Artist honours Canada's war dead by name
Seven days of vigils to name every soldier who died in First World War
Last Updated: Wednesday, October 29, 2008 | 5:11 PM ET
CBC News
Names will be projected on the arch of the National War Memorial in Ottawa. A series of vigils featuring the names of Canadian dead will roll out across Canada and in Britain in November to mark the 90th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
Beginning Nov. 4, the names of the 68,000 Canadian soldiers killed during the First World War will be projected during seven nights of vigil to end at dawn on Nov. 11.
The vigils begin at 5 p.m. in Canada House in London and roll out at 5 p.m. local time in six Canadian cities.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh are scheduled to attend a ceremony marking the launch of Vigil 1914-1918 at Canada House.
In that ceremony, the names of the dead will be projected on the side of Canada House, whose windows have been covered so it serves as screen.
The ceremony is an ambitious enlargement of one held on Remembrance Day in 2007 at the National War Memorial in Ottawa.
Conceived by actor R.H. Thomson and artist Martin Conboy to mark the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge, in the 2007 ceremony, the names of the 3,598 Canadians who were killed during the battle were projected on the face of the memorial.
Irish-born artist Conboy, who came to Canada in the 1970s, said his experience with the 2007 memorial convinced him the project could work on a larger scale. Conboy is a theatre lighting designer and an artist who works mainly with light installations.
"The impact was quite phenomenal," Conboy said, recalling how people turned up at the vigil even in the wee hours of the morning.
Some students had brought candles and everyone was quiet, or spoke in whispers as if they were in a church.
Martin Conboy, a lighting designer and artist, is one of the creators of the vigils. "There is an awful lot of visual clutter in our environment and when you do something like this on a national memorial and you do it in the centre of a large city like Ottawa, you wonder what kind of effect it will have on people," he told CBC News.
Once the vigil started, the names, projected in light on the dark surface of the arch, helped to provide a focus.
"In the twilight it's beautiful. You see the moon and you see the night and the context. In the dead of night, it's a little overwhelming," he said.
"There they were, the men who this memorial is meant to remember, looking out over the city of Ottawa and down onto the river almost 90 years later," he said in an artist's statement.
This year, 68,000 names will be projected — the names of all those killed in the Canadian Expeditionary Force, the Royal Newfoundland Regiment, the Canadian Merchant Navy and the Canadian Army Medical Corps.
"This year we decided we wanted to do all the men who died in the First World War, because there's only one man alive now — that's John Babcock. We decided we were coming to the end. How do we remember it?"
That means 9,700 names will be shown each night of the vigil, with new names appearing over a 13-hour period each night.
Canadians are invited to attend the vigils, most of them outside, to pay witness to the dead.
The vigils will be held:
- In Halifax, at St. Paul's Anglican Church.
- In Fredericton, in Alumni Hall at the University of New Brunswick.
- In Ottawa, at the National War Memorial.
- In Toronto, in Nathan Phillips Square.
- In Regina, at the Saskatchewan Legislature.
- In Edmonton, at the Alberta Legislature.
Bells will ring each night in Ottawa to mark the beginning and end of the vigil.
Canadians with a relative or family friend who died during the First World War can pinpoint the time his name will be shown on a website connected to the project.
There will also be a live webcast of the Ottawa vigil, with the names projected on the arch of Canada's war memorial.
New names appear every eight or nine seconds at the top of the memorial, then get smaller and move down the sides of the arch to allow new names to appear.
The last name — George L. Price — will be shown at dawn on Nov. 11, ahead of Remembrance Day ceremonies. Price, of Moose Jaw, had been conscripted just four months before Nov. 11, 1918, and died two minutes before the Armistice.
Conboy said Veterans Affairs provided $300,000 toward the project, which involved designing a computer program to project the names for each location.
Every major city in Canada was approached to participate, but each province or city had to arrange financing to get the project going. In some places, including London and Toronto, private donations are helping finance the production.
