sense of the word, public. Through his work he spoke for the nation; indeed, he helped define that nation, one we have come to take for granted, though Allward wouldn't have understood that either. His most impressive creation, the extraordinary Vimy Memorial, remains a unique moment in Canadian cultural history. Of course, towns and cities across the country have erected countless monuments, cenotaphs and the like, but the scope and ambition of the Vimy piece is unparalleled. But then, so was the battle it commemorated. Little wonder the work occupied Allward for 14 years, and left him physically and intellectually exhausted. This spring, the Vimy Memorial, and World War I, will come into focus once again with the inauguration of the restored monument on April 9, the 90th anniversary of the battle. Queen Elizabeth is to rededicate it. When Allward began the memorial, in 1921, the battle it commemorated was already several years in the past. But the effects were still fresh in the minds of Canadians. For many, it marked the country's coming of age. Before the fighting, Canada was a colony, an outpost of the empire, firmly in the shadow of Mother England. By the time the shooting ended, however, all that had changed. Canada was a nation with a growing sense of who it was and of its role in the world. The price of nationhood was staggeringly high: 7,000 men were wounded at Vimy, and another 3,600 died. Slaughtered might be a better word – this was the Great War, don't forget, the conflagration that marked the beginning of modern warfare and end of traditional combat. Soldiers fought with bayonets against machine guns. They dragged their howitzers to the front line with horses and they wore gas masks to protect themselves against mustard gas. It was trench warfare, nasty, brutal and horribly pointless. Thousands were killed for the sake of taking a hill, a lookout or, in the case of Vimy, a seven-kilometre-long ridge occupied by the Germans. Because it offered a view of the surrounding plains, Vimy Ridge was strategically important. French and English soldiers had tried to capture it, but were repelled by the enemy. One hundred thousand had been killed or injured before the Canadian Corps were given the order to attack. The fighting, which lasted only four days, began at 5:30 a.m. on April 9, 1917. Canadian troops had practised for weeks, learning specialized roles and familiarizing themselves with new shells designed to explode on impact, "softening" the enemy in advance of the attack. When Allward won the competition to build the Vimy Memorial in 1921, he was a well-established artist known for his statues and busts of famous Canadians such as Sir Wilfrid Laurier and Alexander Graham Bell. The Toronto-born artist had also completed commissions such as the South African War Memorial at University Ave. and Queen St. W. The Canadian Battlefields Memorial Commission, which launched the search in 1920, sifted through more than 160 submissions before choosing Allward's. His proposal was given the main site at Vimy, a 100-hectare park in northern France. The land, which was given to Canada by the French government in 1922, includes Hill 134, the high point of the ridge, and the place where so many died. Using the overtly Christian symbolism of the time, Allward conceived a memorial on a grand scale. It was to be grief made palpable, a monumental display of national mourning and loss. Of the 625,000 Canadians who enlisted to fight in World War I, 60,000 died, and of those 16,000 had no grave. Clearly, Allward had his work cut out for him. The final design comprised 20 allegorical figures set on a vast stone platform set off by two enormous spires that reach upwards 27 metres. Representing France and Canada, they are visible long before the details of the monument are. For Allward, the process of carving the figures, choosing the appropriate materials and determining the right location took several years. The inspiration, he explained, came to him in a wartime dream he never forgot. "When things were at their blackest in France," he said, "I went to sleep one night after dwelling on the muck and misery over there. My spirit was like a thing tormented ... I dreamed I was in a great battlefield. I saw our men going in by the thousands and being mowed down by the sickles of death. Suffering beyond endurance at the sight, I turned my eyes and found myself looking down on an avenue of poplars. Suddenly through the avenue I saw thousands marching to the aid of our armies. They were the dead. They rose in masses, filed silently by and entered the fight to aid the living. So vivid was this impression, that when I awoke it stayed with me for months. Without the dead we were helpless. So I have tried to show this in the monument to Canada's fallen, what we owed them and we will forever owe them." The largest of the figures in the memorial, representing Canada, was carved from one huge block of limestone. The country is personified as a woman draped from head to foot, her eyes cast downward in an attitude of dignified but inconsolable grief. She embodies the overwhelming feeling of sorrow the nation experienced at the loss of so much of its youth. She also bears an obvious resemblance to traditional images of the Virgin Mary mourning Jesus after his Crucifixion. She is a Canadian Pietà. Surrounding her is a series of allegorical figures representing sympathy, sacrifice, justice, honour, peace and faith. Their arms spread, sometimes clasped, heads alternately bowed or arched upwards, they illustrate the kind of universal sadness now seen in the mounds of flowers, cards and studded animals that appear spontaneously at the death of, say, a Princess Diana. Today, grief is expressed communally but personally, and is prompted by the passing of an individual. Allward's task was to express something more abstract, but infinitely more horrible, namely the destruction of countless young lives. And yet, Allward could safely assume that Canadians, along with the rest of the Allies, felt this was a war they were right to fight. Though the toll was beyond imagining, the cause was just. Allward and his contemporaries never essentially questioned the nobility of the sacrifice made by Canadians. The memorial has nothing to do with cynicism, which is why this sort of art no longer resonates in the 21st century. The values on which it was based seem as old-fashioned as the battlefield technology employed in the Great War. Indeed, in an era of stealth bombers and laser-guided missiles, war itself has become a largely impersonal business. The kind of hand-to-hand combat, the very concept of valour, for which the British Army's highest decoration, the Victoria Cross, is awarded, hardly pertains to war any more. A 21st-century Vimy would tear Canada apart, not bring it together. Its significant commemorative art would be informal, certainly unofficial, perhaps unwanted. It would take the form of graffiti and other such anonymous expressions of bitterness and anger. Yes, we still do our bit to show respect for "our boys," whose thankless mission in Afghanistan is nevertheless much debated. But there will be no Allwards and no Vimy Memorials to mark their efforts. It's not that kind of a war; it's not that kind of a world. Which is not to say that Allward set out to glorify war; if anything, his horror at the wholesale destruction it involved informs every detail of the monument. The stone angels who look down from the top of the two pillars survey a scene that includes The Breaking of the Sword, Allward's symbolic depiction of the end of war. There were also The Defenders, The Helpless and, of course, The Mourners, especially two reclining figures, male and female, whose body language – if that isn't too glib a term – portrays something of Allward's incomprehension of the realities of early-20th-century warfare. One mourner, resting his head on a hand, seems to contemplate the situation, forever unable to grasp the enormity of what happened on this now-sacred site. When King Edward VIII officially unveiled the memorial in the summer of 1936, he appeared before a crowd of 100,000. The Canadians who attended – veterans, widows, politicians – spoke of the journey as a pilgrimage. And they meant exactly that. There was no talk that day of the cost of the memorial, which, at $1.25 million, was huge by standards of the time. Or of the constant battles that Allward had to fight to maintain the integrity of his vision against the onslaught of politicians and bureaucrats. King Edward, in his only public function before his abdication, wandered among the visitors and spoke with many. One was Mrs. C.S. Wood, a Winnipeg mother who had lost eight of her 12 sons in the "War To End All Wars." But for Allward, the completion of the memorial marked the beginning of the end. He returned to Toronto after spending more than a decade in London and France to find himself a strangely forgotten figure. Then, as now, Canada was not a country to honour its artists, and inevitably people wanted to move on and forget about war and the dreadful sacrifice it demanded. Eventually the plaster models Allward created in France were returned to Canada, where they languished for years in various federal government warehouses in Ottawa. These were the models from which French stone carvers worked, the only parts of the memorial that actually bear witness to the artistic process, and that show evidence of Allward's hands. The plasters reached Canada in 1937, and there was talk about casting them in bronze. That never took place, and by 1960, the pieces had become such a burden that the Ministry of Veterans Affairs agreed they should be destroyed at "some location where the attention of the public would not be attracted. Thankfully that didn't happen, and after much to-ing and fro-ing, 17 of the original figures ended up at the Canadian War Museum, where they are now on permanent display. They are located in Regeneration Hall, one of the most moving spaces in the museum, which is itself one of the most remarkable pieces of Canadian architecture ever constructed. As the main architect, Raymond Moriyama, explains, the idea was "to design a totally exposed steel structure – naked, uncovered and wobbly – to express a feeling of hope amid unease and instability." On certain days, you can hear the howl of the wind. It seems an ideal setting for Allward's figures. The memorial itself, after decades of neglect, has been refurbished, and in recent years Allward himself has become the unexpected object of attention. Most notably, he appeared as a (fictionalized) character in Jane Urquhart's 2002 novel, The Stone Carvers. Renowned for his modesty, self-effacement and total commitment to art, Allward would no doubt have been bemused by, if not disapproving of, his literary star turn. "The sculptor," he once told a reporter, referring to himself, "is small in comparison with what the (Vimy Memorial) stands for. Now that it is erected, the interest has ended as far as I am concerned. It lives only as people look at it." SPECIALS

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/vimy/