Ready For Remembrance Day

After years of decay had taken their toll, cenotaphs from eight Digby County villages have been refurbished.

"I think it’s tremendous," Allan Puxley, a retired Canadian bureaucrat and former director of European operations for Veterans Affairs Canada, said Friday.

After the First World War, towns across Canada constructed cenotaphs to remember their war dead, Puxley explained during a ceremony at the Weymouth Royal Canadian Legion branch to mark the completion of the restoration project.

"There are 6,900 local cenotaphs across Canada. It’s the way in which we keep the memory alive," he said.

Cenotaphs in Westport, Freeport, Tiverton, Little River, Rossway, Barton, Smiths Cove and Weymouth were restored.

In 2009, the Municipality of the District of Digby partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs, through its cenotaph restoration program, to carry out the project.

The $14,000 cost was shared evenly between the department and the municipal government, said Robert Hersey, the district’s municipal program co-ordinator.

The Rossway cenotaph was "in very bad condition," Hersey said. "It needed a real restoration."

Some of the others around the district needed a good cleaning while a few needed repairs.

When it was discovered that some of the cenotaphs did not have flagpoles, the municipality saw to it that flagpoles were erected at every one.

"The same thing was happening in Europe," said Puxley. "We’ve got 13 memorials over there and they were all falling apart."

Canada erected five in France and three in Belgium between 1922 and 1936 while Newfoundland put up five, he said.

"We spent the last eight years renovating them," said Puxley.

The Vimy memorial took four years to repair and was rededicated in 2007.

Puxley was also involved in the care of the graves of Canadian war dead.

"We’ve got 116,000 buried in 74 different countries," he said.

The graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission

Story by BRIAN MEDEL

The Halifax Chronicle Herald
Sat, Nov 6, 2010