CANADA - SEXTONdigital

JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF I JOURNAL DE LA SOCIETE POUR L'ETUDE DE L'
ARCHITECTURE!~
CANADA
VOL . 33 > N' 1 > 2008

PRESIDENT j PRESIDENT
ANDREW WALDRON
Architectural Historian, National Historic Sites Directorate
Parks Canada
5'" Floor, 25 Eddy Street
Hull, QC K1A OMS
(819) 953-55871 f. (819) 9S3-4909
e : andrew.waldron@pc.gc.ca
THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF ARCHITECTURE IN CANADA is a learned society
devoted to the examination of the role of the built environment in Canadian society. Its membership includes
structural and landscape architects, architectural historians and planners, sociologists, ethnologists, and
specialists in such fields as heritage conservation and landscape history. Founded in 1974, the Society is currently
the sole national society whose focus of interest is Canada's built environment in all of its manifestations.
The Journal of the Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada, published twice a year, is a refereed journal.
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ISSN 1486-0872
(supersedes I remplace ISSN 0228-0744)
EDITING, PROOFREADING, TRANSLATION I REVISION ur•GUISTIQUE, TRADUCTION
MICHELINE GIROUX-AUBIN
GRAPHIC DESIGN I CONCEPTION GRAPHIQUE
MARIKE PARADIS
PAGE MAKE-UP I MISE EN PAGES
B GRAPHISTES
PRINTING I IMPRESSION
MARQUIS IMPRIMEUR INC., MONTMAGNY (QC)
COVER I COUVERTURE
Canadian National Monument, Vi my Ridge, France: Walter Allward .
from the west a /'heure bleue.
(P HOTO: PIERRE DU PREY 1987)
JOURNAL EDITOR I REDACTEUR DU JOURNAL
LUC NOPPEN
Chaire de recherche du Canada en patrimoine urbain
lnstitut du patrimoine
Universite du Quebec a Montreal
CP 8888, succ. centre-ville
Montreal, QC H3C 3P8
(514) 987-3000 x-25621 f : (514) 987-6881
e. noppen.luc@uqam. ca
ASSISTANT EDITOR I ADJOINT A LA REDACTION
(FRANCOPHONE)
MARTIN DROUIN
e: drouin .martin@uqam.ca
ASSISTANT EDITOR I ADJOINT A LA REDACTION
(ANGLOPHONE)
PETER COFFMAN
e : peter.coffman@sympatico.ca
WEB SITE I SITE WEB
LANA STEWART
Parks Canada
25, Eddy St re et, 5th Floor
Gatineau, QC K1A OMS
(819) 997-6098
e · lana.stewart@pc.gc. ca
EDITOR OF NEWS & VIEWS I
REDACTRICE DE NOUVELLES ET COUPS D'CEIL
HEATHER BRETZ
Stantec Arch itecture Ltd .
200- 325 -25th Street SE
Calgary, AB T2A 7H8
(403) 716-7901 1 f. (403 ) 716-8019
e: heather.bretz@stante c.com
VICE-PRESIDENTS! VICE-PRESIDENT(f)S
PETER COFFMAN
Department of Art
Ontario Hall
Queen 's University
Kingston, ON KZL 3N6
(6 13) S33-6000 Ext. 78804
e : peter.coffman@sympatico.ca
LUCIE K. MORISSET
Etudes urbaines et to uristiques
Ecole des sciences de Ia gestion
Universite du Quebec a Montrea l
C.P. 8888, succ. Centre-ville
Montreal, QC H3C 3P8
(514) 987-3000 X 4585 1 f. (514) 987-7827
e: morisset.lucie@uqam.ca
TREASURER j TRESORIER
BARRY MAGRILL
8080 Dalemore Rd
Richmond, BC V7C 2A6
barrymagrill @shaw.ca
SECRETARY I SECRETAIRE
MARIE-FRANCE BISSON
Ecole de design, UQAM
Case postale 8888, succursale «Centre-ville>>
Montreal, QC H3C 3P8
(514) 987 -3000 X 3866
e: bissonmf@yahoo.ca
PROVINCIAL REPRESENTATIVES I
REPRESENTANT(E)S DES PROVINCES
GEORGE CHALKER
Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador
P.O. Box 5171
St. John 's, NF A1C SVS
(709) 739 -1 892 If: (709) 739-5413
e: george@heritagefou ndation.ca
TERRENCE SMITH LAMOTHE
1935 Vernon
Hal ifa x, NS B3H 3N8
(902) 425-0101
THOMAS HORROCKS
ADI Limited
1133 Regent Street, Suite 300
Fre dericto n, NB E3B 3Z2
(506) 452-9000 I f: (906) 452-7303
e · thd@adi.ca I horto@ reg2.health. nb.ca
CLAUDINE DEOM
2078, avenue Claremont
Montrea l, QC H3Z 2P8
t I f. (514) 488-4071
e: cdeom@supernet.ca
SHARON VATTAY
11 Elm Avenue, Apt #322
Toronto, ON M4W 1 N2
(416) 964 -7235
svattay@chass.utoronto.ca
TERRENCE J. SINCLAIR
Heritage Branch
Saskatchewan Department of Mun icipal Affairs,
Culture and Housing
430-1855 Victoria Avenue
Regina, SK S4P 3V7
(306) 787 -S777 I f. (3 06) 787-0069
e : ts incl ai r@mach.gov.sk.ca
l. FREDERICK VALENTINE
Stantec Architecture Ltd.
200 325 -2 5th Street SE
Calgary, AB T2A 7H8
(403) 716-79191 f: (403) 716-8019
e: fred.valen tine@stantec.com
DANIEL MILLETTE
511-SS Water Street
Vancouver, BC V6B 1A1
tl f. (604) 687-4 907
e : lucubratio@yahoo. com
KAYHAN NADJI
126 Niven Dr.
Yellowknife, NT X1A 3W8
t I f: (867) 920-6331
e: kayen@nadji_architects.ca
SHELLEY BRUCE
25 Forks Market Road # 401
Winni peg, MB R3C 4S8
(204) 983 -222 1
ANN HOWATT
P.O. Box 231 1
Charlottetown, P.E.I. C1A 8C1
(902) 626-8076
e: ahowatt@upei.ca

CONTENTS I TABLE DES MATU~RES
JOURNAL OF THE SOCIETY FOR THE STUDY OF I JOURNAL DE LA SOCIETE POUR L'ETUDE DE L'
ARCHITECTURE~~
CANADA
INTRODUCTION
ESSAYS I ESSAIS
POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
REVIEW I COMPTE·RENDU
> PIERRE DE LA
RUFFINIERE DU PREY
Vimy Reveille
> GAVIN STAMP
The Imperial War Graves Commission
> LANE BaRSTAD
Walter Allward: Sculptor and Architect
of the Vi my Ridge Memorial
> JACQUELINE HUCKER
Vimy: A Monument for the Modern World
> JULIAN SMITH
Restoring Vimy: The Cha llenges of
Confronting Emerging Modernism
> PIERRE DE LA
RUFFINIERE DU PREY
Allward's Figures, Lutyens's Flags
and Wreaths
> JOAN COUTU
Gavin Stamp, The Memorial to the Missing
of the Somme (London: Profile Books Ltd.,
paperback edition 2007)
3
5
23
39
49
57
65
VOL. 33 > N' 1 > 2008

INTRODUCTION
VIMY REVEILLE
PIERRE DE LA RUFFINIERE DU PREY is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Canada. and the Queen's
Research Chair' in the Department of Al't at
>P IERRE DE LA
RUFFIN IE RE Ou PRE Y
Queen's Univer-s rty . He is a past Pr'esident of the
Society for the Study of Ar'chitecture in Canada
and rn 2007 contributed to its Journal an article
trtled "John Soane, John Plaw, and Pr'ince Edward
Island"
My last year as president of the
Society for the Study of Architecture
in Canada/ Societe pour !'etude de
!'architecture au Canada overlapped w ith
the ninetieth anniversary of the Battle
of Vimy Ridge (9 April, 1917). To mark
that solemn occasion I conceived the
idea of guest editing an entire issue of
the Society's Journal devoted to the Vi my
Memorial. I am grateful to Luc Noppen
and his editorial staff for encouraging
the idea, and for publishing it in good
time for the ninetieth anniversary of the
armistice that ended the First World War
on 11 November, 1918.
FIG . 1. TH E RESTORED VI MY MEMORIAL: WALTE R ALLWARD'S MONUMENT ON CE AGAIN RISING UNBLEMISHED FROM THE
BROODING LAN DSCAPE OF VI MY RIDGE . I BLAIR KETCHESON, FOR PHILLIPS FAREVAAG SMALLENBERG, JULY 2007.
Apart from celebrating in words and
images two special anniversaries and
the recent painstaking restoration of the
monument at Vi my (figs. 1 - 3), my motivation
behind this commemorative issue
is to bridge what I see as an artificial divide
separating scholarship on World War
I monuments. Each country engaged in
that Great War seems to have celebrated
its own chosen battles, monuments, and
memorials to the missing. Ra rely, however,
do nationals cross the line into other
nationals' research fields - as if those
fields were somehow a no man's land full
of unexploded scholarly ordnance. This
state of affairs contradicts the sp irit of
camaraderie that characterized the soldiers
engaged in the conflict, and that
sometimes extended to fraternisation
with the enemy. With timely advice from
Julie Harris, the SEAC/SSAC's former Treasurer,
I therefore invited an international
and diverse spectrum of contributors.
(As it turned out all six, including myself,
happen to have some association past or
present with Queen's Unive rsity.) In my
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008 > 3 -4
3

P IERRE D E L A R UFFINIE RE Ou P REY > INTRODUCTION
FIG. 2. PART OF THE STATUE OF PEACE BEIN G LI FTED OFF THE WEST TOWER, PRIOR TO RE­
ALIGNMENT AND REINSTATEMENT. I PHILIPPE FRUTIER,ALTIMAGE, FOR VETERANS AFFAIRS CANADA,
OCTOBER 2006.
special perspective
to Vi my in the last
article. Not only
does he under-
stand intimately
the strengths and
weaknesses of the
monument, having
studied its deterioration,
but he
grasps the depth FIG. 3. WA LTER ALLWARD, CANADA (BORST AD CATALO GUE # 539), 1936.I LANE BORSTAD.
of Allward's vision
that prevailed unaltered from beginning colour illustration ofthis issue. Regarding
to end and permeated even the minutest access to the Allward Fonds, several of the
details. One general observation links the contributors and I owe a debt of gratitude
contributors: like a foreboding chant from to Queen's University Archives. Finally, with
ancient Greek tragedy, each raises his or respect to preparing the illustrations for
her voice in chorus. How, they repeatedly publication, I would like to thank Heather
ask, can we keep alive the prophetic warning
message of World War I, and of Vi my Dr. Peter Coffman, Assistant Editor of the
McArthur of Julian Smith Architects and
in particular, when memories fade with SEAC/SSAC Journal.
the passing of the last living veterans, and
the monuments themselves undergo the
irreversible process of slow decay?
In conclusion I wish to commend the
contributors for their dedication and their
patience w ith my editorial suggestions.
I also wish to acknowledge the financial
support of the Queen's Research Chairs
Programme, which made possible the
postscript- a kind of taps or last post to
balance this introductory reveille -I focus
on certain sculptural elements that summarize
for me the poignant message the
preceding articles convey.
Gavin Stamp opens the discussion by
examining the work of the Imperial War
Graves Commission, the topic of his recent
book on the Thiepval Memorial, discussed
at the end in Joan Coutu's review of the
monograph. But in this issue he expands
his scope by comparing IWGC cemeteries
with their French, German, and
Canadian counterparts. Lane Barstad's
article illuminates the design process behind
W alter Allward's Vimy Monument.
A careful analysis of Allward's previous
war memorials and his personal, deeplyfelt
preparatory drawings adds new lustre
to the self-styled architect/sculptor's
competition-winning solution for Vimy.
The political vicissitudes and practical
problems that beset the subsequent construction
of the monument at Vi my form
the subject of Jacqueline Hucker's text .
She furthermore contextualizes Allward
by placing him alongside other modernists
like Rodin, Nietzsche, and the stage
designer Edward Gordon Craig. Restora -
tion architect Julian S. Smith brings a
4 JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

ESSAY I ESSAI
THE IMPERIAL WAR GRAVES COMMISSION
GAVIN STAMP is the author of The Memorial to
the Missing of the Somme as well as other books
>GAVIN STAMP
on the architectum of Edwin Lutyens. In 1977 he
or'ganised the Silent Cities exhibition at the Heinz
Galler·y of the Royal Institute of Br·itish Arcl1itects
about the war cemetery and memor·ial architectur-e
of the Great War. He has also written about the
work of Alexander' "Greek" Thomson, Geor·ge Gilbert
Scott junior and Sir Giles Gilbert Scott.
The melancholy task of the Imperial War
Graves Commission, as its name implies,
was to encompass all the former British
Dominions which engaged in the Great
War of 1914-1918. 1n the event, the various
Dominion governments- Canada, Australia,
New Zealand (fig. 1), South Africa, India -
all chose to erect their own memorials in
France, Belgium and other places where
their dead lay. In addition, Canada chose
to erect a memorial very different both in
style and in the use of sculpture to those
erected by the Commission. All this w ent
counter to the original intentions of the
founders of the War Graves Commission.
Nevertheless, the context in which the
Canadian Battlefields Memorial Commission
erected the monument on Vi my Ridge
cannot be fully understood without reference
to t he work of the Commission and
to the principles which it forged for com ­
memorating the million dead and missing
sustained by the w hole British Empire.
FIG. 1. NEW ZEALAN D MEMORIAL, BUTTES NEW BRITISH CE METE RY. BELGIUM : CHARLES HOLDEN. I GAVIN STAMP 1987.
The work of the Imperial War Graves Commission
between the world wars constitutes
both the largest and the most inspired programme
of public design ever completed by
a British government agency, despite difficult
and w orsening economic conditionsand
this was carried out overseas. Rudyard
Kipling called it "The biggest single bit of
work since any of the Pharaohs- and they
only w orked in their ow n country".' Perhaps
it is surprising that w orks of such high
quality should have been commissioned
by the government of a nation notorious
for its indifference towards works of art
combined w ith great reluctance to pay for
them. For once, official architecture w as
great architecture, and a state that had
shown shocking indifference to the scale
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008 > 5 -22
5

G AVIN S TAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
Graves Commission interpreted and developed
with remarkable sympathy and
sophistication. Above all, perhaps, there
was the work of Edwin Lutyens, whose
Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
at Thiepval is a supremely powerful and
original creation in which, as Roderick
Gradidge has claimed, he adopted "an entirely
new three-dimensional approach to
classical architecture".' But the monument
erected by Canada at Vimy Ridge is consp
icuous for standing outside that dominant
tradition; in the work commissioned by
or associated with the Imperial War Graves
Commission, it is the great exception.
FIG . 2. THE CENOTA PH, WHITEHALL, LONDON: EDWIN LUTYENS.j GAVIN STAMP 1984.
of casualties during the war made some recompense
by constructing cemeteries and so long, and so ruthlessly, ensured the sub­
systems which allowed it to be pursued for
memorials of remarkable beauty and artistic
quality. Some are among the greatest the arts. Yet, in fact, that war generated
sequent rise to dominance of modernism in
architectural achievements of the century. in the subsequent memorials a late but
vital flowering of the European classical
It is often assumed, with some justice, that tradition in architecture, if for a terrible
the death toll and trauma of the Great War, purpose. And it was this tradition that the
by discrediting the attitudes, traditions and architects employed by the Imperial War
What was also remarkable about the
work of the Commission was its secular
and egalitarian character. This was not
achieved w ithout considerable debate and
struggle. The arguments were particularly
passionate in particular over the use of
Christian symbolism to commemorate the
dead in a war in which men of many other
religions, or none, had been fed into the
slaughter. This debate also took place when
it was proposed to rebuild the temporary
Cenotaph as the national war memorial in
the centre of Whitehall in London (fig. 2).
That abstracted classical pylon, modelled
and refined with extraordinary sophistication
to give it remarkable emotional
power, was also one of the supreme cre ­
ations of Lutyens, the architect who would
have more influence on the work of the
War Graves Commission than any other. In
1917, along with his former friend Herbert
Baker (with whom he had fallen out over
the design of New Delhi}, he was asked to
visit the battlefields to see the problems of
creating war graves at first hand. It was on
this occasion that Lutyens wrote the letter,
so often quoted, which reveals his response
and his vision.
What humanity ca n en dure and s uffer
is beyon d belief The battlefiel d s - the
obliter-a t ion of all human en deavour and
6
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008

G AVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 3. BEDFORD HOUSE CEMETE RY, ZIL LE BEKE, BELG IU M: W.C. VON BERG. I GAVIN STAMP 2001
FIG . 4. THE CROSS OF SACRIFI CE AT BRAY MI LITARY CEMETERY, FRANCE: REGINALD
BLOMFIE LD, ASSISTANT ARCH ITECT A.J.S. HUTTON. I GAVIN STAMP 1990.
achievement and the human achievement more concerned with locating and recordof
or the next instant - w ould at length obtain
destruction is bettered by the poppies ing the graves of the dead - something of some la st ing an d distant memorial ... The
and wi ld flowers that are as f l-iendly to an little concern to the military authorities at assemblies of wooden crosses in the wrecked
unexp lo ded shell as t hey al-e t o the leg of first. He pointed out that no one had the vil lages near the line, with her e and t here an
a gar den seat in Surrey . One thinks for responsibility of recording and maintaining addit ional si gn of remembrance suggested by
the moment no other m onument is needed. the grow ing number of war graves. With t he fee ling and opportunity of fel low-soldiers.
But the onl y monument can be one where the the support of General Sir Nevil Macready, seemed t o have a poor chance of remaining
endeavour is sincere to make such monument Adjutant-General to the British Expedition- recognisable or visible after one more outburst
per m an ent - a sol id ball of bronzei3 ary Force, w ho was mindful of the distress of attack or counterblast , when high explosive
caused by the neglect of graves during the or t orrential steel w ould t ear up the soil over
The Imperial War Graves Commission was South African War, the War Office official- deliberately chosen spaces of the land ,
essentially the creation of one remarkable ly recognised Ware's Graves Registration
man, Fabian Ware (1869-1949). An exact Commission in March 1915. Ware badgered the authorities to
contemporary of Lutyens, Ware had been
a teacher, an educational reformer and,
as assistant director of education for the
Transvaal, a member of Alfred M ilner's
"kindergarten" of administrators in South
Africa as well as editor of the London Morning
Post. Ware ce rtainly belonged to that
generation of cultivated bullies w ho ran
the Edw ardian Empire with supreme con ­
fidence, but he was not typical; he was a
man with a strong social conscience and
wide sympathies as w ell as being possessed
of remarkable energy. On the outbreak of
w ar, Wa re offered his services to the Red
Cross and soon found himself organisi ng
a "flying unit" of private cars and drivers
assi sting the French army. In the course of
assisting the w ounded during the confused
campaigns of 1914, Ware became more and
Ware pointed out that although his Commission's
w ork had no military importan
ce, it had "an extraordinary moral
value to the troops in the field as w el l as
to the relatives and friends of the dead
at home" 4 and that w hen host ilities were
eventually terminated, the government
would ha ve to do something about the
thousands and thousands of graves, many
scattered over the battlefields, some dug
in French churchyards. The poet Edmund
Blunden, w ho had fought on the Somme
and who w ould succeed Rud yard Kipling
as the Commission's unofficial literary
adviser, later recalled that,
not many soldiers retained the confidence t hat
t he dead - themselves, it might be. to-morrow
ensure that graves were recorded and, if
possible, maintained; he also commenced
negotiations w ith the French to establish the
status of the w ar cemeteries in the future.
Ware realised t hat the task of creating
proper graves and ceremonies w ould be
immense, and that it would concern all the
const ituent parts of the British Empire. He
al so w as concerned that proper policies
be established for war graves, and that
rich families should not be able to erect
more elaborate memorials or take bodies
back to Britain for burial. Ware knew that,
"in ni nety-nine cases out of a hundred"
officers " will t ell you t hat if they are killed
[t hey] w ould w ish to be among their men"
and he made sure that exhumations w ere
forbidden. 6 As Philip Longworth, historian
of the War Graves Commission, has w ritten,
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > f\j ' 1 > 2008
7

G AVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 5. LOUVERVAL MILITARY CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING,
FRANCE: H.C. BRADSHAW. I GAVIN STAMP 1990.
FIG. 6. STANDARD IWGC HEADSTO NES ATTYNE COT CEM ETERY. I GAVIN STAM P.
Ware "sensed the new and democratic
mood which was taking hold of the Army.
Traditional though he was in many ways,
he had read Bergson, Rousseau, Marx and
the Syndicalists and had been influenced by
some of their ideas".' Ware was a complex
figure, although a "social imperialist" and
the former editor of a right-wing newspaper,
he was sympathetic towards the Labour
movement and anxious for social reform.
The Imperial War Graves Commission, as it
was established by Royal Charter in April
1917, would achieve equality for all the dead
- whether rich or poor, officers or private
soldiers, titled or commoner.
This task was something quite new. No
such concern for the treatment of the dead
had been demonstrated by the authorities
in earlier conflicts. After the Battle of
Waterloo, for instance - the bloodiest
battle for the British before 1914 in which
the casualties were some 5,100 dead out
of a total of 50,000 dead and wounded on
both sides - while the bodies of officers
were mostly taken home for burial those
of private so ldiers were dumped in mass
graves. Only in 1889, by order of Queen
Victoria, were the dead of Waterloo
belatedly honoured at the Evere Cemetery
in Brussels when the bodies of officers,
non-commissioned officers and men were
reinterred there (this was probably the first
British national memorial to the dead, as
opposed to a monument to a victory). The
British government cared little more after
the war with Russia in 1854-56, although a
proper military cemetery was established,
by necessity, at Scutari with graves for 8,000
who died of wounds and disease next to
the hospital run by Florence Nightingale
(later enhanced by a granite obelisk with
angels carved by Baron Marochetti).
As Ware stressed in his memorandum
proposing an "Imperial Commission for
the Care of Soldiers' Graves" in 1917, the
Empire must be "spared the reflections
which weighed on the conscience of the
British nation w hen, nearly twenty years
after the conclusion of the Crimean War, it
became known that the last resting place
of those who had fallen in that war had,
except in individual instances, remained
uncared for and neglected"."
It was after the American Civil War that an
act promoted by President Lincoln in 1862
allowed for the creation of 14 national
cemeteries for all the Union dead. A simi lar
concern was manifested by both sides after
the Franco-Prussian War. As wars became
larger in scale, fought by conscripted
soldiers rather than by professional armies
(on which the British still relied until 1916),
so the popular concern for the fate and
last resting place of the individual soldier
increased. In the Great War of 1914-1918,
parliamentary governments as well as
autocracies committed their populations to
the struggle w ith a ruthless subservience
to the national cause inconceivable in
earlier centuries ("Are we to continue
until we have killed ALL our young men?"
Lord Lansdowne, the former Foreign
Secretary, asked the Cabinet at the end of
the Battle of the Somme) 9 The patriotic
and nationalistic character of the war
demanded that every individual sacrifice
be commemorated, although the chaos
and social breakdown that resulted in some
of the fighting powers, Russia and Turkey
above all, rendered this impossible.
The task faced by the newly established
Imperial War Graves Commission, of
giving decent burial and permanent
commemoration to hundreds of thousands
of casualties, was horribly exacerbated by
the nature of the war. Blunden described
how, on the Somme, "men perished in great
multitudes and in places where their bodies
could not be recovered, so intense was the
new artillery and machine-gun fire, so
hopeless the mud which went on for miles.
The battalions who came up to the relief
of those in the craters and vestiges of
8
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2 008

GAVI N STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 7. LI JSSENTHOEK MILITARY CEMETERY, POPER ING HE, BELG IUM:
REGINALD BLOM FIELD.I GAVI N STAMP 1977.
FIG. 8. LIJSS ENTHO EK MILITARY CEMETERY, POPERINGHE, BE LG IUM
REGINA LD BLOMFIELD. I GAVIN STAMP 2007.
trenches would find themselves, in the firesplashed
night, stumbling over corpse after
corpse. In deep dug-outs, twenty or thirty
feet down, friends or foes were done to
death by one means or another with the
ultimate result that there was no entering
those burnt-out, dreadful caverns". After
the even greater horror of Passchendaele,
when "a deeper, fouler slime drowned all
but the luckiest life in man and nature ...,
the soldier felt that his death would be
his complete and final disappearance.
The Book of Life was for others ... At that
period, the idea that these battlefields
would themselves ever again become
pasture-lands, and chateaux with grounds
and little lakes and garden-walls, would
have appeared sheer fantasy" (fig. 3). 10
As w ork on the cemeteries could not
proceed until after the end of hostilities,
Ware first established principles to
govern the Commission's approach
and sought expert advice- hence the
visit by Lutyens and Baker to France in
July 1917. To a remarkable extent, the
recommendations made by Lutyens in
a Memorandum written the following
month were adopted as official policy.
In particular, there was his suggestion of
an identical abstract monumental form
in all the proposed cemeteries:
I most earnestly advise that there shall be thereon one thought in clear letters so that
one kind of monument throughout, whether in all men for all time may read and know t he
Europe, Asia or Africa, and that it shall take the reasons why these stones are so placed
form of one gr eat fai r stone of fine proportions, throughout France - facing the W est and
twelve feet in length, lying raised upon t hree facing the men who lie looking evel' eastward
steps, of which the first and t hird shal l be towards the enemy - after this you can plant
twice the width of t he second ; and that each to desire and erect cloistei'S - chapels -
stone sha ll bear in in deli ble lettel'ing, some crosses buildings of as many va r ieties as to
fine thoug ht or words of sacred dedi cation. suit t he always val'ying sites.
They should be known in all places and fo r all
time, as the Great War Stones. and should In the event, these monoliths on their
stand , though in three Continents. as equal shallow steps- bearing the inscription
monuments of devotion , suggesting the thought from the Book of Ecclesiasticus - TH El R
of memorial Chapels in one vast Ca t hedr al. NAME LIVETH FOR EVERMORE -chosen
by Kipling and carefully modelled and enlivened
(J.M. Barrie had suggested to Ware calling it
a stone rather than an altar as, knowing the
Presbyterian prejudices of his countrymen,
"The Scotch ... wouldn't like the word".)
with entasis: curves that were part
of a hypothetical sphere exactly 1,801 feet
8 inches in diameter- were placed in all
the Commission's cemeteries apart from
the very smallest (fig. 1).
Such was the transformation of Lutyens's
aspiration for "a solid ball of bronze" into
the concept of what became know n as the
Stone of Remembrance although, in fact,
he had already described the stone idea
to Ware in a letter written in May 1917-
before he went to see the battlefields. In
this, he recommended that the
Jane Ridley points out that the spherical
surface on stone and steps was a symbol
of hope and that, "For Lutyens the symbol
of happiness had always been a circle". 11
The very idea of the Great War Stone was
a faintly pagan concept and thus provoked
opposition from those who wanted
conventional Christian symbolism in the
great stone of fine proportion 12 feet long set
fail' or finely wrot - without undue Ol'nament
and tricky and elabm'ate carvings and inscribe
cemeteries and, later, on the Cenotaph.
The other t w o w ho had visited France with
Lutyens, Baker and Charles Aitken (director
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
9

GAVIN S TAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
of the Tate Gallery), both recommended
a cross for each cemetery; Baker, indeed,
with his love of literal symbolism, even
suggested a cross with five points, one
for each colony. Lutyens wrote to his wife
about this last idea and that, "India, Ware
pointed out, was forgotten, but what does
a five pointed cross mean? Ware bids me
courage." And Lady Emily responded that,
"Baker must be dottyJ A five pointed cross
for each of the colonies. Too silly. And India
left out which w ill cause bitter hurt and
what about the Jews and agnostics who
hate crosses" ? 12
FIG. 9. FRICOURT NEW MILITARY CEM ETERY, FRAN CE: A.J.S. HUTTON. I GAVIN STAMP 1990
For all his racial prejudice engendered by
both convention and by his Theosophist
wife's obsession with Krishnamurti as the
new World Teacher, Lutyens was at one
with his wife in his pantheistic and nonsectarian
conception of religion and culture.
Fortunately Fabian Ware, who Lutyens
immediately admired and got on very well
with, agreed. ("Mon General," Lutyens's
letters to him often began, and he sometimes
signed himself "Votre Toujours Subaltern";
Ware, like others who worked for
the Commission, took military rank, but not
Lutyens. He wrote to Ware in August 1917
about the war stone:
FIG. 10. CORBIE COMMUNAL CEMETERY EXTENSION, FRANCE: CHARLES HOLDEN. I GAVI N STAMP 1990.
LaboU I' members, Jews , R. Catholics, Non ­
conformists, ladies of fashion especially those
that suffer a lo ss , all seem to like it and agree
in the banal1 ty of the t:, I have not had the
courage to tackl e a Bishop , but do you think
it wise if I asked Ca ntuar [the Archbishop of
Canter bury t o see me, he would I think, but if
I ca tch sight of the apr on it is apt, at a critical
moment, to give me the giggles, especiall y
when they get pompous and hold their hands
across their knee s - why?
FIG . 11. NOYELLES·SUR·MER CHINESE CEM ETERY. FRANCE:
REGI NALD TRU ELOVE, ASS ISTANT ARCHITECT; EDWIN
LUTYENS, PRINCIPAL ARCHITECT. I GAVIN STAMP 1990
FIG. 12. ZANTVOORDE BRITI SH CEMETERY, BELG IUM:
CHARLES HOLDEN. I GAVIN STAMP 1977
Lutyens seemed not to have cared much for
the established church and was certa inly
concerned not to cause offence to other
religions. There is no evidence to suggest,
however, that he disliked the way that the
10
JSSAC I JStAC 3:J > N' 1 > 2008

GAVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
Christian churches had identified God's Cemetery in 1920 in which he apologised to like it. The mother lost her boy and it was in
will so closely with the national cause (in
every nation). He might well have done; as
one serving officer recorded, "the Chris-
tian Churches are the finest blood-lust
creators which we have and of them we
made free use. 13
In the event, Lutyens did show his war
stone proposal to Randall Davidson, the
the Assistant Architect as "I did not realise
the cross came so close to the Jewish plot
[of land] & it would be good manners to
move it to a central position south". (In
defence both of the churches and of the
French, it is worth noting that Ware paid
tribute to Mgr Julien, Bishop of Arras, who
never ceased to remind his compatriots that
"in the sight of God the dead of Germany
Archbishop of Canterbury, who at first indi- were the equals of the dead of France".) 16
cated approval but later wrote to Ware to
condemn it and to demand a cross. Lutyens
recorded that Ware "was 'shocked, grieved'
at the Archbishop's letter- expected a neutral
attitude not a narrow antagonistic view.
He says the clergy in France are most tiresome-
always trying to upset any and every
kind of applecart. But he thinks the 'stone'
will win yet ... ". 14 It did, although in view
of the strength of the demand for Christian
imagery in the war cemeteries, a compromise
was eventually established. In addition to
the Stone of Remembrance, every cemetery
would also contain a free-standing cross
(fig. 4). And how pleased Lutyens must have
been when he was able to write to the Archbishop
in 1923 that, "I was so glad to see
in today's paper that the Great War Stone
in a cemetery was used as an Altar for the
administration of Holy Communion". 15
The Cross of Sacrifice, found in many places
in Britain as well as in every war cemetery,
was designed by Reginald Blomfield and
consisted of an octagonal stepped base
supporting a tall stone cross on which is
fixed a bronze sword (fig. 5). This, although
handsome, gives the cemeteries a touch of
precisely that 'Onward, Christian Soldiers!'
tone that Ware and Lutyens strove to avoid
(Lutyens also designed a cross, facetted
and compact, and with no sword, that
can sometimes be found in churchyards in
England). The problems sometimes created
by this Christian symbolism is suggested by
Lutyens's comments on the official report
approving the design for Choques Military
Equally controversial was the question of
the design of the permanent gravestones
and whether they should be uniform. The
crucial principle of no distinction between
the graves of officers and men, and the
policy of non exhumation or reburial back
home (a policy that was unique to Britain),
were fully endorsed by Lutyens who, in his
Memorandum, recommended that
every grave w ill be marked with a headstone
bearing the soldier's name and rank ,
and possibly the sculptured badge of his
regiment, also some symbol denoting his
religious faith ... All that is done of structure
should be for endurance for all time and for
equality of honour, for besides Christians
of all denominations, there w ill be Jews.
Mussulmens, Hindus and men of other creeds;
their glorious names and their mortal bodies
all equally deserving enduring record and
seemly sepulture.
Lutyens revealed more of his feelings
the interests of the country and she had to
suffer - her boy. Do you see what I mean?
But then I don't fight nor do I fight yet for the
seemly sepulture of the Germans when they
lie along with our men.
Emily did see what he meant. "I am very
keen about your stone", she replied and
added:
It appeals to my side of life- as houses don't
and I see much true symbolism in it .. I am
also entirely at one with you about equality
of sacrifice and that all those who 'die' no
matter from what cause should be honoured.
I think it too awful that the wife of a man shot
for cowardice gets no pension. After all he is
equally lost to her and by government orders.
I think it is barbarousn
The Commission decided to adopt a
standard secular headstone as Lutyens,
and others, recommended. Of Portland
stone with a curved top and straight sides,
each bears the name of the man beneath
in a fine Roman alphabet designed by
Macdonald Gill, brother of the sculptor and
typographer Eric Gill (fig. 6). A regimental
badge and a religious symbol -a cross,
or Star of David -could also be carved
into the stone, together with a text if the
soldier's family so requested. Over those
many thousands of graves containing an
unidentified body, the same headstone
bears the poignant inscription- chosen
about this in a letter to his wife in which by Kipling - "A Soldier of the Great
he argued
That the most beautiful sites should be
selected not where the victories were and all
that snobbery, for 1 hold that there is equality
in sacrifice and the men who fell at Quatre
Bras are just as worthy of honour as those
that fell at Waterloo. 1 do not want to put
worldly value over our dead. They put 'killed in
action' or 'died from wounds', 'died'. Died alone
means some defalcation and shot for it. 1 don't
War I Known unto God" (fig. 7). As the
Commission insisted, "in death, all, from
General to Private, of whatever race or
creed, should receive equal honour under
a memorial which should be the common
symbol of their comradeship and of the
cause for which they died." The humanity
and rightness of this decision is reinforced
by comparison with the French war
cemeteries, in which it can be painful to
see a line of crosses broken by a gravestone
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008
11

G AVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
NATIO NA LE NOTRE -DAM E-DE-LORETTE, FRANC E: LOUI S­
MARIE CORDONNIER.J GAVIN STAMP 2006
FIG. 14. INDIAN ARMY MEMORIAL, NEUVE-CHAPELL E, FRANCE: HERBE RT BAKER .J GAVIN STAMP 1990
in the shape of a Star of David or one given
the profile of an Islamic arch.
With the war over, however, the policy of
equality of treatment provoked growing opposition.
Campaigns were mounted against
the War Graves Commission w hich emphasised
the cruelty of preventing families and
bereaved relatives from having any say in
the way soldiers were buried. Lady Florence
Cecil, the w ife of the Bishop of Exeter, who
had lost three sons in the war, made a direct
appeal "in the name of thousands of
heartbroken parents, wives, brothers and
sisters" to the Prince of Wales as President
of the Commission to permit a cross as an
alternative to the standard headstone. "It
is only through the hope of the cross," she
wrote, "that most of us are able to carry on
the life from which all the sunshine seems
to have gone, and to deny us the emblem
of that strength and hope adds heavily to
the burden of our sorrow".'" Ultimately the
matter w as settled by Parliament and in a
crucial debate in May 1920 the Commission's
policies w ere upheld. Equality in death, like
equality in life, had to be enforced by the
12
JSSAC I JSE AC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

GAVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
state, and the British people had to learn reverence and peace ... My ow n thoughts w ere haunted by the fear of winged angels
that liberty is incompatible with war, and always turned to the beauty associated in various sentimental attitudes"." Among
that once a man had enlisted, his body - with churchyard and cloister, a sacred place, the Commission 's principal architects,
whether alive or dead - belonged to the a temenos" (fig. 9).' 9
Lutyens and Holden used the least
King . It is nevertheless remarkable that
sculpture and carving, Baker the most.
such rigid egalitarianism and secularism w as Gertrude Jekyll prepared planting plans Fine w ork w as done for the Commission
enforced by a parliamentary democracy so for four cemeteries for w hich Lutyens by Gilbert Led w ard, Charles Wheeler,
often characterised by compromise and by had responsibility- Hersin, Gezaincourt, William Reid Dick, Ernest Gillick, William
sentimental gestures. Daours and La Neuville - as w ell as for Gilbert, Laurence Turner and by Charles
Warlincourt Halte, which was designed by Sergeant Jagger. Arguably the greatest
Other general principles regarding Holden. Jane Brown has argued that these British sculptor of the last century, Jagger
the design of the cemeteries w ere less set the pattern for all the others and that, was responsible for carved panels on the
contentious. From the beginning, the under Lutyens's influence, the British w ar Memorial to the Missing at Louverval as
importance of horticulture w as stressed. The cemetery became w ell as for the reliefs and the bronze figures
w ar cemeteries were intended to convey
on his great masterpiece, the Artillery
something of the character of the England the modern apotheosis of the secret garden.. Memorial at Hyde Park Corner in London,
the dead had fought for, an ideal England there is the enclosing evergreen (holly or in w hich the heroism and brutality of war is
full of gardens and beautiful landscapes . yewl hedge. the symbolic fastigiated oak or conveyed w ithout any sentimentality.
Just as the Commission's w ork manifested Lo mbardy poplars, massings of workaday
the contemporary interest in classical
architecture, so it reflected the enthusiasm
for garden design which flourished in the
Edw ardian years (fig. 8). The w ar cemeteries
can almost be seen as a recreation of that
fusion of architecture and gardening, and
that reconciliation of the formal and the
picturesque approaches to garden design,
achieved by the collaboration of Lutyens
and his mentor, Gertrude Jekyll , before
the war. Lutyens had recommended to the
Commission that
The design of any further arrangements, or of
any planting of evergreen tress - !lex. box, Bay,
Cypress, Yews or Juniper, or of other trees or
shrubs of such a kind as may be suitable t o a
special climate, would be determined by the
character of t he bui ldings, and by t he area and
shrubs of the English countryside - blackthorn, Because of the disagreements between
whitethorn, hazel, guilder rose and honeysuckle the architect s first consulted and about
-with the Virgin's flowering meads ushered the methods to be used to secure designs,
into soft borders where the headstones Frederic Ken yon, Director of the British
stand , hellebores, narcissus, forget-me-not. Museum, w as invited to act as Archit ecfritillaries.
foxg loves , co lu m bines, London tural Advisor in November 1917 and he
Pr ide, bergenia , nepeta and roses. These are recommended the senior architects to be
Arts and Crafts gardens, outdoor rooms of employed by the Commission. Lutyens,
green walls, their vistas or dered and closed Baker and Blomfield w ere appointed Prinby
the most sub lime stone works, most cipal Architects for France and Belgium in
with book-room pavilions and shelters. all March 1918. They w ere joined in 1920 by
of them laced and imbued with meaning Charles Holden, who had already served as
and double-meaning .. 20
an Assistant Architect to the Commission
and who applied his severe neoclassical
"Those w ho doubt the pow er of landscape style both to the w ar cemeteries (fig. 10)
to console", Ken Worpole has recently w rit-
and to the contemporary stations for the
ten, "should visit some of these cemeteries, London Underground. Their salary w as initially
the design and care of which successfully
£400 per annum, raised to £600 in
embody and integrate so many nuances of 1919. The Commission's work was not, how­
nature of the ground; but all should be planned public and private emotion". 21
ever, confined to the Western Front. Robert
on broad and si mple lines .... But though it will
be important to secure the qualities of repose The Commission's architect s w ere also
Lorimer, designer of the Scottish National
War Memorial, w as appointed Principal
and dignity there is no need for the cemeter ies generally agreed that for both the Architect for Italy, Macedonia and Egypt,
to be gloomy or even sad looking places. Good memorials and the she lter buildings and was responsible for rugged war cemeteries
use should be made of the best and most required in each cemetery, monumental
high up in the foothills of the Alps.
beaut iful flowering plants and shrubs.. classi cal architecture w as enough and that
little sculpture w as needed. As Blomfield
Anot her Scot, the great Beaux-Arts trained
Glasw eg ian, John James Burnet, w as appointed
Baker, for once, agreed, later w riting that later recalled, " many of us had seen terrible
Prin cipal Architect for Pal estine
the cemeteries "should express the sense of examples of w ar memorials in France and and Gallipoli, and was assisted in hi s work
JSSAC I JSE AC 33 > N" 1 > 2008
13

G AVIN S TA MP > ESSAY I ESSAI
by his partner Thomas Tait. Finally there was
E.P. Warren, who was appointed Principal
Architect for Mesopotamia and designed
the Memorial to the Missing in Basra.
The task of designing and supervising the
execution of hundreds of cemeteries in
France and Belgium could not be undertaken
by the Principal Architects alone, especially
as all were also running their own private
practices. On Kenyon's recommendation,
the actual work of designing the many cemeteries
was entrusted to younger architects
who had served in the war, but supervised
by the senior architects. This team of Assistant
Architects was based at Saint-Omer in
France. Two w ere South African: Gordon
Leith and Wilfrid von Berg; two were older,
and had served in the London Ambulance
Brigade of the Red Cross: Holden and W.H.
Cowlishaw; the others were W.B. Binnie, H.C.
Bradshaw, G.H. Goldsmith (who had been
Lutyens's assistant before the war), Frank
Higginson, A.J .S. Hutton, Noel Rew, Verner
0 . Rees and J.R. Truelove. In theory, the Principal
Architect would make suggestions for
a particular cemetery, and later approve or
amend a sketch design made by the Assistant
Architect. For the smallest cemeteries,
with under 250 burials, the Assistant Architects
would seem to have enjoyed more
or less complete independence. "In retrospect,"
Ware later wrote, "the chief merit of
this system is seen to have been the variety
of treatment which resulted from the free
play thus given to the interest in individual
cemeteries natural to architects who were
dealing with burial places of their
comrades in arms"."
The ultimate authorship of a particular
w ar cemetery is often confirmed by the
Commission's standard report sheets, on
which the Principal Architect as well as
the Horticultural Expert and the Deputy
Director of Works would indicate approval
or make suggestions. On that for the Chinese
Labour Corps Cemetery at Noyellessur-mer
(fig. 11), which was designed by
Truelove in an appropriate style, Lutyens
wrote that, "I know nothing of Chinese
art. I can but express my admiration. Capt
Truelove should go to London and visit the
British Museum and the wholesale Chinese
warehouses in London". It is clear from
the cemeteries themselves that the principal
influence on their architecture was
that of Lutyens, although Lutyens himself
may well have been influenced by the
severely abstract work of Holden (fig. 12).
Asked half a century later about his w ork
for the Commission, Wilfrid von Berg
w rote that,
Blomfield . I reca ll , t oo k a meagr e and
superficia l interest in my wor'k and r arely had
much to contribute. Lutyens, on the other
han d, showed a lively concern coupl ed with a
delicious sense of humour. I remember how
once he introduced an asymmetrical feature
into one of my designs saying with a chuckle
'That's cockeye but let's do it'. Away from the
dr'awing-board he was the greatest fun and
at a party in the chateau at Longuenesse ,
I.W.G.C. headquarter s. to everyone's delight
he climbed on a t abl e and danced a little jig.
Holden, serious and painstaking, was a senior
14
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

GAVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 17. VLADSLO DEUTSCHE SOLDATENFRIEDHOF, BELGIUM: FIGURES OF THE MOURNING
PARENTS BY KATHE KOLLWITZ. I GAVIN STAMP 1988.
FIG . 18. TERLINCTHUN BRITI SH CEMETERY, FRANCE: GORDON LEITH . I GAVIN STAMP 1990.
ar chitect for whom I had the greatest r espect.
Of Baker I have no r ecoll ections since his work
was alm ost exclusive ly wit h Gor don Leith. 24
Von Berg also recorded his recollections of
his fellow Assistant Architects, who deserve
to be better known.
The colossa l task of caring for 580,000 identified
and 180,000 unidentified graves was
begun early in 1919. Some were in small
temporary cemeteries, others scattered and
isolated, so that bodies had to be moved to
the permanent cemeteries to be constructed
by the Commission. Today, when film makers
wish to emphasise the carnage of the Great
at intervals of a few hundred yar ds, r un
a line of t he Comm onwealth War Gr aves
Commissio n's beautiful garden cemeteries,
abl aze near t he an niversary of the batt le with
r ose and w ister ia blossom , t he white Portland
stone of headston es an d memor ial crosses
gleam ing in t he sun .. A few .. . stand a little
forward of the r est, an d mark the furthest
Truelove was highly t al ented and a man of great War, the camera often pans over a vast sea li mit of adva nce. The majority stand on the
chal'm. In his spare time he won a place in t he of crosses . But this, at least for British war fr ont line or in no man's land just out side t he
first premiated designs for the Quasr -ei-A ini cemeteries, gives a quite false impression. German w ire. The soldiers w ho died there
Hospital in Ca iron. Goldsm ith w as a slavish Not only are the British dead marked by wel'e buried where t hey ha d fa ll en. Thus the
devotee of Lutyens an d allowed his own talents standard headstones rather than crosses, cemeter ies are a map of t he bat tle. The map
t o be subm erged in his efforts to copy t he but few of the cemeteries are very large and t ells a simpl e an d t err ible story. 26
m aster. Gor don Leith was a br ill iant architect in most there are but several hundred headwho
worked ch iefl y under Baker. In later years stones. Only those sited near base-camps or Because of the controversy over the Commission's
he r eceived a Doctorate in r ecognition of his hospitals where men died of their wounds,
policies, three experimental
outstanding achievement s in South Afr ica. Of like Eta pies and Lijssenthoek, are the graves cemeteries were completed by 1920 to
Rew, Hutton, Cowl ishaw and ... Salway Nicol , to be counted in thousands (figs. 7, 13}. demonstrate what was being aimed at.
I have little t o say beyond the fact that they
wer e painstaki ng and efficient.
What is awe-inspiring -terrifying -about
It was first intended that each should be
designed by one of the three Principal
the British cemeteries of the Great War is Architects but, in the event, all three- Le
And of two others who seemed to have not their size but their number. Even after Treport, Louvencourt and Forceville- had
designed cemeteries and memorials, the bodies in severa l hundred cemeteries Blomfield as Principal Architect. There is
had been moved, there were almost a thou- strong evidence, however, that Forceville,
I am surprised to lear n t hat Fr ank Higgin son
d id any d esign s since he wa s I . .. I an
administ rator. He was a delightful fellow an d
both he an d his wife w ere my close fr ien ds. I
cannot say the same of one W .B. Binnie, also
an administr ator, who was an aggressive little
Sc otsman sa dly lack ing in polish. 25
sand separate British war cemeteries constructed
along the line of the Western Front
between the North Sea and the Somme.
Their very locations tell the story of the
war. As John Keegan has written about the
Battle of the Somme, along the old front
line north of Thiepval,
the most successfu l of these cemeteries,
as well as Louvencourt were actually the
work of Holden as Blomfield's assistant
and the economical severity of its design
would serve as a model for the Commission's
architectsY These cemeteries were
well received by the visiting British public;
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
15

G AVIN S TAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
suspended in 1930 for economic reasons,
Hobbs approached Lutyens instead (not
for the first time did he cheerfully supplant
another architect). 29 The memorial as built is
one of Lutyens's last and most idiosyncratic
executed works; in the flanking pavilions
and the observation pavilion at the top
of the tower he returned to themes that
had exercised him early in his career,
deconstructing Classical forms and
making them hang, as it were, in space.
Th is memorial was dedicated in 1938,
completing the Commission's task.
FIG . 19. MEN IN GATE AT YPRES, BELGIUM: REGINALD BLOMFIELD. I LANE BORSTAD.
a correspondent for The Times considered the flags on the Cenotaph in London but
that Forceville Community Cemetery Extension,
planted with yew hedges and lindens was scarcely a new problem, but Lutyens
was overruled. The design of a cemetery
as well as flowers, was "The most perfect, demonstrated here that he was able to rise
the noblest, the most classically beautiful
memorial that any loving heart or any and developing the Classical language of
to new heights of originality in abstracting
proud nation cou ld desire to their heroes architecture to give dignity to these "silent
fallen in a foreign land ... It is the simplest, cities of the dead".
it is the grandest place I ever saw". 26
Another impressive cemetery by Lutyens
Lutyens, as Principal Architect, was responsible
for designing or supervising 127 war Lutyens placed two exquisite lodges like
is that at Villers - Bretonneux w here
cemeteries in France and Belgium, although eighteenth-century garden pavilions at the
many of these were actually the work of roadside entrance. From here, the ground
his former assistant, Goldsmith. Lutyens rises in a gentle convex slope, past the
himself was certainly personally respon ­ Cross of Sacrifice standing between lines
sible for some of the larger cemeteries, of headstones, to reach a wall covered in
notably Etaples Military Cemetery near Le names either side of a look-out tower. This
Touquet, next to the site of the notorious is the Australian National War Memorial,
"Eat Apples" base camp - where a mutiny for it was here that Australian troops
had occurred in 1917. Here, above stone re-
checked General Ludendorff's offensive
taining walls on rising land overlooking the towards Ami ens in 1918. Originally the
railway from the Channel ports to Paris, he memorial was to have been the work of
placed two extraordinary cenotaphs either the Australian architect, William Lucas,
side of the Stone of Remembrance (fig. 13). who had won a competition in 1925, but
Each of these pylons rises above an arched his design was disliked by Ware and by
base and is flanked by stone flag s that General Talbot Hobbs, w ho had chosen the
hang ever stil l - as he wanted to do w ith site for the memorial. When the project was
Ware was distressed that the various constituent
parts of the Empire chose to erect
their own memorials as it undermined his
vision of Imperial co-operation and also led
to anomalies and the duplication of the
names of the Missing in certain cases, but
his persuasiveness- for once- was in vain.
The Union of South Africa naturally turned
to Baker for its memorial at Delville Wood,
where hellish fighting had taken place during
the Somme offensive. Baker was also
responsible for the Indian Memorial at
Neuve Chapelle, one of his happiest works
in which the Moghul, Hindu and Buddhist
elements used at New Delhi were combined
in a beautiful circu lar enclosure (fig. 14). New
Zealand chose to build several memorials to
its missing in different cemeteries. That at
Grevillers is by Lutyens; the one at Caterpillar
Valley by Baker; and those in Belgium,
at Polygon Wood and Messines, were designed
by Holden in his severe neoclassical
style. Canada, of course, chose not to use
one of the Commission's own architects,
but selected the sculptor Walter Seymour
Allward (as discussed by Lane Borstad and
Jacqueline Hucker in their articles).
It is instructive to compare the British war
cemeteries w ith those of the other fighting
powers. The French chose to concentrate
their dead in large cemeteries, with the
bones of the many unidentified casualties
put into ossuaries, as at Douamont near
16
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008

G AV IN S TAM P > ESS AY I ESSAI
FIG. 20. TYNE COT CEMETERY AN D MEMORIAL TO THE
MISSING: HERBERT BAKER. I GAVIN STAMP 1987.
FIG . 21. TYNE COT CEM ETERY, PASSCHENDAELE, BELGIUM,
BEFORE RECONSTRUCTION. ! IMPERIAL WAR MUSEU M.
FIG. 22. BERKS CEMETERY EXTENSION AN D MEMORIAL
TO THE MISSIN G, PLOE GS TEERT, BELGIUM: HAROLD
CHA LTON BRADSHAW; LIONS BY GI LBERT
LED WARD. I GAVIN STAMP 2007.
Verdun where a strange monumental
streamlined structure with a tower, designed
by Azema, Hardy & Edrei and built
1923-32, encloses a long barrel vaulted
chamber containing thousands upon thousands
of bones. As already mentioned, the
gravestone adopted by the French was
the cross, usually made of concrete, with
a stamped tin label attached bearing the
name ofthe dead man or the single, pathetic
w ord "lnconnu". A characteristic example
of French war memorial architecture is the
national memorial and cemetery of Notre­
Dame-de-Lorette, north of Arras, where a
tall lantern tower, containing an ossuary,
and a basilica rise above a vast sea of crosses
(fig. 15). There are 40,000 bodies in this
melancholy and desperate place, 24, 000 of
them in marked graves. The buildings were
designed by Louis-Marie Cordonnier and his
son Jacques Cordonnier, architects of the
basilica at Li sieu x, and built in 1921-27. Artistica
lly they are puzzling, as although there
is a slight Art Deco or modernistic quality
about the tower, the Byzantinesque church
might well have been designed deca des
earlier. Such architecture exhibits nothing
of the discipline and monumentality of the
British war cemeteries and memorials. It is
as if France had been so devastated by the
war that her architects were unable to rise
to the terrible occasion. The torch of classicism,
once kept alight at the Ecole des­
Beaux-Arts in Paris, w ould seem to have
been passed to American architects, so
many of whom were educated there. Their
monumental but rather pedantic classical
memorials are to be found in the American
war cemeteries east of the Somme,
establishing a ratio between the volume
of masonry and the number of casualties
far in excess of those of other nations.
The Germans were not permitted to erect
memorials in the places in France w here so
many of their soldiers died. Many bodies
were eventually taken back to Germany;
most were exhumed in the 1950s to be
concentrated in a few cemeteries, often in
mass graves. Where the Belgians permitted
permanent cemeteries to be constructed,
w ith lodges and walls, they were designed
in a rugged Arts and Crafts manner in dark
stone by Robert Tischler, architect to the
Volksbund Deutsche KriegsgraberfUrsorge,
the German counterpart to the War Graves
Commission, which had been established in
1919. Inside the walls, the graves are somet
imes marked by rough stone crosses but
many bodies lie under squares of granite
bearing perhaps eight or more names on
each . The cemeteries are often planted
w ith oaks, associated with Thor, the god
of war. These places were as carefully and
subtly designed as the British w ar cemeter-
ies and have a distinct stern, Teutonic char-
acter. The most impressive examples are at
Langemarck and at Vladslo (figs. 16- 17).
At the latter are the Trauernden Elternpaares
- the Mourning Parents - by Kathe
Kollwitz, in front of which lies the body of
her son, killed in 1914. Originally installed at
a nearby cemetery at Roggevelde in 1932,
these granite figures are surely among the
great scu lptures to emerge from the warpowerful
works or art to be ranked with
Allward's at Vimy, Jagger's on the Artillery
Memorial in London and Rayner Hoff's on
the Anzac Memorial in Sydney.
Most of the permanent British cemeteries
were completed by the mid-1920s. As a
feat of construction, this was a prodigious
achievement, not least as the Commission 's
engineers had to construct foundations in
unstable or waterlogged land, or in ground
riddled with old trenches, dug-outs, crate rs
and unexploded shells. Writing in 1937,
Ware recorded that,
in F1·ance and Belgium al one there are 970
architectu1· ally c on struct ed cemeteries
surrounded by 50 miles of walling in b1·ick or
stone, with nearly 1000 Crosses of Sacrifice
and 560 Stones of Remembrance, and many
chapels , record buildings and shelters; there
a1· e some 600,000 headstones resting on
nea1·ly 250 miles of concrete beam foundations.
There are al so eighteen la1·ger memorials to
those who have no known grave.
30
This w as one of the largest schemes of public
w orks ever undertaken by Great Britain,
far larger than the contemporary achievement
of the Office of Works erecting post
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' ·J > 2 008
17

G AVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 23. VIS-EN-ARTOIS BRITISH CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING, FRANCE: REGINALD TRUELOVE.[ GAVIN STAMP 1977.
offices and telephone exchanges (consistently
neo-Georgian in style) back home or
the celebrated creation of new modern
Edmund Blunden, in his introduction to
Fabian Ware's book, The Immortal Heritage
published in 1937, wrote how visitors
stations on the London Underground. to the cemeteries
Furthermore, high standards of design and
construction were maintained despite in- must be impressed and even astonished
creasing financial pressure as economic con - at the degree of beauty achieved by the
ditions worsened. Yet the work was surely creators and guardians of t hese resting
cheap at the price. The total cost of all the places The beauty, the serenity, the
Imperial War Graves Commission's cemeter- inspiration of the Imperial cemeteries
ies and memorials was £8,150,000, and to have been frequently acknowledged by
put this into perspective it is worth remem- more able eulogists; for my part, I venture
bering that the Treasury's account for the to speak of these lovely, elegiac closes
so-ca lled Third Battle of Ypres, that is, the (which almost cause me to deny my own
horror of Passchendaele in 1917, was £22 experiences in the acres they now grace)
million while just one day's shooting and as being after all the eloquent evidence
shelling in September 1918 cost some £3 .75 against war. Their very flowerfulness and
million. Sometimes it is cheaper as well as calm tell the lingerer that the men beneath
better to build rather than destroy.
that green coverlet should be there to
enjoy such influence, the tyranny of war
stands all the more terribly revealed. 31
Enough of the permanent cemeteries
had been completed by 1922 to convince
King George V that the Commission's
principles were right when he and Queen
Mary went on a pilgrimage to the battlefields.
At the end, in the cemetery at
Terlincthun outside Boulogne (fig. 18), in
the shadow of the Colonne de Ia Grande
Armee raised to the glory of Napoleon
and commemorating the planned invasion
of England, the King gave a speech
in which he claimed that,
Never before in history have a peop le
thus dedicated and maintained individual
memorials to their fallen , and, in the course
18
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008

G AVIN S TAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG . 24. LE TOURET MILITARY CEMETERY AND MEMORIAL TO TH E MISSING, FRANCE:
REGINALD TRUELOVE. I GAVIN STAMP 1990.
FIG . 25. DUD CORN ER CEM ETERY AN D LOOS MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING, LOOS, FRANCE:
HERBERT BAKER. I GAVIN STAMP 1990.
of my pilgrimage. I have many t imes asked
myself whet her there can be more potent
advocates of peace upon earth t hr ough the
yea r s to come. t han t his massed multitude of
silent witnesses to the desolation of wara 2
However, even with most of the Commission's
war cemeteries completed, over half
of the casualties remained uncommemorated:
the Missing -those whose mutilated
or burnt bodies were never identified, or
who were blown to pieces, or lost at sea .
Once the records had been gone through
and the sums done, it emerged that there
were over half a million of them: 517,000
men of the British Empire who had, in
effect, disappeared between 1914 and
1918. The Commission's principles nevertheless
held good and it was determined
that every single missing man was to receive
a permanent memorial. The question
was how. The idea of "false graves"
- headstones w ith no bodies beneath -
was mooted, and rejected. Furthermore,
if there were to be memorials bearing the
names of the missing, were they to be
organised by regiments, which was not
popular with relatives of the dead, or by
the geographical location of their death?
It was at first decided to have the names
of the missing carved on walls in eightyfive
of the cemeteries.
In the end, the project for memorials to
the missing was merged with a quite separate
proposal for battlefield memorials
endorsed by the government - something
with which Ware did not want the Commission
to become involved. In 1919 a National
Battlefield Memorial Committee was
set up under the chairmanship of the Earl
of Midleton. This soon encountered difficulties
and it became clear that there was
a danger of wasting taxpayers' money by
duplicating memorials in particular places
as well as having too many of them. The
situation was further complicated by the
natural desire of the Dominion governments
to erect their own memorials in
France and Belgium. When, in 1921, the
Commission was asked to handle land negotiations
for the proposed battlefield memorials,
it seemed more sensible for these
memorials to be combined with memorials
for the missing. The Midleton Committee
was dissolved and, for the first time, the
War Graves Commission considered building
large architectural monuments.
There were now to be a dozen large memorials
to the missing erected in France
and Belgium. Others were to be at Gallipoli,
Jerusalem and at Port Tewfik on
the Suez Canal (all eventually designed by
Burnet and Tait), in Basra (by Warren) and
Macedonia (by Lorimer). There were also
those to commemorate men lost at sea
(memorials at Chatham, Portsmouth and
Plymouth were designed by Lorimer, and
the Mercantile Marine Memorial at Tower
Hill by Lutyens). At Kenyon's suggestion,
each of the Commiss ion's Principal Architects
was to be given the opportunity to
design a memorial while the design of
the other memorials w as to be decided by
competitions. That for the memorial at La
Ferte-sous-Jouarre, commemorating the
Battle of the Marne, was to be limited to
the Commission's Assistant Architects (and
was won by Goldsmith).
The f irst and, in the end, the best known
of the Commission's memorials was built at
Ypres- " Wipers" -- the ancient, smashed
Flem ish city whose stubborn defence for
four years was inextricably associated w ith
the horror and tragedy of the war in the
public mind. The Ypres Salient was the
graveyard for a quarter of a million British
dead and in January 1919 Winston
Churchill announced to the Commission
that "I should like us to acquire the whole
of the ruins of Ypres" as a memorial, for "A
more sacred place for the British ra ce does
not exist in the w orld" 33 - an idea which,
not surprisingly, found little favour with its
longsuffering and displaced citizens. That
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008
19

GAVIN STAM P > ESSAY I ESSAI
same year, Reginald Blomfield was invited
by the government to survey sites in Ypres
for a memorial and he recommended the
spot where the seventeenth-century Men in
Gate by the great French military engineer
Vauban had once stood and the road into
the city passed over a moat and between
ramparts. By 1922 Blomfield's project
for the Menin Gate had developed into a
Memorial to the Missing containing a Hall
of Memory (fig. 19). Work began on building
it the following year as, all around, a
passable recreation of pre-war Ypres (today
leper) was slowly rising .
For Blomfield, the Menin Gate w as one of
three works he wanted to be remembered
by and "perhaps the only building I have
ever designed in which I do not want anything
altered". 34 The most conservative as
well as the oldest of the Commission's architects,
he designed a new gateway between
the ramparts which was long enough for
a noble vaulted stone hall to contain the
names of tens of thousands of Missing on
its wall s. At either end, inspired by Vauban
and informed by his knowledge of French
Classical architecture, Blomfield created
a grand arched entrance articulated by a
giant Roman Doric order. Above the parapet
of the arch facing outwards from the
city he placed a massive lion modelled by
William Reid Di ck: "not fierce and truculent,
but patient and enduring, looking
outward as a symbol of the latent strength
and heroism of our race" 35
Perhaps it was the slight triumphalist air
created by this feature which encouraged
Siegfried Sassoon angrily to dismiss the
whole thing as "a pile of peace-complacent
stone." Sassoon, who knew wel l enough
w hat the Ypres Salient had actually been
like, wrote his poem, 'On Passing the New
Menin Gate', so on after it had been inaugurated
with much ceremony in 1927 as
the first and most important of the Commission's
Memorials to the Missing. " Was
ever an immolation so belied I As these
intolerably nameless names? I Well might
the Dead who struggled in the slime I Rise
and deride this sepulchre of crime." But this
justifiably cynical interpretation perhaps
needs to be set against the reaction of the
Austrian writer (and pacifist), Stefan Zweig,
whose article published in 1928 in the Berliner
Tageblatt Blomfield was pleased to
quote in his Memoirs of an Architect:
Ypres has gained a new monument ... one that
is, both spi ritually and artistically, profoundly
impressive - the Menin Gate, erected by t he
English nation t o its dead, a monument m ore
moving than any other on English soil. . It is a
memorial . offered not to victory but t o the
dead - the victims - wit hout any distinction,
to the fal len Au stralians, English, Hindus and
Mohammedans who are immortalised t o the
same degree. and in the same chambers. in the
same stone, by vir t ue of the same deat h. Here
there is no image of the King , no mention of
victories, no genuflection to generals of genius,
no prattle about Archdukes and Princes: only a
laconic, noble inscript ion- Pro Rege Pro Patria.
In its really Roman simplicity t his m onument t o
the six and fifty thousand is more impressive
than any triumphal arch or monument t o victory
that I have ever seen. Js
This was surely a response which fully justified
the tolerant and eirenic vision of the
Imperial War Graves Commission.
In the event, although some 57,000 names
were carved in the Hall of Memory and
on the walls of the higher lateral galleries
facing the ramparts, the Menin Gate
proved to be nowhere near large enough
to commemorate all those disappeared in
the mud of the Salient. A further 37,000
names- mainly of those w ho perished at
Pa sschendaele- had to be carved on the
long, curving colonnaded wall of stone and
knapped flint w hich Herbert Baker designed
to frame the large Tyne Cot war cemetery
at Zillebeke (fig. 20). This cemetery was so
called because a Newcastle regiment had
nicknamed the strong German reinforced
concrete blockhouses "Tyne cottages" -
one, at the suggestion of King George V,
being retained to serve as the base for the
Cross of Sacrifice (fig. 21). But by the time
this cemetery and memorial was completed,
the Commission's plans for Memorials
to the Missing had undergone a crisis and
had completely to be rethought.
The French were not at all happy about
the memorials foreign governments proposed
to erect on their territory- and that
incl uded w hat w as proposed by Canada.
Concern was being expressed in local
newspapers- particularly about the scale
of the American memorials - and questions
were being asked in the Assemblee
Nationale. In 1926, it was reported that
"the French authorities were disquieted
by the number and scale of the Memoria
ls which the Commission proposed to
erect in France and that some modification
of the proposals was necessary". This
disquiet had resulted in the Commission
des Monuments Historiques reporting
adversely on the proposals for Memorials
to the Missing at Bethune, Saint-Quentin
and the Faubourg d'Amiens Cemetery in
Arras. Lutyens had been asked in 1923 to
design a memorial at Saint-Quentin to accommodate
60,000 names, later reduced
to 30,000, and had come up with the multiple
arch concept which would eventually
be realised at Thiepval. Here it was to be
almost 180 feet high and the principal arch
was to straddle a road- an idea no doubt
suggested by Blomfield's Men in Gate - but
the Corps des Ponts et Chaussees objected
to this straddling. At Arras, Lutyens proposed
an extraordinary high, thin arch, 124
feet high, as a memorial to missing airmen;
its sides were to consist of a vertical series
of diminishing blocks, each pierced by an
arched tunnel arranged on alternate axes
and filled with bells which would swing
and toll with the wind.
20
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

GAVIN STAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
In April1926, Major A.L.Ingpen, the Secretary­
General of the Anglo-French Mixed Committee
established in 1918 to smooth the
diplomacy required by the Commission's
work, explained the problem to Ware.
The Commission des Monuments Historiques
is of the op inion that the desi gns submitted ar'e
somewhat exaggerated, and too grandiose .
Further, and in view of t he fact that, owing
to the present financial conditions in France,
the French Go vernment can do nothing to
commemorate their ow n missing , s uch
grandiose monuments will not be understood,
or appreciated, by the general public, and may
gi ve rise to hostile comment, not only of an
international character, but also against the
Commissi on des Monuments Histor'iques itself
for having approved such grandiose schemes
put forwar d by a foreign govemment, for
execution on French territory.
lngpen feared that to raise a colossa l arch at
Saint-Quentin would seem, "in the eyes of
the public, to be unreasonably obtrusive,"
especially in a place where the French had
sustained as severe, if not greater losses.
Ware was not unsympathetic to this argument,
for France was suffering even more
than Britain from the losses of the war and
from the huge cost of reconstructing the
great swathe of country devastated by
the fighting, and he replied that "The attitude
of the Commission des Monuments
Historiques does not surprise me; indeed,
the only complaint one can offer about it is
that it was not made known to us earlier."
Others agreed, not least Lord Crewe, British
Ambassador to France, who informed Ware
"how strongly I feel that expensive and ostentatious
Memorials are out of place in
this country ...".
Ware had to use all his diplomatic skills to
"prevent a heap of trouble" and "a first
class row". He was particularly anxious to
stop the Monuments Historiques formally
reporting to the French Foreign Office that
FIG. 26. MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING OF TH E SOMME AT THIEPVAL, FRANCE: EDWIN LU TYEN S.I PIERRE ou PREY 1987.
it opposed the memorials at Arras, Vimy sma ller memorials to be erected in existing
Ridge and "the imposing and beautiful memorial
of Lutyens' at Saint-Quentin". Th e Lille, for which H.C. Bradshaw had won a
war cemeteries. The proposed memorial at
whole matter was discussed by the Anglo­ competition, was therefore taken over the
French Mixed Committee and it was eventually
agreed that proposed memorials at steert (fig. 22). Bradshaw had also won the
Belgian frontier to the cemetery at Ploeg­
Saint-Quentin, Cambrai, Bethune, Lille, and competition for the memorial at Cambrai
Pozieres should be abandoned and that, and this was now transferred to Louverval
instead of twelve memorials, there would cemetery. Similarly, J.R. Truelove designed
now only be four in France and two in Belgium.
The names ofthe Missing which cou ld Vis-en-Artois and Le Touret (figs. 23- 24).
memorials w ithin existing cemeteries at
not be accommodated on these purposebuilt
memorials would be transferred to memorials on the Somme were
Some of the names intended for several
transferred
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008
21

G AVIN S TAMP > ESSAY I ESSAI
to a memorial colonnaded wall designed by
W.H . Cowlishaw at Pozieres cemetery and
Herbert Baker designed a memorial in Dud
Corner cemetery (fig. 25) at Loos so called
because of the number of unexploded
shells found there) to replace the memorial
intended for Bethune. At Arras, Lutyens's
proposal for the Faubourg d'Amiens cemetery
was completely redesigned on a less
grandiose scale.
What remained to be established were
the locations of the four new memorials in
France. Land had already been acquired at
Scissons for the rather pedestrian memorial
by V.O. Rees with three stiff figures of
soldiers by Eric Kennington. The contract
for Goldsmith's memorial at La Ferte had
already been acquired and work had started
on Baker's Indian memorial at Neuve­
Chapelle. That left but one memorial to
replace the one at Saint-Quentin and the
two intended for the Somme battlefield,
at the Butte de Warlencourt and between
Contalmaison and Pozieres (which was to
have been designed by Baker). It was decided
that this- now the only battlefield
memorial to be built in France- must be
on the Somme, and at Thiepval. Lutyens
was asked to consider moving his Saint­
Quentin design to Thiepval Ridge and,
after further delicate negotiations, work
began in 1928.
The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
(fig. 26}, bearing the names of 73,000 men
on the internal walls between 16 piers,
was the last of the Imperial War Graves
Commission's memorials to be completed
(although the Australian Memorial at
Villers-Bretonneaux was not finished until
1938). Lutyens's vast, astonishing creation
was unveiled in 1932 and is arguably the
finest British work of architecture of the
twentieth century- even if on the other
side of the English Channel- although, in
both its reliance on developing the classical
tradition and in having no place for
figurative sculpture, it represents a very
different approach to that adopted by
Canada at Vi my Ridge for commemorating
the terrible losses of the Great War.
[Editor's note: This article is an expanded
version of the relevant text in the author's
recent book on The Memorial to the Missing
of the Somme, Profile Books, London
2006, reviewed by Joan Coutu at the end
of this issue.]
NOTES
1. Quoted in Ware, Fabian, 1937, The Immortal
Heritage, Cambridge, Unive rsity Press, p. 56.
Documents not otherwise sourced are in the
archives of the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission at Maidenhead, Berkshi re.
2. Gradidge, Roderick, 1981, Edwin Lutyens, Architect
Laureate, London, George Allen & Unw in,
p. 84.
3. 12" July 1917, quoted in full in Percy, Clayre and
Jane Rid ley eds., 1985, The Letters of Edwin
Lutyens to his wife Lady Emily, London, Collins,
pp. 349-350.
4. report to the War Office, March 1915, quoted
in Longworth, Philip, 1967, The Unending Vigil,
London, Constable, p. 7.
5. Blunden, Edmund, in Ware: 16-17.
6. quoted in Longw orth: 14.
7. Longworth: 13.
8. quoted in Longworth: 25.
9. quoted in Macdonald, Lyn, 1983, Somme, London,
Michael Joseph, p. 337.
10. Blunden: 15-16.
11. Ridley, Jane, 2002, The Architect and his Wife.
A Life of Edwin Lutyens, London, Chatto & Windus,
p. 278.
12. 23'' & 24'h August 1917, in Percy & Ridley: 251 -
252.
13. Crozier, F.P., 1930, A Brass Hat in No Man's Land,
London, Jonathan Cape, p. 43 .
14. 14" October 1917, in Percy & Ridley: 355-356.
15. quoted in Lloyd, Da vi d W., 1998, Battlefield
To urism. Pilgrimage and the Commemoration
of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada,
1919-1939, Oxford, Berg .
16. Ware: 38.
17. 28" & 29" August 191 7, in Percy & Ridley:
354-355.
18. quoted in Longworth: 47.
19. Baker, Herbert, 1944, Architecture & Personalities,
London, Country Life, p. 93.
20. Brown, Jan e, 1999, The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social
History of Gardens and Gardening, London,
Harper Collins, pp. 71 -72.
21. Worpole, Ken, 2003, Last Landscapes: The Architecture
of the Cemetery in the West, London,
Reaktion, p.166.
22. Blomfie ld, Sir Reginald, 1932, Memoirs of an
Architect, London, Macmillan, p. 18 1.
23. Ware: 31 .
24. W.C. von Berg to the author, 13 August, 1977.
25. W.C. von Berg to the author, 13 August and
13 September, 1977. Biographical details of all
these architects are given in Stamp, Gavin, 1977,
Silent Cities, London.
26. Keegan, John, 1998, The First World War, London,
Hutchinson, p. 316.
27. see Crellin, David, "'Some corner of a foreign
field': Lutyens, Empire and the Sites of Remembrance"
in Hopkins, Andrew, and Gavin Stamp
eds., 2002, Lutyens Abroad, London, British
School at Rome, and Karol, Eitan, 2007, Charles
Holden, Architect, Donington, Shaun Tyas.
28. The Times 2 September, 1920, quoted by Longworth:
67-68.
29. for this scanda l, see Marr, David, in the Sydney
Morning Herald for 26" April 1997 and Lutyens
Abroad: 233.
30. Ware: 56.
31. Ware: 20.
32. The King's Pilgrimage, London, Hodder &
Stoughton.
33. 21 January, 1919, quoted in Dendooven, Dominiek,
2001 , Menin Gate & Last Post, Koksijde,
De Klaproos, p. 20.
34. Blomfield :189; the others w ere the Quadrant
of Regent Street and Lambeth Bridge, both in
London.
35. Ibid.
36. Berliner Tageblatt 16 September, 1916, quoted
in Blomfield: 190-191 .
22
JSSAC I JSE AC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

ESSAY
ESSAI
WALTER ALLWARD: SCULPTOR AND ARCHITECT
OF THE VIMY RIDGE MEMORIAL
LANE BORSTAD rs Chairperson of Fine Ar'tS .
Grande Pr' air'ie Regional College , Alberta . His
>LANE 80RSTAD
1990 Queen's Universil:y MA thesis, A Catalogue
of Ol'awings and Sculpture of Walter Seymour
Allward 11876-19551. remains the acknowledged
authority on its subject . In November' 2007
he or'ganized a conference, Monuments and
Memorials, which dealt with Vimy and other' srtes
of remerT1brance .
INTRODUCTION
Before the First World War, English Canada
reflected the shared values and experiences
of an emerging nation deeply concerned
with national identity and patriotism. Sculpture
in English Canada around 1900, similar
to nineteenth-century European sculpture
from which it derived,' was "dedicated
to the celebration of the nation's heroes,
institutions, and middle class values. " 2 In
1898, W.A. Sherwood ARCA described the
relationship between sculpture and nationalism
as follows:
The Fine Arts could be most effectually
used to develop a strong patriotic national
pride. The heroic statues of England
have made thou sands of heroes. The little
schoolboy winding his way t hrough the parks
of France and Germany learns more of the
true meaning of patriotism as he gazes upon
the bronze figures of native celebrities than
he could possibly do under the guidance of
the most enthusiastic teacher. Our country
has no dearth of heroes. 3
Hamilton MacCarthy RCA 4 , another academician
and one of the leading Canadian
sculptors of the day, gave expression to
the traditional canon of sculpture:
FIG. 1. WALTER ALL WARD, NORTHWEST REBELLION MEMORIAL, TORONTO (BORST AD CATALOGUE #506),
1894-96. I LANE BORSTAD.
Sculpture through its beauty and a/ fresco
endurance is especially fitted to present and
express the incidents and achievements of
history; the heroes. heroines and patriots
who have bu ilt up t heir country and the Empire
upon which the sun never sets. Statues are
ever present reminders to youth of the glory
of the past and the potential greatness of the
future, and witnesses to the power and pride
which every citizen should fee l in the heritage
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008 > 23,38
23

L ANE B aRSTA D > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG . 2. WALTE R ALLWA RD, ARMY AND NAVY VETERANS
MEMORIAL, TO RO NTO (BORSTAD CATALOGUE #523),
1906. I LANE 80RSTAD.
FIG. 3. HAM ILTION MACCARTHY, SOUTH AFRICAN WAR
MEMORIAL, OTTAWA, 1902.ILANE 80RSTAD.
artistic training or temperament come
from Frederick Challener who mentions
Allward trying painting at William
Cruikshank's studio in 1890."A year later
he attended evening modeling classes at
Central Technica l school on College Street.
In order to "improve his natural talent as a
draughtsman", 12 he joined a sketch ing club
(Toronto Art Students' League). Allward's
only other formal training was limited
to a period of four years (1891-1895) as
draughtsman for the firm of Henry Gibson
and Charles Simpson" that he later described
as his "little instruction in architecture
in early years". 14 This was fol lowed by
employment at the Don Valley Pressed
Brick Works where he executed designs
in terra-cotta for architectural decoration.
Among the other sculptors employed to
produce designs was Hamilton MacCarthy 15
already quoted above, who also went on
which he po ssesses, and which he hop es to Starting w ith Allward's first public com- to a successful career as a sculptor and
hand down to posterity. 5 mission at the age of eighteen, and cui- designed many memorials in Canada. While
Walter Allward, the future scu lptor and
architect of the Canadian Memorial at
Vimy Ridge, worked successfully within
the academic tradition as is amply dem-
onstrated by his early monuments to
politicians and "native ce lebritie s" 6 His
romantic and emotional nature, however,
found fuller expression in a long series of
w ar memorials. He alluded to this romantic
nature when describing the source of his
inspiration:
Every true disciple of art weaves out of the
dream !which! his ow n heart kn ows. There
can be nothing tangible about art.'
James Mavor in writing about Allward
minating with his major life's work at
Vimy Ridge in France, his focus on the
intangible in art drew him to evoke emo-
tional responses by using human figures
as timeless symbols.
WALTER ALLWARD
The earli est known record of the career of
Walter Seymour Allward appears in the 2
March, 1895 edition of Saturday Night. A
short notice, in the "Art News" co lumn,
noted that the model for his Northwest
Rebellion monument (fig. 1) 9 had been
completed' 0 This rather unassuming notice
gives little hint of his future career as Canada's
leading sculptor of war memorials.
still designing terra-cotta reliefs, Allward
received his first public comm ission, the
monument to commemorate the Northwest
Rebellion of 1885. 16
EARLY MEMORIAL COMMISIONS
In 1894 Allward began work on the Northwest
Rebellion (fig. 1) in rented studio
space on Adelaide Street East and the
following year moved his studio to Room
19 of the Studio Building; the same studio
in which he had taken his first art classes
from William Cruickshank f ive years earlier.
Working for the Mcintosh Granite Company,
Wilson Grey designed the elaborate
base of the monument itself and Allward
was awarded the subcontract to model the
in the Year Book of Canadian Art, 1913 Allward was born on November 18, 1876 simpler and more elegant figure of Peace
stated that Allward's: in Toronto. He attended Dufferin Public that stands on the top' ' The overall design
fig u1' es tell their symbolic stol'Y with the
imperturbable assurance which is the si gn
of all high art, "Thu s an d not ot herwise .
must these things be " 8 school in the east end, learned carpentry
from his father and, aside from anecdotal
references to playing in the clay banks of
the Don Val ley, little else is known relating
to his youth. The earliest references to
is reminiscent of the nearby Niagara Vol-
unteers monument by Robert Reid, w hich
was erected in 1870 18 and is in stark contrast
to the simplified forms favoured by
Allward in all his later commissions'' There
24
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LANE B ORSTAO > ESSAY I ESSAI
is already an indication of the meticulous
attention to detail that Allward maintained
throughout his career and which
often resulted in his failure to complete
comm iss ions w ithin the promised time 20
Grey's pedestal was in place by January
of 1896, but portions of Allward 's clay
models w ere only "massed in" with much
work "yet to be done."" This is the monument
Allward later referred to when he
described a confrontation between himse
lf and a memorial committee:
I haven't had an easy t ime. I remember that
one of my first committees sent guards t o
look after what they regarded as their wor-k.
I was doing a detail figure for a memorial for
which a big t om bstone building firm held the
main contr-act. I did not get it though when
they thought it ought t o be done, and they
began t o nag. I sa id at last, "if you do not
stop hurrying me I'll break the figure". They
took me literally. Next day came men to
place scaffolding about the com pleted work
an d a guard to watch me as I worked. 22
Despite a tough start, in the next decade
Allw ard became one of English-speaking
Canada's most sought-after sculptors of
historical figures for such organizations
as the Normal School Education Museum,
the Province of Ontario, and the Federal
Government in Ottawa. He also received
major private commissions such as that
in Brantford, Ontario to commemorate
Alexander Graham Bell's invention of the
telephone in that city-"
FIG. 4. WA LT ER ALLWARD, SOU TH AFRICAN WAR MEMORIAL, TORONTO (BOR ST AD CATALO GUE #524), 1907.1LANE BORSTAO.
In 1904, he re ce ive d his secon d war memorial
commission, the Army and Navy
Veterans Memorial to commemorate the
War of 1812, (fig.2). This sma ll work represents
a new direction in Allward's career.
Hi s previous work commemorated
famous statesmen where he had been
constrained by tradition and conventions
of portraiture. Hale w rote that Allward's
figure tells:
the tale of soldiers whose battles wer-e fought
long ago, here indeed is a little neglected shrine
of art. For the half figure of I the I soldier, with
his empty coat sleeve and his eager wonderful
old face is absolutely haunting. 24
While stil l maintaining the careful descriptive
details, he had chosen to emphasize
the humanity and pathos of
the old so ldier. In contrast, Hamilton
MacCarthy 's South African War Memorial
(1902), accurately records the
costume and details of the so ldier (fig.
3) and through its accuracy, conforms
to the traditional canon of scu lpture,
which MacCarthy advocated. 25 This canon
sought to represent incidents, achievements
and heroes; not the human and
personal experience of those incidents
and achieve ments.
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25

L ANE B aRSTAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 5. WA LTER ALLWA RD, PLASTERS FOR STRATFORD WAR
MEMORIAL (BORSTAD CATA LOGUE #537), 1922.
FIG . 6. WA LTER ALLWARD, ALLEGORICAL FIGURE FROM
PETERBOROUGH WAR MEMORIAL, PETE RB ORO UGH
(BORSTAD CATALOGUE #535), 1921.
The South African War (1892-1902), also
known as the Boer War, was the first
time Canada's troops were in an overseas
expedition . Two hundred, si xtyseven
Canadians who served in South
Africa died. Allward's memorial to the
South African War 26 (fig. 4) shares some
of the personal qualities first seen in the
old so ldier of the Army and Veterans
Monument. The sculpture is by far the
most grand and ambitious that A llward
had yet created. Its figures do not lapse
into anonymity by the use of traditiona l,
static or conventional poses . The success
of the monument lies in A llward's ability
to fuse both individual emotions and
responses to war with the nationalistic
aspirations of the country. The individua
lized figures of the soldiers "take
away all cheap necessity for heroic pose
or theatric gesture" 27 and the idealized
figure:
is the young mother, Canada , sending out
her sons to battle for the Empire And there
WORLD WAR I MONUMENTS
IN CANADA
World War I not only had a profound
emotional impact upon Allward, it had a
major effect upon his career as a sculptor.
Already proficient at designing large-scale
monuments, he turned his skill s tow ard
the production of memorials in response
to the grief and pride felt by Canadians at
the close of hostilities. As a result of "the
general wave of enthusiasm for building
monuments that swept the country", 30 Allward
received commissions for memorials
in Stratford (fig. 5), Peterborough (fig. 6),
and Brantford (fig. 9).
The first commission, Stratford War
Memoria/,1920-1922 (fig. 5) was the only
monument of the three new commissions
completed in its entirety by A llward. Hi s in ­
itial tender w as dated September 9, 1920 3 '
and by 1922, the figures were complete.
A Canadian Company, The Architectural
Bronze and Iron Company of Toronto, did
is t hat in her attitude, in the heroic soul of the casting in March of 1922 32
her imprisoned in the inflexible bronze, that
makes one glad of one's country 28
Al lward chose his own mother as his
inspiration and model . 29 The soldiers
appear believable as young men being
sent to war. They display no false bravado,
heroics or drama. This personal
touch and the sheer ordinariness of the
soldiers make the sculpture access ible to
the viewer and lend a timeless quality to
Allward's w ork that is often lost in other
war memorials.
Although the Canadian government at
the time stated that thi s use of Canadian
soldiers overseas did not set
precedent, history w ould prove them
wrong . In 1914, Canada w as again at
war. This t ime over 600,000 Canadian
soldiers served abroad; 66,655 gave
the ir lives.
At Stratford, A ll ward used two free
standing al legorical figures. Gone are
all references to specif ic place and time.
Rather than portray a Canadian soldier
in a traditional pose, Allward stated that
the figure "on the high ground expresses
the better, the spiritual man, while going
down into the valley is the disarmed
figure of strife, the group showing the
supremacy of right over brute force" B
These are not " heroes, heroines and patriots";
nor do they represent the "incidents
and achievements of history." By avoiding
the stock stereotype emblems and attributes
so typical of his contemporaries, 34 Allw
ard aligned himself closer to the Fren ch
romantic tradition of Auguste Rodin than
the academic sculpture tradition of Can ­
ada . Stratford represented the culmination
of a stylistic evolution that can be traced
26
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L ANE BDRSTAD > ESSAY I ES SAI
FIG. 7. WALTER ALLWA RD, SKETCH FOR BRANT FO RD WAR
MEMORIAL (BORSTAD CATALOGUE #221), C 192 1.
FIG. 8. WA LTER ALL WARD, PHOTOGRAPH OF PLASTER
MODEL FOR BRANTFORD, C. 1921.
FIG. 9. WA LTER ALL WARD, BRAN TFORD WAR MEMORIAL,
BRANTFORD (BORSTAD CATALOGUE #538), 1930.
sketches may relate to the Brantford fig-
in Allward's career from the traditional
biographical representation of Simcoe
(Toronto) through progressively bolder designs
of South African Memorial (Toronto),
Baldwin and Lafontaine (Ottawa) and Bell
Telephone Memorial (Brantford).
This evolution continued in the commission
Allward received in 1918, for the Peterborough
War Memorial, 1918-1922 (fig. 6). The
sketch model was completed in November
1920 35 and once again, Allward designed
the monument with two large allegorical
bronze figures similar to Stratford. Here,
Allward's romantic debt to Rodin is again
evident in the handling of the figures and
treatment of surfaces. More importantly,
however, is the use of a wall to define the
space. This results in a stage like setting
upon which the characters act out their dramatic
confrontation. The drama becomes
even more powerful when the viewer enters
the defined space.
Allward explained that one figure is
standing:
with out stret ched han d, the idle sh iel d worn
on the back of the figure and an id le sword
expressing t he idea t hat there can be no
further conflict On the r ight is the figure of
strife or ba r barism , beat en and retreating
before the strengt h of civilizat ion , the sword
ha s fa llen t o the ground and t he flambeau
has been extinguished. 36
Here are the lofty and universal ideas, dramatic
gestures, and powerful silhouettes
set against the sky that Allward came to
favour. The models for the Peterborough
figures were finished by Allward in 1921 but
he was unable to complete the commission
because he won the competition for the
Canadian Memorial in France and subsequently
left for England in June 1922. 37
He was also unable to complete Brantford
War Memorial (1921-1930) and the city
of Brantford was never to receive its memorial
as originally conceived. 38 The initial
design of the monument was to include
a group of bronze figures representing
humanity depicted by:
the wounded fi gure of a r ecumbent youth
gazing up at th e cross , wh ile a mother,
with head held high, typifies unbroken faith
and pa t riotic fervor; a t hird figure is in t he
attitude of praye r.os
As Allward states, these figures were
never completed because "of my whole
time being given to Vimy". 40
Among All ward's drawings severa l
ures, but none agrees exactly with the
description quoted above. One drawing
(fig. 7) inscribed as the Brantford war me-
morial 41 represents the breaking of the
sword rather than a recumbent youth and
mother. There are also no drawings that
include pylons in a configuration similar
to the completed monument (fig. 9).
The architect credited with the construction
of the memorial was Walter Allward's
eldest son, Hugh L. Allward 42 and it may
be that Hugh in fact is responsible for the
design. A third architect is also associated
with the project. Undated blueprints in
the Ontario Archives entitled Proposed
Memorial Gallery - Brantford War Memorial
are signed by C. H. Brooks, Architect.'3The
monument depicted is identical
to the monument as built in Brantford.
It is not possible then to assign exclusive
credit for the Brantford memorial to Walter
Allward. He may have been responsible
for the initial concept. Hi s plaster
model included pylons and a grave below
that strongly foreshadow the concept for
Vi my, but the orientation and the lack of
figurative sculpture differ from Brantford
as executed (fig. 8).
PERSONAL DRAWINGS AT THE
START OF THE WAR
Walter Allward never took an active part in
the war, nonetheless he "reacted strongly
to the brutality of enemy invasions
and conquest". 44 A series of pen and ink
drawings dating from 1913/14 give a very
personal self-portrait of the artist as he
approached mid-life, a successful sculptor
JSSAC ! JSE':AC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
27

L ANE BaRSTAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
'
' .t
furnishings, are placed on the floor to the
right and in the space above the musician
floats a group of faint intertwined
figures. By dividing the composition in
half with the dark heavily drawn figure
of the cel list at the bottom and the lightly
drawn cloud of figures at the top, Allward
suggests the division between an earthly
sphere of existence and a heavenly one.
The link between the two is provided by
the upward glance of the player. Allward,
himself a ce ll ist, may be portraying divine
inspiration for the creation of the artsthe
artist and his muses. 45
FIG . 10. WALTER ALLWARD, THE MUSICIAN (BORST AD CATALOGUE #18), 1914.
of public monuments. The drawings have public art. The folly inherent in the pursuit
a dark, ominous, and melancholic quality of earthly pleasure, the passage of time,
that reflects Allward's romantic nature and inevitability of death, personal sacrifice,
show him to have been a private and introspective
individual. They also are marked throughout the balance of his career.
a sense of entrapment, all form themes
by a strong spiritual quality that reappears
in the form of Christian symbols of sacrifice
and resurrection in all of his later a small enclosed space reminiscent of a
In The Musician (fig . 10) a cellist sits in
monument studies. Here are the private jail cell with a high barred w indow to the
emotional struggles that he wove into his left. A sleeping mat and bowl, the only
Like The Musician, the composition of
Death of Artist (fig. 11) is divided into two
realms. The drawing depicts the interior of
an artist's studio with the figure of the artist
lying dead or dying on a bed to the left.
A mourning figure is collapsed across the
artist's body. On the right, is a large painting
of a crucifixion set on an easel. A small
table with palette and brushes is placed
at its base. In the centre of the picture, a
bearded face floats above the scene. The
painting of Christ's death, on the right, parallels
the artist's death, on the left. The position
and identification of the artist's death
with the sacrifice of Christ evokes the image
of the misunderstood and self-sacrificing
artist whose greatness is only recognized
after death. The reference to resurrection
is reinforced by the pale line drawing of a
bearded Christ floating near the painting.
This drawing is the earliest use of overtly
Christian religious symbols which Allward
used extensively in his later designs and
drawings made during World War 11. 46
Another drawing, The Sculptor's Studio (fig.
12), also incorporates re ligious symbolism
in its church-like setting but evokes even
stronger allusions to death. Lying on the
floor is a nude female figure in a cruciform
position. The large wound on her
side reinforces the association with Christ.
Auto-biographical elements are present as
28
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L ANE B DR STAO > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 11 . WALTER ALLWAR D, DEA TH OF ARTIST (BORSTAO
CATALOGUE #19), C.19 14.
FIG. 12. WALTER ALL WA RD, UNTITLED- SCULPTOR'S STUDIO FIG. 13. WA LTER ALL WARD, THE INQUISITION (BORST AD
(BO RST AD CATALOGUE #2 0), C19 14. CATALOGUE #21 ), C. 1914.
this is clearly a vaulted, Gothic-style sculptor's
studio as seen by the unfinished statue
at the center of the composition. The ladder
that leans against the wall may allude
to Jacob's vision of a ladder between earth
and heaven (Genesis 28:12) or to the ladder
used at Christ's crucifixion in the Descent
from the Cross. In either case, the suggestion
is spiritual in nature; the Ascension
to heaven or an allusion to the sacrifice
of Christ similar to that in Death of Artist.
Also similar to Death of Artist is the reference
to death in the act of creation: the
painting remains unfinished on the easel;
the sculpture remains unfinished on the
stand. In this case, however, it is the model
who is dead.
The Inquisition (fig. 13) is dominated by
violence. This image portrays a male figure
bound and hung by the wrists being
stretched by a rope tied about his ankles.
This work maintains the left-right juxtaposition
of conflicting narrative elements
as the robed figures, sitting in judgment
on a raised dais to the right, are balanced
by the tortured figure to the left. The
artist palette and brushes beneath the
unfortunate individual, add an autobio- CANADIAN BATTLEFIELDS
graphical note in keeping with Allward's MEMORIALS: THE COMPETITION -
other works of this period. The artist is FIRST STAGE
held responsible for some unknown crime
and suffers the torture by the cloaked The federal government discussed the
members of the inquisition . The all- erection of a memorial to honour Cansuffering
artist and critical dispassionate ada's casualties of World War I as early
audience seem to be implied.
as 1917 and on 2 September, 1920, the
Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commis-
A final image from this series of draw- sion (CBMC) was constituted by Order in
ings (fig. 14) summarizes the tragedy and Councii. 48 The role of the commission was
hopelessness of the war years. Christ has to oversee:
returned only to find a battlefield strew
with the bodies of the dead.
(1J Eight m emorials of a permanent character
and w orthy of the events commemorated.
Allward did not abandon the personal expressive
elements displayed in his drawings
when confronted with the demands Canadian architects, de sig ners, sculptors
(2J That a competition in design, open to all
of public monuments. By 1914, he had and other artists should be held to determine
already left behind the sculpture advocated
by his Canadian contemporaries
the desi gn or desi gns to be adopted 4 9 .
such as Hamilton MacCarthy, who stated The first meeting of the commission was
that "the highest plane in statuary [is] held in November 1920, at which time it
reached in the Ideal single figure, commonly
armed and emblematic". 47 Personal tion would be held and that not less than
was decided that a two-stage competi­
and emotional elements animate Allward's
largest commission- The Canadian the first stage would be invited to submit
ten, nor more than twenty, competitors in
Memorial in France.
models for the second and final stage. 50 The
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
29

L ANE B DRSTAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 15. WA LTER ALL WARD, MEMORIA L STUOY( BORSTAD
CATALOG UE #226), C. 1921.
FIG. 16. WALTER ALLWARD, MEMORIAL STUDY (BORST AD
CATALOGUE #235), C. 1921.
Conditions of Competition in Design for
Eight Memorial Monuments to be erected
in France and Belgium was issued 20 December,
1920 with the deadline for submis-
1920, the stark reality of the cost in husion
of proposal s set for 15 April, 192 1.5'
rather than intellectual base for his art,
visible in his drawings just considered, became
the hallmark of all of his later work.
As he himself later stated:
Back of all high art, I am convinced there
final design apart. Confronted with the
magnitude of World Wa r I, he sought
to express loss, sorrow and futility. By
man lives overw helmed the feelings of
patriotism expressed in his South Afri-
ALLWARD'S DRAWINGS FOR must be - not so much the intell ectual - must can Memorial. The stoic mother w ho
THE CANADIAN MEMORIAL IN be truly and loftily the emotional. Ther e is no sent her sons to w ar in 1902 has now
FRANCE artist like the heart. 52 returned to foreign shores to gather
up the dead (fig. 17). Death, which pre-
In the fall of 1920, Allward, in his mid for- The preliminary designs for the Can - dominates his personal drawings, now
ties with a substantial body of work be- ad ian Memorial in France or Belgium became central to his memorial studies
hind him, w as one ofthe leading sculptors demonstrate this tendency to emo - and the thoughts that inspired them. As
in English Canada. The highly emotional tion over intellect, w hich set Allw ard's he wrote in 1922:
30
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L ANE B DR STAO > ESSAY I ESSAI
Without the thought of the dead we could
not have carried on , during the war, or
afterwards. It is this feeling I have t r ied to
express. 53
The recurrent reference to dreams in the
personal drawings of the period also reappears
when, in the same interview of
1922, Allward famously revealed the inspiration
for his design to Anne Perry:
When things were at their blacke s t in
France. during the war. I went to sleep one
night after dwelling on al l the muck and
misery over there. M y spirit was like a t hing
tormented. So I dreamed. In my dream I
wa s on a great bat tlefield . I saw our men
going by in thousands, and being mowe d
down by the sickles of death, regiment after
r·egiment, division after division. Suffering
beyond en durance at the sight, I turned
my eyes and found myself looking down an
avenue of poplars. Suddenly through this
avenue. I saw thousands m arching to the
aid of our armies. They were the dead. They
r ose in masses, fil ed silently by and entered
the fight, to aid the living. So vivid was this
impr ession, that when I awoke it stayed w ith
me for months. 54
FI G. 17. WALTER ALLWARD, CANADIAN MEMORIAL IN FRANCE, ROUGH SKETCH (BOR ST AD CATALO GUE #237), 1921.
In trying to capture the intangibility of
the dream and his own romantic sentiment,
Allward produced hundreds of
drawings that finally culminated in his
design for what would become the Vimy
Ridge War Memorial. 5 5
It is not possible to reconstruct the development
of his ideas in detail, but it
is possible to see a general trend from
traditional concepts such as Gothic triumphal
arches w ith allegorical figures
of the "People of France and Defenders"
(fig. 15), to a highly personal final
concept. Many of the drawings, for
example (fig. 16), reflect the work of
the Imperial War Graves architects, in
particular Edwin Lutyens.
FIG . 18. WALTER ALLWARD, MEMORIAL STUDY (BORST AD
CATALOG UE #236), C. 1921.
One series of drawings entitled Canadian
Memorial in France, Rough Sketch (fig.
17) shows clearly what must be one of Allward's
initial designs and one that provided
many elements for the final monument. It
was labeled by Allward: "Canada comes to
France to claim her glorious dead", "the
immortal dead" and "the solid wa lls of defense"
and "the failure of Germany on the
wall of broken France". The figure of Canada
and the walls of defense evolved as Allward
simplified the design and removed the overt
references to the dead (figs. 18, 19). Direct
FIG. 19. WALTER ALLWARD, MEMORIAL STUDY (BORST AD
CATALOGUE #235), C. 1921.
references to France, victors or the defeated,
are eliminated and the dead are replaced by
a symbolic tomb (fig. 20). Lutyens's Stone of
Remembrance may be the source (see Gavin
Stamp's article in this issue)-' 6
A parallel source of inspiration appears to
have come from earlier Allward ideas for
memorials. These include a Sketch for the
Plains of Abraham, 1913 (fig. 21) and Sketch
for a Memorial on the St. Lawrence River
(fig. 22), which may have been conceived as
a memorial to the sinking of the Empress
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
31

L ANE BaRSTAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
is the Spirit of Sacrifice, who giving all , throws
the t orch to his Comrade. Looking up, they see
the figures of Peace, Justice, Truth, Knowledge,
&c ., for which they fought. chant ing the Hymn
of Peace. Around t he figures are the shield s of
Britain, Canada and France, On the outside of
the pylons is the Cross. 57
THE COMPETITION · SECOND
STAGE
When the results ofthe preliminary stage
of the competition were made public
on 21 April, 1921, Allward's design was
one of the seventeen chosen from the
160 submissions. 58 After reviewing the
seventeen submissions, the assessors 59
recommended on 10 September that two
designs alone should be executed. The
assessors' report stated:
Of t hese desi gn s .. that by Mr. Allward ,
wh ich in our opin ion is specia ll y fine and
FIG . 20. WALTER ALL WARD, VI MY MEMORIAL STUDY (BORSTAD CATALOGUE #242), C. 1921.
of Ireland in May 1914. In the Sketch for behind the wall of defense and the figure
the Plains of Abraham, a tall Gothic towerlike
of Canada returns to the wall, mourning the
structure is placed on high cliffs over­
dead now represented by the tomb below.
looking the sea. The cliffs are replaced by The defenders and mourning figures flank
high ground and the structure is once again the wall at the base of the stairs. The jamb
simplified as the initial structure evolves into sculptures of the Gothic arch proposal have
a massing of rectilinear forms reminiscent ascended to the top of the pylons.
of the pylons ultimately used by Allward at
Vimy. The introduction ofthe long horizontal Allward explained the finished design in
wall behind the vertical elements anticipates the following allegorical terms:
Allward's design and was labeled: "Symbolic
figure above & guarding the tomb below At the base of the impregnable wall of defense
the resting figure with broken wings" and are the Defenders; one group sho w ing the
"comrades of the dead Peace keeping and Breaking of the Sword, the other the Sympathy
guarding the tomb" (fig. 23).
of the Canadians for t he Helpless. Above these
are the mouths of guns, cover ed with olive and
By combining elements from the Vimy laurels. On the wall stands an heroic figure of
Memorial Study with other sketch designs Canada , brooding over the graves of her valiant
illustrated here, Allward arrived at his final, dead ; below is suggest ed a grave, with helmet,
Design for Canadian Memorial for Vimy laurels , etc. Behind her stand two pylons
Ridge or Other Sites (fig. 24). The pylons, symbolizing the two forces - Canadian and
now two in number, have been moved French- while between, at t he base of these,
makes a very high appeal to t he imagination .
we su ggest sho ul d be erected once only ..
It is a design of s uch individuality and
complexity t hat its character preclude s it
from the possibility of repetition 60
This recommendation conflicted with the
wishes of Percy Nobbs, the architectural
adviser to the CBMC, who expressed on
numerous occasions his preference for a
series of smaller monuments." The consensus
was, however, in Allward's favour
and his design soon received public approval.
A . Y. Jackson, the outspoken
member of the Group of Seven, came to
the defense of the design in a letter to
the editor of the Canadian Forum:
Th e Allward de sign was really hors concours.
It went beyond and above anything the framers
of t he competition conceived of. He ignored the
rest r ictions t he other competitors accepted.
After seeing his design one feels t here should
have be en no r estrictions an d not that he
should have worked within t hem.
32
JSS AC I JSE AC 33 > N' 1 > 2 008

L AN E B DR STAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
Then . as there is to b e one dom inant
memorial. t he other memorials should be
de si gned in relation to it. The second prize
de sign bears no relation t o the fir st. fine as
it may be by itself. When one t r ie s to form
a conception of the A llward monument and
the four or five replicas of the Clemesha 62
monument along the battle line one is
acutely consciou s of discord 63
Second place went to Frederick Chapman
Clemesha from Regina and the monument
he designed w as eventually placed
at Saint-Julien in Belgium. The remainder
of the sites uniformly received a stone of
remembrance (not unlike Lutyens's Great
War Stone or Stone of Remembrance)
with the names of the local battles engraved
on it.
Having w on the competition for the memorial,
Allw ard spent the remainder of
1921 and the spring of 1922 preparing to
move to Europe in order to oversee construction
of the memorial. On 12 April,
1922, Allw ard w as honoured at the Arts
and Letters Club's final dinner of that
winter. The program for the evening,
presided over by Vincent Massey, included
a one-act comedy of the "near
north" entitled From their own Place
w ith Arthur Li smer playing one of the
character parts, and a valedictory of Allw
ard given by Robert Holmes, supplemented
by photos by M. 0. Hammond
"thrown upon the screen". 64 His studio
and house sold, the All w ard 's departed
for Belgium on 6 June, 1922. 65
VIMY RIDGE MEMORIAL
"'?>~ ~Or
\:\o..........., ·lA \:\\.>\/ .,L,"'"'
01 ~--...... ,J..
FIG . 21 WALTER ALLWARD, SKETC H FOR TH E PLAINS OF ABRAHAM MONUMENT(BORSTAD CATALOGUE #2 05), 1913.
Allward's Design for Canadian Memorial
at Vimy Ridge or Other Sites, according
to the assessor's report:
was suited t o a low hill rather than t o a
conti nuous and lofty bl uff or cliff like Vimy
Ri dge , where the de licacy of line would be
lost in t he mass of t he ridge . On the Hil l
62 .. it would comman d the whole of the
area of t he Ypres Salient••
The desire by the CBMC to pla ce the
memorial on Hill 62 , near Ypres in Belgium,
ran counter to the desire of Prime
Minister King, w ho stated in the House
of Commons on 22 May, 1922:
I wish to say just one word in regard t o this
lmatterl and the work of the War Memorials
Commission .. I hope the commission will
con si de r ve r y seriously indeed - I know in
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
33

LANE B DRSTAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
FI G. 22. WALTER ALLWARD, SKETCH FOR THE MEMORIAL
ST. LAWRENCE (BORST AD CATALOGUE #2 03),
UNDATED.
FIG. 23. WALTER ALLWARD, MEMORIAL STUDY( BORSTAD CATALOGUE #249), C. 192 1.
fact it is consid ering it - the advisability of
acquir ing a very cons iderable tract of land
along Vimy Ridge as a permanent memorial.
Whilst sculpture m ay do a great deal t o
commemorate t he sacrifices of ou r men,
Vimy itself is one of the world's great altars,
on which a perceptible portion of our manhood
has bee n sacrificed in the cause of the world's
freedom . As a national mem or ial nothing can
equal the pr eservation of the r idge itself 6 7
The sentiments expressed by King received
unanimous support from both
sides of the House and appear to have set
the stage for the erection of the monument
at Vimy. As late as 1923, however,
expenditures by the Militia and Defense
Department for the year 1923 record an
the final location of the memorial at Vi my
thus appears to have acquiesced to the
desire of the Federal Government.
After several months of searching for a suitable
studio in Belgium, and Paris, Allward
finally settled on a studio in London. The
search for suitable stone for the memorial
proved less rapid and delayed the initial
construction as Allward toured quarries
in Europe and the British Isles. The stone
ultimately chosen came from the eastern
Adriatic coast near Split, but problems
with supply caused further delays. 70 The
Vimy Memorial was not completed until
the summer of 1936, nineteen years after
the battle which it commemorated.
coverage of the event was given by the
news media and discussion of the monument
was limited to patriotic statements.
The British press, on the other hand, gave
extensive coverage of the opening with
multiple full-page stories appearing in
most British newspapers. 71 This may be
partly due to the involvement of Edward
VIII, but many of the stories discuss the
nature of the Canadian monument.
Prime Minister King only visited the Vi my
Memorial several months later while in
Europe on other government business. On
11 October, 1936, he wrote a long entry
in his diary about his day's activities. As
for Vi my, he was less impressed with the
Monument than with the lovely day and
allocation of $10,000 on the contract price The Memorial was unveiled 26 July, 1936 the appearance of the grounds:
for the design of a monument on Hill 62. by Edward VIII and the President of France
An experimental model of the memor- before an assembled audience of 100,000 T he monument is excee d ingly f ine and
ial, built of canvas and plaster, was to people, including Canadians who had impressive. One feels however, that it would
be erected at the Hill 62 site to ascertain made the "pilgrimage" to Vi my. With be more sui ta ble if it w ere a Eur-opean
the suitability of the design and to decide the exception of the veterans, interest m onument to which all nations in the all ie d
upon the actual scale upon which the de- in a memorial on foreign soil to a war forces in t he War had contributed, instead of
sign would be carried out. 68 There is no nearly twenty years in the past seemed to Canada's m onument. One cannot but fee l that
indication that this model was built 69 and have waned among Canadians. Very little a sense of pr oportion and of the fitness of
34
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LANE B aR STAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 24. WALTER ALLWARD, DESIGN FOR V/MY( BORSTAD CATALOGUE #254), 1921. FIG. 25. WALTER ALLWARD, CANA DA (BORST AD CATALOGUE #539),
1936. I LANE BORSTAD.
things is lacking in anything so pretentiou s in
comparison with the memor ials of countries
most concerned. It is in fact the most
pretentious war memorial in the world n
RETURN TO CANADA
Beginning with hundreds of drawings for
the initial design competition in October
1920 to the completion and unveiling in
July of 1936, Allward was occupied solely
with the Vi my Memorial. For fourteen of
these years (1922-1936) he was resident in
London, England and effectively removed
from the Canadian art world.
An article in the Globe and Mail compared
the the welcome given Allward with the
civic welcome given by Toronto to the
movie star Mae West and was:
chagrined to think that sa me honou r
has not be en paid to him. Unfortu natel y
knighthood no longer is in flower in t he
Do minion and the nation appar'e nt ly has
been too preoccupied with other problems
like unemployment and w estern debts t o
pay t ribute to the man who put Canada on
the map artistically in Europe 73
If the public seemed little concerned with
Allward's achievements, he did receive re ­
cognition from other sources. The Royal
Architectural Institute of Canada awarded
him Honourary Fellowship in the Institute;
Queen's University, Kingston, conferred an
honourary Doctor of Laws; University of
Toronto, an honourary LL.D. 74 On June 30,
1938, Prime Minister King moved in the
House of Commons, seconded by the leader
of the opposition Richard Bennett:
that this House de sires particularly to
express its appreciation of the services
of M r . WalterS . All ward , who, as the
designer and architect of the memorial at
Vimy, has given to t he world, a work of art
of outstanding beauty and character.
Through the years to come the Vi my memorial
will remain the symbol of Canada's
efforts in the war, and its tribute to those
who, on the field of battle, sought to preserve
the free institutions of mankind. 75
CONCLUSION
King's as sessment in 1936 of Allward's
monument has been disproved by thousands
of visitors every year for the past
90 years. Allward brought a viewpoint
to Vimy very different from the formal
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2 008
35

LANE B DR STAO > ESSAY I ESSAI
5. Hopkins: 382.
6. Early monuments include: Annie Pi xley, 1896;
Lord Tennyson, 1897; Sir Charles Tupper, 1898;
Hon. Dr. Rolph, 1899; Hon. A.S. Hardy, 1899; Sir
Oliver Mowat, 1900; Sir Wilfred Laurier, 1900;
Sir George Brown, 1900; Sir George Ross, 1901;
John Graves Simcoe, 1903; Sir Oliver Mowat,
1905; JohnS. MacDonald, 1909; Baldwin and
Lafontaine, 1914; Ed ward VII (unfinished).,
1912; Alexander Graham Bell, 1917.
7. Miller, Muriel. " Famous Canadian Artists ­
WalterS. Allward". Onward (Toronto) 49, no.
2 (8 January, 1939), p. 21-22.
8. Mavor, James, 1913, The Year Book of Canadian
Art: 1913, comp. The Arts and Letters
Club of Toronto, Toronto: J.M. Dent and Sons,
p. 252 .
FIG . 26. WALTER ALLWARD, VIMY RIDGE MEMORIAL, FRANCE (BORST AD CATALOGUE #539), 1936.1 LANE BORSTAD.
classical training of the Imperial War
Graves architects. His conception grew
out of personal disillusionment with and
reaction to the horror of war. He spoke
in the timeless language of the symbolic
human figure and with his own brand of
modern architecture, expressed in the
striking simplicity of his wall surfaces and
towering pylons. The visitor to Vi my Ridge
today is moved by the mourning figure of
Canada (fig. 25) and responds to the
solemn grandeur of the architecture unaware
of any pretentiousness such as King
detected (fig. 26). Because the figures
speak directly to the emotions rather than
act strictly as religious symbols, they are
accessible to those who bring to the memorial
their own experiences of sorrow,
loss, and hope.
NOTES
1. It is not surprising that there is a continuation
of the British tradition of sculpture in Canada.
Many of this country's early sculptors were
born and trained in Britain prior to coming to
Canada. Hamilton MacCarthy (1846-1939), the
premier scul ptor in late nineteenth century
Canada, was successful and active member of
the Roya l Academy in London, Alfred Howell
was born in England and trained at the Royal
College of Art. Charles Adamson (1881-1959)
came from Dundee, Scotland w here he had a
studio. Jacobine Jones (1898-1976) was born
and trained in London and exhibited at the
Royal Academy and Pari s Salon. (Lawrence
Hayward Collection, Artist files. Department
of Art, Queen's University, Kingston).
2. Elsen, Albert E., 1974, Origins of Modern
Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises. New York,
George Braziller, p. 3.
3. Hopkins, J. Castell, ed., 1898, Canada -An Encyclopaedia
of the Country. Toronto: Linscott
Publishing Company. The section called The
Development of Sculpture in Canada is written
by Hamilton MacCarthy.
4. Hamilton MacCarthy was born in London
England in 1846 and received his early artistic
training there at the Marylebone Art School.
He was a member of and exhibited regularly
w ith the Royal Academy prior to coming to
Toronto in 1885. The follow ing year (1886) he
exhibited five portrait busts with the Ontario
Society of Artists. In 1887 he exhibited with
the Roya l Canadian Academy and Montreal
Art Association. He received his first Canadian
monumental sculpture comm is sion in 1887
(Egerton Ryerson, Toronto, unveiled 24 May,
1889). He moved to Ottawa in 1899 where he
continued to exhibited regularly w ith the RCA,
OSA and MAA until the 1920s. He died in 1939
at the age of 93 (Lawrence Hayward Collection,
Artist files. Department of Art, Queen's
University, Kingston . Heyward has published
Canadian Sculptors Biographed: Walter Seymour
Allward 7876- 7955. Kingston, Lawrence
Ha yward, 2003.
9. Borstad, Lane, 1990, A Catalogue of Drawings
and Sculpture of Walter Seymour Allward
(1876-1955), MA Thesis, Queen's University.
Numbers in brackets following the ca ptions to
illustrations refer to this catalogue.
10. Art Notes. Saturday Night (Toronto), 11 January,
1896, p. 9.
11 . Challener, Frederick, Biography of Walter
Seymour Allward. 7955 (?),Typed Manuscript,
Qu een's University Archives, Allward Fond s,
p. 1.
12. Mavor: 251
13. Henry Simpson was a Toronto born architect
w ho had studied under E. J. Lennox and in
New York. He returned to Toronto in 1888
and was in partnership with Charles Gibson
by 1890. During the time Allward was apprenticing
as a draughtsman, Simpson and Gibson
designed Cooke's Presbyterian Church, Queen
Street, and Bethany Chapel, University Avenue
(Arthur, Eri c, 1986, Toronto: No Mean City. To ­
ronto, University of Toronto Pre ss, p. 158).
14. Perry, Anne Anderson. "Walter Allward: Can ­
ada's Great Sculptor". National Pictorial, (1
March, 1922), p. 8-9, 55.
15. Guthrie, Ann,1986, Don Valley Legacy- A Pioneer
History. Erin, Ontario, The Bo ston Mills
Press, p. 155.
16. Northwest Rebellion is now more commonly
known as the Riel Rebellion after the Metis
leader Louis Riel. Riel was found guilty of High
Treason and hung in 16 November, 1885.
17. Challener: 1
18. Ontario Archives, MV 1294, Hammond Notebooks:
p. 4
36
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2 008

LANE B OR STAD > ESSAY I ESSAI
19. The figure of Canada is very similar to that of
Daniel Chester French's The Republic at the
World 's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893.
This was a sixty-four foot allegorical colossus
conceived by Augustus Saint-Gaudens and created
by Fren ch.
20. Other monuments to suffer from this problem
were Bell Telephone, Edward VII, Brantford
War memorial, Peterborough War Memorial
and Vi my Ridge.
21. Art Notes: 9. A description of the clay models
is given w hi ch describes the difficulty experienced
in deciding on the right dress for the
figure as well as pointing out details such as
the use of maple leaves for the wreath.
22. Perry: 8.
23. Works includ e: Memorials to Annie Pixley
(1886); Busts of Lord Tennyson (1897), Sir
Charles Tupper (1898), Hon. Dr. Rolph (1899),
Hon. A.S. Hardy (1899), Hon. Sir Oliver Mowat
(1900), Sir Wilfred Laurier (1900), Sir George
Burton (1900), Hon. Sir George Ross (1901);
Large scale memorials to John Graves Simcoe
(1903), Nicholas Flood Davin (1903), Hon. Sir
Oliver Mowat (1905), Hon. John Sandfield
MacDonald (1909), Baldwin and Lafontaine
Memorial (1914) and Alexander Graham Bell
(1917). He also received a commission to sculpt
King Edward VII (1912) which was never completed.
The figures of Truth and Justice from
the Edward VIII memorial were eventually
placed in front the of Supreme Court in Ottawa.
24. Hale, Katherine. "WalterS. Allward Sculptor".
Canadian Magazine 52, no.3 (January, 1919):
p. 785.
25. See the article published by McCarthy in 1898
(Hopkins: 398).
26 The South African War (Boer War) took
place between Britain and the South Afrikaner
republics of South Africa from 1899 to 1902.
Canadian troops distinguished themselves in
battle and their success became a source of national
pride for English-speaking Canadians.
Criticism of the British leadership helped fuel
Canadian self-confidence and national identity.
27. McFarlane, Arthur. " The Work of Walter Allward".
Busy Man's Magazine (Toronto) 19, no
1, (November, 1909): p. 31.
28. Hale: 787.
29. Hammond Notebooks: entry 46.
30. Shipley, Robert, 1987, To Mark Our Place: A
History of Canadian War Memorials. Toronto,
New Canada Publications, p. 21.
31. This tender is contained in a letter toW. Preston,
Chairman of the Soldiers War Memorial,
Stratford now in Queen's University Archives,
A llward Fonds, Undated Correspondence
file.
32. The quote included picking up the plasters at
A llward's studio, casting in bronze, delivery
to Statford and erection of the figures w ithin
a t hree month time frame and at a cost of
$4,600.00. (Queen's University Archives, A llward
Fond s, Undated correspondence file,
quote from C. Marchant, Assistant Manager
Architectural Bronze and Iron, 10 March,
1922.)
33. Allward quoted in Construction: 13 (August,
1920) p. 264.
34. See Hamilton MacCarthy in Hopkins: 381
35. Saturday Night, (13 November, 1920), p. 5
36. Ibid.
37. In a memo to the Battlefields Memorial Commission
in 1934, Allward claimed that he suffered
a personal loss of $500.00 on Stratford
for leaving before completion of the monument
and $10,000.00 on the Peterborough
memorial as a result of having a London sculp ­
tor build the full scale figures. Queens University
Archives, A llward Fonds, Miscellaneous,
Memo of Losses re Vimy, [1934]
38. "W. S. Allward, Noted Sculptor has Created
Many Fine Designs". Brantford Expositor, (September,
1923), no page.
39. Souvenir of the Dedication of the Brant War
Memorial. Brantford, Brant War Memorial Association,
25 May, 1933, p. 2.
40. Memo of Losses: 3 (see note 37 above).
41. The name Brantford is erased but legible.
42. Souvenir: 16. Walter's son had est ablished an
architectural firm in Toronto in partnership
with the son of G. W. Gouin lock designer of
the I.O.F. Temple for which Walter Allward
received his first private commission in 1899.
Walter Allward is listed as designer and Sculptor;
Hugh Allward- Architect in charge; and
H. Dunnington-Grubb as Landscape Architect.
Dunnington -G rubb in co llaboration w ith
W. L. Sommerville (architect) carried many
commissions in Ontario which incorporated
scu lpture by such sculptors as Frances Loring,
Florence Wyle, Emanuel Hahn and Elizabeth
Wyn Wood. Fo r a study of this co llaboration
between architecture, landscape design and
scu lpture see Coutu, Joan, 1989, Design and
Pa tronage: The Architecture of the Niagara
Parks 7935- 1941, MA thesis, Queen's Universit
y,.
43 . Ontario Archives: Accession number 10696.
44. RCA Memorial Exhibition: Art Gallery of To ­
tonto. 1955, n.p.
45. Interview, Peter Allward, 28 Jul y, 1988.
46. During World War II Allward produced a series
of drawings that he referred to as "war
cartoons".
47. Hopkins: 381.
48. A committee was created in Parliament 21
April, 1920 to "Report on memorials to be
erected on battlefields to commemorate heroism
of Canadians" (Parliamentary Debates ­
Commons, 1920: p. 1461-1462) and tabled its
report in the house 6 May, 1920 (Parliamentary
Debates- Commons, 1920: p. 2078).
49 . Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Battlefields
Memorials Commission, RG 24, vol. 1845,
file GA Q 11 -28, Conditions of Competition in
Design for Eight Memorial Monuments to be
erected in France and Belgium, 20 December,
1920, p. 5. The eight original sites selected
were: Saint-Julien; Passchendaele; Observatory
Ridge; Vimy Ridge; Dury Crossroads; Bourlon
Wood; Courcelette; Hospital Wood.
50. Brigadier-General H. T. Hughes was appointed
Chief Engineer of the entire project; Honourable
S. C. Mewburn, Chairman of the Commission;
Colonel Henry C. Osbone, Honorary
Secretary; and Percy E. Nobbs, MA, FRIBA, RCA
architectural adviser to the Commission.
51. Library and Archives Canada, Canadian Battlefields
Memorials Commission, RG 24, vol. 1845,
file GA Q 11-28, Conditions of Competition in
Design for Eight Memorial Monuments to be
erected in Fran ce and Belgium, 20 December,
1920: p. 4.
52. Miller: 21-22.
53. Allward quoted in Perry, Anne Anderson,
"Walter Allward: Canada's Sculptor". Studio,
75 (April, 1922), p. 123.
54. Ibid.
55. Challener: 8.
56. Allward's note to "try Canada Kneeling"
confirms the identification of this drawing
as an early concept for the Mourning Canada
at Vi my. It is also drawn on the reverse side
of letter head paper for his 1920s studio in
Toronto.
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L ANE BDRSTA D > ESSAY I ESSAI
57. Osborne, Henry C., " Brief History of the Com ­
petition for the Canadian Battlefield". Construction.
14 (December, 1921): p. 369
58. The designs se lected from the first stage were
reproduced in Construction: June, 1921 , p.
160-172. Library and Archives Canada, Can ­
adian Ba ttlefields Memorials Commission,
RG 24, vol. 1845, file GA Q 11-28, Conditions
of Competition in Design (Second Stage) for
Eight Memorial Monuments to be erected in
France and Belgium, 4 May 1921. The competitors
for the second stage were: W. Allw ard;
C. Burgess; C. Clemesha; C. Cobb; P. Domvi lle
and L. Hu sba nd; W. Gagnon and A . Clarence;
G. Hill; A. King; F. Lessore; R. Perry; K. Reay;
5. Richie; D. Rowat; R. Traquair; J. Va nier; and
P. Wilson. All appear to have been architects
except George Hill the only other scu lptor to
have been selected for the second stage.
59. The assessors consisted of Professo r Charles H.
Reil ly, OBE, BA, FRIBA, representing the Royal
Institute of British Architects (Lon don); M.
Paul Cret, representing the Societe Centrale
des Architectes (Paris) and Mr. Fran k Darling,
FRIBA, RCA , representing the Royal Architectural
Institute of Canada.
60. Library and Archives Canada, CBMC, 1921 : p.
10.
61. Nobbs, Percy. " Battlefields Memorials". Construction,
13 (November, 1920): p. 334-335;
"Canadian Battlefields Memorials Competition
- Notes on First Stage". Construction 14
(June, 1921): p. 160-172.
62. F. Chapman Clemesha was a Regina architect
whose design was chose n for monuments to
be erected at the seven other sites (Construction
1920: 335).
63. Jackson, A. Y. Letter to Editor re: Allward Memorial.
Canadian Forum 11, no. 18 (March,
1922): p. 559 .
64. Challener: 11 .
65. In his Memo of Losses: 1, (see note 37 above)
Allward claimed that he had to se ll hi s house
at a loss and " because of haste I had practically
give all my furniture and stud io effects
away .. as I had not time to have a sa le." He
recei ved the final signed contract just ten da ys
before leaving for England.
69. The payment records of the Militia and De ­
fence department record only expenses "in
connection w ith the manufacture of a 12 foot
model of the C.B.M. monument" (Sessional
Paper No. 1, 1923, P-155). This is probably the
model entitled Vi my War Memorial displayed
in the Architectural Exhibit at the Canadian
National Exh ibition in 1923 according to Construction,
September, 1923, p. 316 -317).
70. Extensive documentation of Allward's search
for an appropriate quarry can be found in
Queen's University Archives, Allw ard Fonds.
71. There are three volumes of Brit ish press clippings
at Library and Archives Canada from
the w eeks leading up to the opening. These
include several hundred periodica ls in cluding
larger London ones such as The Illustrated
London News and the Times.
72. Library and Archives Can ada, King Pap ers,
October 11 , 1936: p. 393.
73. M archington, William. "Recognition of Al l­
w ard Compared to Welcome Accorded Movie".
Globe and Mail (Toronto), 10 February, 1937, p.
3. For an earlier M archington article complimentary
of Allward, see Pierre du Prey's postscript
to this issue of the Journal of the Society
for the Study of Architecture in Canada.
74. Journal of the Royal Architectural Institute
of Canada. 139, no. 3 (March, 1937): p. 38;
Queen's Review 11, no. 5 (May, 1937): p. 126;
MacDonald, Colin. Dictionary of Canadian Artists.
Ottawa: Canadian Paperbacks, 1967: p.
11.
75. Journals of the House of Commons, 76 (1938):
p. 555. King visited the memorial 12 October,
1936 and the delay of two ye ars before Allward's
official recognition is unexplained.
King was impresse d w ith the memorial for on
the same day as his visit he telegrammed Vincent
Massey, High Commissioner in Lo ndon,
with orders to halt negotiat ions rega rding the
transfer of ownership of V i my to the Imperial
War Graves Commissio n of Britain. In King's
opinion: "We are inclined to the view that the
memorial .. . should be regarded as property of
our ow n government" (Library and Archives
Canada, RG 24, vol 6298, file 40-1 -2 vo l. 3, 13
October, 1936).
66. Construction, 1921: 368.
67. Debates in the House of Commons, 22 May,
1922: p. 21 01
68. Osborne, 1921 : 370.
38
JSS AC I JSE AC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

ESSAY I ESSAI
VI MY:
A MONUMENT FOR THE MODERN WORLD
JACQUELINE HUCKER is an architectLwal
histot'ian and co-author' of A Guide To Canadian
>JACQUELI N E HU CKER
Architectural Styles (2nd edition, 2 0041. She is a
fom1er manager of the Fedet'al Heritage Buildings
Revrew Office. Between 2005-2007, she served
as the historian on tr1e conservation team tl1at
t'estor-ed t he Vimy M on ument.
More than 1,000 Commonwealth War
Graves cemeteries mark the landscape
of northern France. Created to bury
the Allied dead of the First World War,
these immaculate, silent, never-aging
places are the enduring legacy of a war
that has irrevocably marked this region.
Within the cemetery compounds, tens of
thousands of crosses and headstones are
neatly lined up, as if on permanent parade.
They are a constant reminder of the
millions of young men whose lives were
cruelly cut short by the Great War. But
they record only half the tragedy because
half of the Allied dead could never be
identified. All that remains of those men
are names engraved on the numerous
memorials that punctuate the landscape.
Other wars have passed without leaving
their mark on the present, but in northeastern
France and southwestern Belgium
the First World War is not permitted to
be forgotten. There, "the hands of the
sisters of Death and Night" are kept at
bay by an army of gardeners and stonemasons
who toil to hold in perpetual
perfection these idealized places.'
FIG. 1. WALTER ALLWA RD, VI MY MONUMENT, DESIGNED 1921, ERECTED 1925-36. THE MONUMENT IN 1936.
The extraordinary beauty and orderliness
of the First World War cemeteries
and memorials were intended to comfort
the bereaved by honouring the sacrifice
of those who had died. By their sheer
number, however, they also preserve the
memory of that calamitous event and the
loss left in its wake. As time passes, the
unique character of this cultural landscape
can be seen as an outward expression of
the anxieties that beset the living in the
melancholy post-war period. It speaks of
a need to return order to the world and,
simultaneously, to the certain knowledge
JSS AC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008 > 39-48
39

JACQUELINE H UCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
peace, and yet we labor to know what it
is we hold on to.
FI G. 2. WALTER ALL WARD, VI MY MONUMENT, 1936.
that one day all would be forgotten.
Rudyard Kipling's invocation, ' Lest we
forget' was written for another conflict,
but it came to serve as a clarion cry for
the Great War and its aftermath.
We know that time engenders forgetfulness
that can heal even the most terrible
loss 2 Yet, despite the passing of the First
World War generation, the landscape of
the Western Front retains its hold on the
present. Sometimes, a poignant personal
message breaks free of its stone, and infuses
the silence w ith sadness . At other
times, the clear light of a late afternoon
might reveal the outline of an old trench
line cutting across a field, and a shadow
falls across the present. And, always, the
rusted remnants of war debris are breaking
through to the surface, a reminder
of the brutal nature of that struggle. It
seems the First World War cannot rest in
The Vimy Monument is part of this
world . Rising from the highest point
of Vimy Ridge, it forms the centrepiece
of a carefully preserved section of the
western front, 14 kilometers north of
the town of Arras in the Pas de Calais
region of France (fig. 1). The 100-hectare
site' was granted to Canada in perpetuity
by France in 1922 to be preserved
as a memorial park "to the memory of
the Canadian soldiers who died on the
f ield of honour in France during the war
1914-18". 4 The memorial park is Canada's
principal monument in Europe to the
country's contribution and sacrifice in
the First World War. The names of 11,285
Canadian servicemen who died in France
and have no known grave are engraved
across the monument's outer walls (fig. 2,
4). There are also two cemeteries within
the boundaries of the park; one contains
the graves of 111 Canadian soldiers who
died during the Canadian offensive to
capture the ridge on April 9-12, 1917; the
other is a collector cemetery containing
the bodies of 2, 965 Allied soldiers, including
695 Canadians, who died on
the ridge between 1914 and 1918. The
site also includes a significant length of
the Canadian and German front lines
and tunnel systems as they existed in
April, 1917. W ith the dramatic drop of
its northeast slope, the section of ridge
within the park also provides clear evidence
of why Vi my Ridge was so militarily
significant during the First World War
and why its capture is considered to be
one of Canada's greatest accomplishments
of that conflict. The memorial park
is, in fact, a capsule of the Western Front,
preserving evidence of the war itself and
its consequences, as well as Canada's
commemorative response. The park also
provides a dramatic setting for ongoing
ceremonies of remembrance. Although
40
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J ACQUELINE H UCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
most Canadians w ill never ha ve the opportunity
to visit the site, for many Vi my
has come to possess iconic status.
The Vi my Monument w as designed in 1921
by the Toronto sculptor WalterS. Allward,
and constructed betw een 1925 and 1936.
The idea to preserve part of the actual
battle site originated w ith the Prime
Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie King.
Both the monument and w hat was to become
a memorial park w ere new forms of
commemoration. With the possible exception
of the Battle of Gettysburg during
the American Civil War, no earlier conflict
had prompted an interest in locating the
dead and honouring their memory, or in
preserving an actual battle site.' The significance
of these novel commemorative
responses has been a topic of scholarly
interest for the past 30 years, but little
has been written on the special qualities
of Canada 's in it iative. The present paper
w ill argue that Allw ard's monument and
its memorial park are, in fact, quintessential
expressions of the post-First World
War sensibilities of loss and obligation;
emotions that resulted in a f elt need to
honour each and every deceased person
in perpetuity. The paper will also examine
the influence on Allward of the modern
movement, as he sought to capture in
his work the full dimensions of the Great
War's impact. 6
The Vi my project began with a traditional
post-war exerci se . Victorious in the re ­
cent conflict, representatives of Britain
and her Allies met in London to agree
on names for the battles that had been
fought and to lay claim to battle sites.
Canada sought and was awarded eight
sites, three in Be lgium and five in France. 7
Individual regiments also sought permission
to erect their own monuments on the
front, as they had done in past wars (tw o
Canadian reg iments, had already begun
this operation). On this occasion, however,
FIG . 3. WALTER ALL WARD, VI MY MONUMENT. 1936.
the Dominion governments, noting that
their armies had been made up largely
of civilian soldiers, to whom regimental
loyalty w ould mean less than in ea rlier
eras, reasoned that battle sites should be
reserved for monuments to all who had
fought in the w ar. Significantly, they also
determined that such monuments should
be funded by government. 8
The following year, a Speci al Committee
of the Canadian House of Commons
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008
41

JACQUE LIN E H UCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 4. WALTER ALLWARD, VI MY MONUMENT. 1936.
was established to determine how best
to mark the sites. It recommended that
each shou ld be adorned with a permanent
memorial and that a public competition
be held to select the design of these
monuments. The Committee initially favoured
a conservative approach to design.
Members assumed that the structures
would take the form of a traditional victory
monument and identified the Brock
Monument on Queenston Heights as
an appropriate model. This monument,
which had been erected in 1859, consisted
of a 180 foot-tall classical column
surmounted by a statue of General Brock,
the Canadian military hero of the War of
1812. Committee members were aware,
however, that tastes were changing and
sought assurances that nothing of an
abstract, or 'cubist,' nature would be
erected. According ly, the competition
guidelines made reference to the arch,
obelisk, column, tower, or mausoleum as
appropriate design models. The guidelines
left open, however, the possibility of
other architectural forms. Tellingly, they
emphasized that the monuments should
be designed to last "for many centuries"
and be very "durable". 9
In September 1920, the Canadian Battlefields
Memorials Committee (CBMC) was
mandated to acquire land for the monuments,
hold an architectural competition,
and oversee construction. CBMC membership
included senior level parliamentarians
and military personnel, and it was chaired
by the M inister of National Defence. The
Commission invited Percy Nobbs, a professor
of architecture at McGill University,
to be the architectural advisor to the
Commission. Nobbs's primary task was to
help Commission members determine the
nature of the monuments and to organize
the design competition, which opened in
December 1920. The results were made
public in October 1921 . Nobbs understood
the importance of inviting the British and
French to play a part in the competition,
thereby minim izing the likelihood of
unforeseen objections arising at a later
stage. Accordingly, the CBMC established
an internationa l, three-person jury to
evaluate the submissions. Members were:
Charles Reil ly, representing the Royal In ­
stitute of British Architects (London); Paul
Cret, representing the Societe Centrale
des Architectes (Paris); and Frank Darling
of Toronto, representing the Royal Architectural
Institute of Canada . All were
prominent architects in their respective
countries. In addition to being professor
of architecture at Liverpool University,
Reilly had been training students in design
development for war memorials. For
his part, French/American architect Paul
Cret had been se lected by the United
States to design its national monument
in Europe.
In deference to the guidelines, most entrants
submitted des igns for tall towerlike
structures or mausoleums set off by
classica l terraces, steps and enclosures,
adorned with plant material typical of the
period. The assessors, however, selected
two monuments, neither of which cou ld
be said to have been traditional. Walter
Allward's entry was judged to be the clear
winner. In their explanation for choosing
42
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J ACQUEL INE H UCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
his design, the assessors noted that it
"made a very high appeal to the imagination".
They then recommended that the
monument be erected on Hill 62, a low
height of land that had been awarded
to Canada to mark the country's military
contribution in the defense of Ypres from
April to August 1916. In choosing Hill 62,
the assessors voiced the opinion that
Allward's design was not suited to a "continuous
and lofty bluff or cliff like Vimy
Ridge, where its delicacy of line would
be lost in the mass of the ridge". 10 The
choice of Allward's design for the national
monument was greeted with enthusiasm;
however, the recommendation that it be
erected on Hill 62 did not meet with the
approval of certain military officers and
other high ranking officials who believed
that Vimy was the only appropriate site
for Canada's national memorial. The issue
was resolved at a meeting of the CBMC
held on 26 April, 1922, and attended by
the Prime Minister, William Lyon Mackenzie
King, at which a decision was taken to
erect Allward's monument on Hill145, the
highest point on Vimy Ridge.
Allward's design was, as Lane Barstad
points out elsewhere in this same issue,
unlike any previous Canadian war monument.
It made no direct reference to war
or victory but alluded rather to the consequences
of war and the suffering of
those who were left to grieve. Through
reference to the cyclical myth of sacrifice
and spiritual rebirth, it also offered solace
to the living. Allward had conceived
his creation as a large and powerful
form that would function as a formidable
presence in the sweeping landscape
of northern France and a moving mis en
scene, which he would later explain was
to be understood as a "sermon against
the futility of war"." At either end of a
long, heavy base, planned to rise out of
the ground and give the impression of an
impregnable bastion, stood two groups
of figures. These Allward identified as the
'Defenders,' one group representing the
'Breaking of the Sword,' and the other
the 'Sympathy of Canadians for the Helpless'.
They represented the ideals for
which Canadians had given their lives.
Their sacrifice is depicted by the 'Spirit
of Sacrifice' and the 'Passing of the Torch,'
two figures at the centre of the monument,
framed between soaring pylons.
Having given his all, one figure passes
the torch to his comrade. Straining up to
the highest point on the columns they
regard the figures of Truth, Faith, Justice,
Charity, Knowledge and Peace, the virtues
for which they fought, and who, in
Allward's words, chant the "Hymn of
Peace" (fig. 3). At the foot of the main wall,
an empty sarcophagus was placed directly
on the battleground. On the wall above
stood the tall shrouded figure of 'Canada
Bereft'. In deep contemplation, this heroic,
unmoving figure would forever mourn
her fallen sons.
Prior to the war, Walter Allward had
enjoyed success as a designer of public
monuments, working in an unremarkable
late-nineteenth century style that
was gradually breaking away from the
Beaux-Arts manner with its reliance on
hierarchical, pyramidal compositions. For
the Vimy Memorial, Allward jettisoned
this traditional approach, replacing it
with a strong, architectural structure
that was stripped of all decoration and
relied for effect on simple lines and a
weighty, formal abstraction." The abstract
qualities of the monument's design
are best illustrated by the paired
pylons. They were an unusual feature,
not found on any other First World War
memorial, and they piqued the curiosity
of the Commission des Monuments
Historiques, whose task it was to review
the designs of major war memorials
planned for France. In his reply to a letter
from the Commission, Allward noted
that the silhouette of the pylons "would
not be easily confused with towers or
other landmarks". He added "because
of the sympathy which existed between
the French, and the Canadian soldiers
... I have taken the liberty of introducing
the Fleur-de-lis on a corner of the
second wall" (fig. 4). "In the afternoon",
he explained, "when a shaft of sunlight
will break through the space between
the pylons, and, illuminating part of
the sculptures, will suggest a cathedral
effect"n The pylons also functioned as
a theatrical backdrop for the figurative
sculpture, its huge scale endowing the
figures with inner strength and vitality.
Upon its stage, they took part in a drama
that was meant to be read in a primarily
pictorial fashion, with a single frontal
viewing point and an emphasis on visual
rather than tactile effects. The classical
figure style, which is both physically
intense and psychologically powerful,
reveals the influence of August Rodin's
physical expressiveness and also the
calmer, symbolic style of the American
sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, as
illustrated in his grave memorial for the
wife of the writer Henry Adams in Rock
Creek Cemetery, Washington, D. C. 14
Allward's interest in the new encompassed
all aspects of the monument,
including its structural design. Building
the substructure was complicated by the
infirmity of the chalky soil, whose friable
nature had allowed the excavation
of extensive trench systems and underground
networks of tunnels and caverns
during the war. Concerned about the
state of the ground underfoot, Allward
questioned the initial specifications for
the monument and urged the CBMC to
hire Oscar Faber to provide new plans for
the monument's structural design. Faber
was a highly skilled young engineer who
had recently designed the substructure
for the Menin Gate at Ypres, the British
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
43

J AC QUELINE HUCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 5. PAUL NASH, MONUMENT TO FALLEN CANADIANS ON VIMY RIDGE, 1917.
FIG. 6. EDWARD GORDON CRAIG, DESIGN FOR ELEKTRA, 1905. FROM
EDWARD GORDON CRAIG, INDEX TO THE STORY OF MY DA YS.
Empire's monument to the missing in the
Ypres Salient. For the Vimy Monument,
Faber specified the use of cast-in-place,
heavily reinforced concrete, to which the
facing stone would be bonded . At Allward's
insistence the joints between the
stones were made as fine as possible so
they would not detract from the appearance
ofthe monument's long, continuous
base wa lls .' 5
Acquiring the facing stone proved to
be one of the greatest challenges confronting
the CBMC. Allward had initially
hoped to clad the monument in white
marble. When Percy Nobbs suggested
that this would be a mistake because the
effect wou ld be ghost-like, and marble
was unlikely to weather well in northern
France, Allward and the CBMC were
obliged to seek an appropriate alternative.
A search was undertaken for material
that was warm and white, had a
fine grain and was durable yet workable.
On ce again, Allward's exacting standards
dictated the choice. For example, he
firmly maintained that the figure groups
could not be carved from stone blocks
less than six feet in depth and that the
figure of Canada Bereft must be carved
from a single f la w less block 13 feet high.
Acquiring blocks of that size was difficult
in post-war Europe, but suitable stone
was eventually found in a former Roman
quarry, near Split in present day Croatia.
Known as Seget, this was a white limestone
w ith a fine grain and texture. Allward
was delighted with the stone and
saw immediately how it would enhance
the beauty of his monument. He reveled
in the knowledge that material from the
same site had been used in the late third
century for Diocletian 's Palace in Split.
This was evidence of the stone's durability;
moreover, the stone's connection to
the classical world would reinforce the
transcendental values he was seeking for
his monument. Allward was not alone
in being impressed by the Seget stone.
Once it arrived on the site in June 1927
and the monument finally began to take
on its intended appearance, the Director
of Works for the Imperial War Graves
Commission pronounced it the "finest
piece of masonry in Europe ". Edwin
Lutyens, a principal Commission architect,
concurred, observing that "he had
never seen finer [stone] in his life". 16
For Allward it was extremely important
that the monument not simply sit on the
crest of the ridge but be positioned in
such a way that it appeared to grow out
of the battle landscape. To achieve this
effect, he chose to excavate the ground
in front of the monument until the desired
impression was achieved. Necessitating
the removal of 65,000 tons of
chalk and clay and made more difficult
by the dangerous nature of the ground
underfoot, this task took well over a year
to accomplish. 17
One of the sad ironies of the First World
War's commemorative program was
that no sooner had the monument been
completed than the Second World War
broke out. While the Canadian public
44
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J ACQUELINE H UC KER > ESSAY I ESS AI
became concerned for the safety of the
Vimy Monument during the war, in the
decades after the conflict Canada's First
World War monuments were largely
seen as cultural relics from a different
era and suffered neglect. In the 1970s,
however, the pendulum began to swing
back and scholars started to examine
the nature and meaning of First World
War commemoration and its aftermath.
Particularly significant was Paul Fussell's
groundbreaking 1975 study, The Great
War and Modern Memory. A second
important work was Samuel Hynes', A
War Imagined: The First World War and
English Culture, published in 1991. Each
scholar focused closely on the responses
of writers, poets and painters who had
lived through the war. They found that
many had experienced an acute sense of
a rupture in history, which in their work
took the form of images of irony, fragmentation
and ruin. Fussell and Hynes
demonstrated that, if the war did not actually
create the modern world, it fueled
its development and shaped the character
of our world.'" The British historian, Jay
Winter, examined popular response to the
war. While endorsing much of Fussell and
Hynes' general thesis, Winter pointed out
that most post-war commemoration was
"framed in traditional language of shared
images and ideas derived from classical,
romantic and Christian sources". This,
he argued, was because only this shared
language had the power to heal. 19
Gavin Stamp, a contributor to this journal
issue, was one of the first architectural
historians to define the cultural significance
of British and Commonwealth war
memorials. He directed attention to the
differences between the First World War
memorials and earlier war monuments,
which in the face of so much death and
destruction had become outmoded and
inadequate. 20 Stamp was also one of the
first in recent times to highlight the new
commemorative approach adopted by the employed as a war artist by the Can ­
Imperial War Graves Commission, which adian War Memorials Fund and travelled
was rigidly egalitarian, aimed at ensuring
that no matter his role, each service His drawing, Monument to Fallen Can­
to Vimy Ridge shortly after the battle.
person was honoured as a hero in a collectivity
of heroism.
than broken trees, a wooden cross and
adians on Vimy Ridge, depicts little more
trenches on the crest of the ridge (fig .
Writing in the 1990s, the American historian
Thomas Laqueur reinforced Stamp's of war, as the transcendental quality of
5) . It expresses not so much the drama
interpretation of the war cemeteries and the battle field where so many had died.
monuments as significant cultural sites. Under an expansive sky, the trees, the
Expanding upon the work of other scholars,
including Fussell and Hynes, he also raking light, turning each into a symbol
cross and the trenches are touched by a
demonstrated that, while the cemeteries of the man-made horrors witnessed by
and monuments made use of traditional the artist. The light itself takes on divine
classical language, theirs was a remade properties and holds out the promise of
classicism, expressing the modern sensibilities
of loss and obligation, which kind. Immediately after the war, Nash's
regeneration for nature and for man­
demanded that somehow the past be drawings and paintings were displayed
kept present. Examples cited by Laqueur in the Canadian War Memorials Fund exhibition,
held in Toronto in August 1919.
to make his point were the Cenotaph in
London, the Monument to the Missing of There the modern and visionary character
of his work attracted the attention
the Somme at Thiepval, and the Trench of
the Bayonets at Verdun. His assessment of Canadian artists.
of these sites, however, could as read ­
ily apply to the Vimy Monument and its In a different setting, Prime Minister
memorial park.
Mackenzie King showed a similar sensibility
to the war-torn landscape. Suggesting
When asked in 1921, for an explanation that part of the Vi my Ridge be preserved,
of the monument's complex origins, Allward's
reply was couched in dream im­
he recorded his reason in a diary entry:
agery that revealed the same modern I made a strong plea for conserving a tract
preoccupations that Fussell, Hynes and of one or two square miles of Vimy ridge
Laqueur had identified in the work of as consecrated hallowed ground around
artists who had lived through the war. Allward 's memorial to be er ected . The
Allward stated "I have tried to show ... real memorial being t he ridge itself, one of
in this monument to Canada's fallen, earth's altars, on w hich Canadians sacrificed
what we owed them and will forever for the cause of humanit y ... This is Canada's
owe them." 21 altar on European soil 22
During the war, ghosts haunted the The Prime Minister's words echoed those
battlefields and the Western Front used so memorably by President Abracame
to be seen as a sacred site sancti- ham Lincoln in his Gettysburg address
fied by the blood spilled by the dead . delivered at the dedication ceremony of
The transcendental quality of the war the Solders' National CemeteryY Like
landscape captured the imagination of Gettysburg, Vi my would be preserved in
artists, writers and poets, most notably the manner of a rural cemetery where
the British painter, Paul Nash, who was Allward's monument would forever
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N·' 1 > 2008
45

J AC QU ELI NE H UCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
mark the site of the battle and where
the living might commune with the dead
through nature.
If the concept of the battlefield as hallowed
ground had become common currency
during and after the First World
War, neither Allward's dream nor King's
response to Allward's monument were
conceivable before the war. Between
1914 and 1918, Canada, a young country
of fewer than eight million people, had
lost 60,000 men in battle. Of that number,
almost 18,000 were never identified
and lay either in unmarked graves in the
war cemeteries or lost forever in the devastated
landscape of the Front. Recognizing
the extent of the loss, both men
understood the power of art and nature
to comfort the bereaved . No doubt,
the prime minister also recognized the
power of symbols and myths to cement
an awakened sense of Canadian nationalism
experienced by the military victory
on Vimy Ridge.
For Allward, situating the monument on
such a landscape added further complexity
to its meaning. Significantly, he chose
not to place his structure within a precinct
or garden, as was the case with the majority
of war monuments, but directly on the
unbounded battlefield, where its mythologized
interpretation of the war would
forever confront the real tragedy. Once the
monument had been built, Allward turned
the excavated area in front of the structure
into a grassed space that he referred to as
the amphitheatre, which fanned out from
the monument's front wall for a distance
of 270 feet. He retained the remnant battle
landscape around the sides and back of the
monument, thereby creating a direct and
powerful emotional connection between
the monument and the ridge. When the
monument was unveiled on 26 July 1936
before 5,000 Canadian " pilgrims", the
veterans stood in pride of place in the
amphitheatre, while family members
watched from its sloping sides. Viewed
in this light, Allward's monument may
be understood as a modern retelling of a
Greek drama. Rising from a site of so much
destruction and loss of life, the monument's
mythology harnesses the violent
and irrational forces released by the war
and offers the promise of a return to order
and harmony.
A new-found fascination with Greek tragic
drama had reemerged at the beginning
of the twentieth century. This was
attributable in large part to the popularization
of Friedrich Nietzsche's The Birth
of Tragedy, his famous analysis of the
cultural meaning of ancient Greek tragedy,
which was first published in 1872.
Nietzsche believed that the harmony of
Greek art was in fact a sublimated expression
of the violence that permeated Greek
society. The great achievement of Greek
culture, he argued, was its ability to reconcile
the conflicting sides of human nature
through the invention of tragedy. 24
It was well understood that Nietzsche's
observation was intended as a criticism
of contemporary German society and its
blind faith in science. When the results
of the natural sciences were manifested
in the technology of mass slaughter in
the First World War, many saw Nietzsche's
version of society as prophetic. 25
By that time, Birth of Tragedy had been
introduced to the English-speaking world,
and tragedy became the route to a new
modern confrontation with the horrors
of existence. 26
The influence of the new understanding of
Greek culture introduced by Nietzsche can
be seen in a revolutionary production of
Sophocles' Elektra, as an opera with music
by Richard Strauss and libretto by Hugo
von Hofmannsthal. Opening in Dresden
in 1909, the highly original staging emphasized
the instinctive, irrational, darker
side of early Greece. In its exploration of
the unconscious world, it also revealed
an acquaintance with psychoanalysis and
knowledge of Sigmund Freud's seminal
work, The Interpretation of Dreams.n
Edward Gordon Craig, the visionary
British stage designer, had been asked
to design the stage sets for Elektra. A
strong admirer of The Birth of Tragedy,
he sought to convey the deeper meaning
of tragedy by harmonizing the rhythms,
tone and colour of the scene so that the
design elements might transcend real ­
ity and function as poetic symbols. As it
happened, his designs were not adopted
for the production, but their appearance
in a number of publications contributed
greatly to the spread of his influential
ideas through Europe and North America
(fig.6). 28 Similarities between the Vi my
Monument and Craig 's theatrical design
for Elektra suggest that Allward was well
acquainted with Craig's work and had
understood the principles behind his innovations.29
The basic elements of Craig's
theatrical set designs- the flights of steps,
tiered floor levels, the use of monochromatic
architectural screens as backdrop
-appear in adapted form on the Vimy
Monument. There are also resemblances
between the symbolic figures of Elektra
and Canada Bereft, and in their relationship
to their setting: each is made larger
than other figures in the composition, is
set against a tall architectural backdrop,
and stands facing an infinite space. 30
To a greater or lesser extent, the First
World War cemeteries and the war memorials
are all evidence of an effort to
return harmony and beauty to a world
shattered by a calamitous event. The
Vi my Monument makes this need explicit.
If the secret of tragedy lies in its ability
to transmute pain into exaltation, so the
beauty of the monument is enhanced
by its retelling of the ancient myth of
46
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JACQUELINE HUCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
sacrifice and spiritual rebirth in which
the pain of loss is overlaid with the hope
of new life. Such new life is evidenced
at Vimy in a landscape whose changing
but immanent nature serves to bring the
events that happened 90 years ago into
the present.
The powerful physical and metaphysical
interplay between the Vimy Memorial
and the former battle landscape is unique
among First World War monuments.
Walter Allward's creative recasting of
traditional classical language and his
marrying of the monument with the war
landscape mark a break with his artistic
past and were driven by the modern sensibilities
of an obligation to honour the
dead combined with a fear of forgetting
the past. But although the past is past,
and specific memory fades, the message
of Vimy, like that of all art, transcends
its time. Similarly, it is the unflinching
display of the consequences of the Great
War that gives the war cemeteries and
monuments their haunting quality. We
understand that we cannot hold onto
the memory of the First World War forever,
but the truth of its consequences as
expressed by these memorials cannot be
diminished by time.
NOTES
1. Whitman, Walt, 1865-66, Reconciliation.
2. Laqueur, Thomas, " The Past's Past," The London
Review of Books, vol . 18, no. 18 (9 September,
1996), p. 3.
3. An additional 17 hectares were acquired in the
late 1920s, so the property actually measures
approximately 117 hectares.
4. "Agreement between Canada and France for
the cession to Canada of the free use of a parcel
of land on Vi my ridge for the erection of
a monument to the memory of the Canadian
Soldiers who died on the field of honour in
France in the course of the War 1914-1918",
on file in the Legal Advisory Division, Foreign
Affairs Canada.
5. Laqueur: 5. Following the Battle of Gettysburg
in 1863, 3,512 Union dead were reburied in a
newly created rural cemetery named the Soldiers'
National Cemetery at the edge of the
battlefield. See: Wills, Garry, 1992, Lincoln at
Gettysburg, New York, Simon & Schuster, p.
21-23. The battle site as we know it today was
acquired in sections in successive decades.
6. I have discussed aspects of the circumstances
surrounding the design and construction of
the Vimy Monument in two articles. See
my "'After the Agony in Stony Places': The
Meaning and Significance of the Vi my Monument",
in Vimy Ridge: A Canadian Reassessment,
Geoffrey Hayes, Andrew Iarocci, Mike
Bechthold eds., Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred University
Press, 2007, p. 279-90.
7. The sites are: Saint-Julien, Hill 62 and Passchendaele
in Belgium, and Courcellette, Vi my
Ridge, Le Quesnel, Dury and Bourlon Wood in
France.
8. "Report of the Special Committee appointed
to consider and report upon the question of
what memorials if any, should be erected in
the battlefields of the I at war to commemorate
the gallantry of the Canadian troops; with
statements and evidence attached thereto,
Fourth Session, Thirteenth Parliament, 1920",
contained in Canadian Battlefields Memorials
Commission, Canadian Battlefield Memorials,
Ottawa. King's Printer, 1929, p. 76-84.
9. Library and Archives Canada, "Conditions
of Competition in Design for Eight Memorial
Monuments to be erected in France and
Belgium" issued 20 December, 1920, vol. 335,
Minutes of the Canadian Battlefields Memorial
Commission (CBMC), RG25.
10. "Report of the Assessors to the chairman and
members of the Canadian Battlefields Memorials
Commission", 10 September 1921, CH, VS
1296-14, vol. 2, Veterans Affairs (hereafter
VA).
11. "Canada's Wonderful Memorial to her Missing",
British Empire Service League, 9, 1933.
12. Allward had begun to experiment with new
compositions that did aw ay with the pedestal
model around 1909 with his design for
the Bell Telephone Memorial, Brantford,
Ontario. See: Mosquin, Alexandra, 2001,
"Walter Seymour Allward," Submission
Report, National Historic Sites and Monuments
Board of Canada, 5, p. 4-7.
13. Queen's University Archives, Allw ard Fonds,
Box 1, Vimy Correspondence. The letter to
Andre Ventre is dated 12 April, 1926. The
letter is quoted at greater length in Pierre du
Prey's postscript to this issue.
14. Curtis, Penelope, 1999, Sculpture, 1900-1945,
Oxford . Oxford University Press. In her introduction
Curtis states that Rodin's innovations
are key to understanding the development
of sculpture in the first half of the twentieth
century. For his part, Allward made a
special journey to Europe before the war to
see Rodin's work. An illustration of the Adams
Memorial is found in Hamilton, George
Heard, 1970, 19'" and 20'" Century Art, Englewood
Cliffs, N.J., Prentice-Hall and New York:
Harry N. Abrams, p. 151 .
15. Paradoxically, it was Allward's desire for very
narrow joints that contributed to the monument's
deterioration.
16. S. C. Mewburn, Chairman, CBMC, to Prime
Minister R. B. Bennett, 13 February 1932,
VAC-CH, VS 1296-14 Vol. 3. By contrast, Prime
Minister Richard B. Bennett complained,
" it was crazy for Canada to have opened
a quarry that had been closed by the Romans!!"
Bennett's remark was written in response
to Mewburn's letter, a copy of which
is contained in the same file.
17. As first designed, Allward's monument had a
clear front and back. However, the decision
to place the monument on the edge of the
ridge meant that it would be approached from
the back as well as the front. Allward, therefore,
added a central flight of steps to the
back of the monument. He flanked the steps
with mourning figures that recalled the reclining
sculptures of Day and Night, Dawn and
Dusk in Michelangelo's Medici tomb chapel
in Florence.
18 . This sense of a break with the historical
past is stated clearly by Thomas Mann in
his forward to The Magic Mountain, a book
he began before the war but was unable to
complete until after the conflict. He wrote,
"But let us not intentionally obscure a clear
state of affairs: the extraordinary pastness
of our story results from its having taken
place before a certain turning point, on the
far side of a rift that has cut deeply through
our lives and consciousness ... It took place
back then, long ago, in the old days of
the world before the Great War ... ". See:
Mann,Thomas, 1996, The Magic Mountain,
New York, Vintage International, p. xi.
19. Winter, Jay, 1995, Sites of Memory, Sites of
Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural
History, Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press. See also, Winter, Jay and Antoine Prost,
2005, The Great War in History: Debates and
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008
47

JACQUELI NE HUCKER > ESSAY I ESSAI
Controversies, 1914 to the Present, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, which provides a
very useful summation of the historiography
of remembrance and the First World War.
20 . Stamp, Gavin, 1977, introduction to the exhibition
Silent Cities mounted at the Heinz
Gallery of the Royal Institute of British Architects,
London, 9 November- 22 December,
1977, p. 3-19.
21 . Queen's University Archives, Allward Fonds,
Vimy Correspondence, Box 1. Alward's dream
bears a close similarity with J'Accuse, Abel
Gance's 1919, anti-war film. For a fuller version
of Allward's quotation and its source see Lane
Barstad's note 54 earlier in this same issue of
the Journal of the Society for the Study of
Architecture in Canada .
22. Library and Archives Canada, W.L.M. King
Diaries, 26 April, 1922.
23. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address included the following
powerful words: 'But in a larger sense,
we cannot dedicate -we cannot consecrate,
we cannot hallow- this ground. The brave
men, living and dead, who struggled here,
have consecrated it, far above our poor power
to add or detract".
similarity between E. Gordon Craig's "Eiektra"
and Allward's "Canada Bereft" in an
article entitled " Setting Legend in Stone",
published in the Globe and Mail on 7 April,
2007. Craig's influence on the development
of Canadian theatre design can be traced to
the 1920s and the Little Theatres established
at McGill, Queen's and Hart House, Toronto.
The f irst director of the Hart House Theatre,
Roy Mitchell, began his career in Canada at
the Arts and Letters Club, Toronto, of which
Allward was a founding member. Craig's influence
spread beyond the theatre. Many
British artists with a visionary bent were
inspired by him. They included Paul Nash
who believed Craig was one of Britain' s
outstanding artists.
30. The Vi my Monument also bears a close resem ­
blance to another of Craig's stage sets, Hamlet,
his most influential theatrical production,
which opened at the Moscow Art Theatre in
December 1911. Allw ard was not the only post
First World War monument designer to have
been influenced by modern theatre design.
Arturo Martini also set figures against an ambitious
stage like setting for his war memorial
at Vado Ligure. See: Curtis: 60.
24. This interpretation of The Birth of Tragedy is
taken from Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick,
2002, Cultural Theory: The Key Thinkers,
London and New York, Routledge, p.
164-66.
25. Bowie, Andrew, 2003, Introduction to German
Philosophy: From Kant to Habermas,
Cambridge, Polity Press, p. 138.
26. Ibid., p. 253 .
27. For an analysis of the significance of the 1909
production of Elektra to the modern movement
see Watson, Peter, 2001 , A Terrible
Beauty: The People and Ideas that Shaped
the Modern Mind, London, Phoenix Press, p.
54-55. Sigmund Freud's, The Interpretation
of Dreams, was published in Vienna in 1900.
While sales of the first print run were very
slow, the third edition, which was published
and translated into English in 1911 ensured its
place in the field of psychology. The publication
also opened up new avenues of exploration
for artists.
28. For E. Gordon Craig's association with the Dresden
production of Elektra and his contribution
to the modern theatre see Bablet, Denis, 1981,
The Theatre of Edward Gordon Craig, Daphne
Woodward, trans., London, Eyre Metheun.
29. Following a conversation with the present
writer, Michael Valpy discussed the visual
48
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N' 1 > 2008

ESSAY I ESSAI
RESTORING VIMY:
THE CHALLENGES OF CONFRONTING
EMERGING MODERNISM
JULIAN SMITH is Pl'incipa l of J ulian Smith &
Associates. Architects, of Ottawa, Onlal'iO. He
>JULIAN SMITH
teamed With Da ni el Lefevre , arch1tecte-en-cllef
de s monuments histor1ques and p1·inci pal of
Cabinet Lefevre, of Paris, Fl' ance. t o ove 1·see the
restOI'ation of the Vi my Memorial. Tile pr oject was
comple ted in 2 007 . He is also Executive DirectOI',
School of Restor·ation Al'ts at Willowbank.
Oueenston , Ontario.
The restoration of the Vi my Memorial
was completed in April 2007, in time
for a ceremony of rededication ninety
years to the day after the original Battle
of Vimy Ridge. The project was completed
on time and on schedule, and
the finished product was greeted with
favourable comments from both the
popular and professional press . It would
be reasonable to assume that this was a
project that went pretty much according
to expectations.
Such was not the case. The restoration
process was considerably more intrusive
and radical than originally envisioned.
The entire monument was dismantled
and rebuilt, except for the two py lons,
and even on the pylons there was some
significant dismantling on the west side.
There was a time during the process when
most of the monument lay scattered on
the ground around the base, inventoried
and sorted and awaiting treatment
or disposal.
Why such a ruthless approach, bordering
on reconstruction? The original project
brief had outlined four possible levels of
conservation activity-' In order of severity
of intervention, they ranged from a do
nothing option, through a limited repair
option and a limited repair and upgrade
option, to a comprehensive repair and upgrade
option. But even this fourth option
stopped short of extensive reconstruction,
and the recommendation in the brief
was to adopt an approach somewhere
between options three and four.
FI G. 1. DISMANTLING THE VI MY MEMOR IAL: ROW AFTER ROW OF STON E BEING CUT AWAY FRO M ITS
CONCRETE BAS E. I PHILI PPE FRUTIER, ALTIMAGE , FOR VETERANS AFFAIRS CANADA, JUNE 2005.
A general rule of conservation is that
intervention should be as minimal as
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2 008 > 49-56
4 9

J ULIAN SMITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
the articles contributed to this issue by
Jacqueline Hucker and Lane Borstad.
The Vimy commission was the perfect
opportunity for Allward to push the
limits of these tendencies (fig. 2) .
FIG . 2. A PHOTOGRAPH OF THE MONUMENT AT THE TI ME
OF ITS COM PLETION, 1936. LIGHT IS USED TO GIVE
THE STRU CTU RE ITS FORMAL QUALITY AS A SIN GLE
COM POSITION OF SOLID AN D VO ID.
possible. And in fact the reason the
first option, a do nothing option, was
rejected in the brief was that the decay
would be so severe that eventually the
monument would have to be completely
rebuilt. And yet here it was, being almost
completely rebuilt anyway (fig. 1).
There are two reasons that shaped
the final decision on how to proceed .
The first was technical -the inherent
causes of decay were so intrinsic
to the way the monument had been
constructed, that there was a requirement
to redesign the fundamental
structural underpinnings of the wall
systems. The second, and more compelling
reason, was philosophical -
the integrity of the monument was
threatened if the abstract purity of its
form was compromised. It w as an artifact
that could not readily accept the
patina of gradual decay and localized
repair, that was designed to challenge
traditional notions of materiality and
the effects of time.'
DRAWINGS. THE TEXTURE OF THE INDIVID UAL
MASONRY UN ITS IS SECONDARY TO THE SHAPE OF
THE WHOLE. IT IS A COM POSITION THAT IN THEORY
COU LD HAVE BEEN MOULDED FROM A FEW GIANT
BLOCKS, SUGGESTING THE TENDENCIES OF
MODERNIST ABSTRACTION. ! BORSTAD CATALOGUE# 253.
Both the technical and philosophical
reasons had to do with Walter Allward's
embrace of emerging modernism. As
the conservation field is increasingly
faced with the conservation of modernist
icons, it is worth reflecting on the
implications of the style and the values
that modernism embodies .
In the case of the Vimy Memorial, the
project emerged out of the cultural upheaval
created by the Great War, the
crucible within with the key principles
of modernism were forged . There was
a desperate search for a new and more
universal design idiom; an idiom free of
the kind of national and ethnic identities
that were seen to have led to the
immoralities and atrocities of the war.
And Allward, designer of the Vimy
monument and overseer of its construction,
w as well placed to understand this
angst and to help find a way out of the
morass. He had already been exploring
a modernist aesthetic in his sculptural
work and in his drawings, as shown in
The importance of Allward's work can be
understood by placing the Vi my Memorial
alongside other World War I memorials
such as those discussed by Gavin Stamp's
article in this issue. Most ofthem exhibit a
more traditional design approach, firmly
rooted in Victorian and Edwardian stylistic
devices and conventions. The Vimy Memorial
stands out in the simplicity of its
conception and the unremitting rigour of
its execution. Many projects, during the
process of detailing the design and then
implementing the construction, move
from a relatively simple underlying concept
to a more complex composition of
colour, texture and form. Allward became
obsessed with maintaining, throughout
the project, the purity and the formal simplicity
of his original concept. What we
see at Vi my is the impulse that becomes a
hallmark of modernism -the use of spareness
and formal purity to get out from
under the weight of historical precedent
and to avoid the specificity of traditional
materials, stylistic details, and methods
of assembly.
Most telling, at Vi my, was Allward 's treatment
of surface. His conceptual drawings,
not only for Vimy but for earlier
explorations of memorial architecture,
reveal an interest in the whole as something
quite different from the sum of
the parts. He always drew his designs, no
matter what the scale, as simple volumes
with unbroken surfaces that appear to
be carved from single blocks of material.
And the material itself is not important.
It is simply a continuous surface that plays
out the three-dimensional geometry of
his design. The power of these images is
in the subtlety of the forms, particularly
50
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008

J ULIAN S MITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
the almost imperceptible curves that help
create the sense of a sculptor working his
single block of clay (fig. 3).
During the process of translating Vimy
from drawing board into physical reality,
Allward never let go of his commitment
to surface and volume. For three
years he searched for a stone to meet his
requirements- smooth, homogeneous,
white, luminous - and then he designed
a system where the blocks were so large,
and the joints so fine, that there was almost
nothing but stone visible to the eye.
The mortar in the joints was coloured
to match the stone, and tooled flush
with the surface to eliminate even the
hint of a shadow line. And in one of the
more impressive and subtle gestures in
his design, the vertical joints were staggered
randomly up and down the walls
and pylons, to avoid even a subconscious
reading of a joint pattern.
Only once the stone was embedded into
the walls, did the final tooling of the surface
take place. This technique allowed
the very subtle texture to carry over
seamlessly from one stone to the next. It
also allowed the subtle curves, both horizontal
and vertical, to become perfectly
continuous over enormous distances. As
part of the construction process, stones
that displayed an unacceptable variation
in colour or texture were weeded out and
replaced . The precision of the assembly
and the finishing was extraordinary.
A final gesture that seems to confirm
Allward's modernist tendencies was his
treatment of the names. His design of the
monument was virtually complete when
he was required to add to it the names of
FIG. 4. ALLWA RD WAS ABLE TO ADD ELEVEN AND A HALF THOU SAND NAMES TO HI S MONU MENT WITHOUT DISTURBIN G
THE CONTINUITY OF SUR FAC E. TH E NAM ES RUN CONTINUOUSLY AS A KIND OF LIGHT TRACERY RI GHT AC RO SS
THE VERTI CAL AND HORI ZO NTAL JO INTS. I BLAIR KETCHESON, FOR PHILLIPS FAREVAAG SMALLEN BERG. JULY 2007.
Commission, he was working with the
idea of the surface as a two-dimensional
plane, not a three-dimensional texture.
He was not looking to enrich the surface
with carved regimental or other insignia,
or to emphasize the individual stones by
treating each of them as a name panel.
He protested the last minute decision at
first, and, in an effort perhaps to force
a re-evaluation, proposed carving names
into the floor of the platform area - a
most impractical idea. The authorities,
however, insisted on adding them to the
vertical wall surfaces.
His solution, in the end, was a brilliant
effort to turn a challenge into an opportunity.
In a complete break with
2000 years of tradition, he carved the
names in continuous bands, running the
letters without interruption from stone
11,285 Canadian soldiers who had died in to stone to stone, ignoring the mortar
World War I but whose bodies had never
been found. Allward was not pleased-
unlike his fellow architects and design-
ers employed by the Imperial War Graves
joints and simply treating the mortar as
part of the surface. No one had ever
carved letters or parts of letters into
exposed mortar joints before, and as if
to emphasize what he was doing, he not
only ran them across the vertical joints,
but ran them along some of the horizontal
joints as well.
The result of the lettering of the names
was to completely liberate the texture
of the surface from the pattern of the
stones. Rather than the names highlighting
the geometry of the individual
stone blocks, they became an almost disembodied
screen sitting proud of the surface,
free of the material real ity of stone
and mortar. The method of inscribing the
names had to be innovative as well, and
he developed a method of sandblasting
the letters through hard rubber stencils,
allowing them to be embedded in the
mortar and across the fragile edge conditions
of the stone without causing cra cking
and failure (fig. 4).
Just before the opening ceremony in
1936, Allward decided to lightly sandblast
the entire monument. This cleaning
of the surface was intended to
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N" 1 > 2008
51

J ULIAN S MITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
. ) j
FIG . 5. DETERIORATION OF THE MONUMENT BEFORE
RESTORATION. THE CONTINUITY OF THE SURFACE
IS DISRUPTED BY BOTH SURFACE DECAY AND
DISCOLOURATION OF THE MORTAR JOINTS.
CRACKING AND SPALLING ERODE THE SIMPLICITY
OF THE DESIGN. THE LATER WHITE LIMESTONE
PAVING UNDERMINES ALLWARD'S JUXTAPOSITION
OF THE FORMAL PURITY OF THE MONUMENT WITH
HAUNTING SIMPLICITY AND INFORMALITY OF A
DARKER LANDSCAPE. ! CA81N£TLEF!vRE. MAY 2003.
I -- -------
FIG . 6. DETERIORATION OF THE MONUMENT BEFORE RESTORATION. THE SURFACE OF THE MONUMENT HAD BEEN
BROKEN UP BY A PATCHWORK OF DIFFERENT STONE TYPES, TYPOGRAPHICAL STYLES, CALCITE DEPOSITS, SURFACE
DISCOLOURATIONS, AND SPALLING. I CABIN£1 UF!vRE. MAY 2003.
remove, as much as possible, the slight
discolorations which had begun to create
local variations and to distinguish individual
stones within the larger composition.
His obsession with the formal purity of
the monument was thus carried through
right to the time of dedication. The many
thousands of visitors who assembled for
the opening found a monument of enormous
beauty and emotional power, and
it seems that Allward had succeeded in
his mission.
Time was not kind to Allward, however,
or to his monument. By the end
of the century, the monument was selfdestructing
and a long history of repairs
had left a patchwork of materials, col ­
ours and textures, and a disconcerting
pattern of joints and inserts (figs. 5, 6).
The challenge, in terms of restoring the
monument, was to find an approach
that would respect Allward's intentions,
and would return some kind of integrity
to the monument. The answers could
not be found by simply intensifying the
decision making. The photograph, for
example, has become a document frequently
used in conservation to establish
historical fact and to guide restoration
activity. It is assumed that a photograph
provides an unbiased perspective on
what existed at some point in time, or
what survives today. Similarly, detailed
measured drawings are used as valuefree
documents representing the reality
of what exists. They become the basis
for the working drawings of conserva-
tion activity.
The problem is that restoration is a
process that plays around with cultural
value, and that makes decisions
about cultural continuity and cultural
disruption. People react viscerally to
restoration projects because their own
values are often embedded in the object
in question, and they can easily
sense whether those values are being
celebrated, ignored, or even trampled
on. Photographs and measured drawings
may be unbiased, but often bias
technical research. Although deterioration
is usually a technical issue, appropriate
conservation solutions first have
to be defined philosophically.
In the case of Vimy, its situation within
the larger context of post-war cultural upheaval
had not been studied when the
project brief was issued . It was Jacqueline
Hucker who provided the restoration
team with the first careful study of Allward's
work in the context of the early
twentieth century, and who was able to
provide a framework for understanding
the observable physical reality. The research
findings allowed the monument
to be appreciated as the representation
of an idea . The conservation options
could then be discussed in terms of their
appropriateness to that idea. How best
could one conserve the ideas intrinsic to
the values of the site?
This issue of representation is central to
the activity of conservation, and yet is
not well understood as a framework for
52
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008

JULIAN SMITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
is what one is after. What were the
original design intentions? How successfully
were they achieved? How did
people perceive the result, both initially
and in succeeding years? These questions
are sometimes better answered
by drawings and paintings and other
modes of representation, or by looking
not only at the content of photographs
but at their composition and framing.
For this reason, Hucker's illustrations
in this issue and my fig. 2 deliberately
reproduce period photographs of the
Vimy Memorial taken around the time
of its inauguration.
In the case of Vi my, Allward's initial drawings
show a monument with unbroken
surfaces, without material identifiers,
without joint patterns. Only the overall
form of the monument is delineated, its
volumetric composition enhanced by renderings
of light and shadow. By contrast,
the measured drawings forming part of
the project brief showed a monument
with every single stone identified, each
joint carefully delineated (fig. 7). And
with good reason. By the end of the twentieth
century, not only was the monument
crumbling but so was Allward's vision.
He had not been interested in a graceful
aging process. He had not created a
monument that would embrace the gradual
texturing of the surface from wind
and rain and sun . He had certainly not designed
a monument that could accept replacement
materials of similar but slightly
different texture, or colour, or dimension.
He had designed a monument that had
everything to do with formal abstraction,
and the quality of abstraction could not
be easily sustained if there were years of
patchwork repair.
To respect Allward 's vision, therefore,
seemed to require a restoration approach
that would begin to dissolve the
importance of the mortar joints and the
localized stone detailing and the variations
in material and texture, and that
would re-establish a monument appreciated
for its pure form, its seamless surface
qualities, its patterns of light and
shade. Individual components had to
be subjected to the importance of the
whole. This approach would require a
removal of all the foreign materials and
textures that had crept into the monument
over a period of seventy years,
and their replacement with stone from
the same quarry in Croatia that had
supplied the original material, shaped
and dressed exactly as before. It also
meant correcting even the most minor
displacements of the original stone, due
to freeze-thaw activity or other internal
pressures. To sustain such considerable
investment over the long term meant
correcting some of the underlying structural
flaws to limit future deterioration
or movement.
The idea was that future generations
could draw or photograph Vimy as Allward
had envisioned it; as an object in the
landscape simple and powerful in both
concept and execution. This goal shaped
both small-scale and larger-scale decisions
throughout the restoration process, and
resulted in the massive scale of the intervention.
There was general agreement at
the end of the project on the success of
this approach (fig. 8).
A nagging question remains, however.
What are the consequences of dealing
with modernism if we decide that the
abstract idea, and its formal representation,
justify a continual cycle of reconstruction?
Does the importance not
only of materiality, but of the original
craftsmanship associated with it, disappear
from the discussion? The Barcelona
Pavilion, of Mies van der Rohe,
exists today as a complete reconstruction
of the lost masterpiece (figs. 9, 10). The
FIG. 7. DRAWING PREPARED BY THE CONSULTANT TEAM
AS PART OF DEVELOPING BOTH AN OVERALL
RESTORATION PHILOSOPHY AND THE DETAILED
CONSTRUCTION REQUIREMENTS. IT SHOWS THE
UNEVENNESS OF SURFACE CONDITIONS AND THE
CHALLENGE OF RECOVERING THE SIMPLICITY OF
ALLWARD'S CONCEPTION. I CABINEl UFME.
FIG. 8. THE VIMY MEMORIAL DURING REDEDICATION
CEREMONIES. THE RESTORED MONUMENT CAN
ONCE AGAIN BE UNDERSTOOD AS A SIMPLE,
UNIFIED COMPOSITION. SURFACE TEXTURE IS NOT
AS IMPORTANT AS THE OVERALL PLAY OF LIGHT AND
SHADOW. I PHoum FRUnEA. ALTIMAGE. FOtt VETERANS AFFAIRS
CANADA. 1 APIIIL 1007.
Villa Savoye, an equally iconic marker of
the modernist period, exists as a heavily-
restored, perfect formal and visual rep-
resentation of Le Corbusier's idea, but
hardly a single original surface remains
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008 53

J ULIAN SMITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG . 9. BARCELONA PAVILION, MIES VANDER ROHE, RECONSTRUCTION.! PIERRE DO Pt!EY 1!1117. FIG . 10. BARCELONA PAVI LION, MIES VANDER ROHE, RECONSTRUCTION. ! PIERRE DO PREY 1!187.
intact (fig. 11). Frank Lloyd Wright's Fall -
ing Water has been restored with coat-
ings on the concrete that are not the
same as he used but recreate the intend-
ed formal qualities of the composition.
And in each case, the reconstruction is
designed to last indefinitely; to ignore
the effects of aging by using the latest
available technology. The recent restoration
of Vimy is designed to last for a
hundred years. This hubris is not so different
from that of the original creators,
approximation of the original. A few
centuries from now, one can imagine
Percy Bysshe Shelley's "traveller from an
antique land" reporting about Vi my:
have convinced us that the physical reality
is the only thing we are working with. We
direct all our energies at physical repair.
We have not explored adequately the
possibility for representing these ideas
... on the pedestal. these words appear: in virtual forms; forms that can stimulate
-My name is Ozymandias. King of Kings,
Look on my Works. ye M ighty. and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck. boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
the imagination and keep the ideal alive
even as the embodiment decays.
For the sake of comparison, consider
the Parthenon in Athens. This monument
had become a ruin; decay had
and involves the restorers in the same In the case of the Vimy Memorial, decay been allowed to run its course for cen -
modernist conceits. is also of broader philosophical interest. turies. The monument occupied a land-
There was, in fact, one other conservation
option for Vimy. It was raised early on
in the process, but had been ruled out a
priori in the project brief and was never
seriously discussed . The option was to
allow the monument to decay; in other
words, the do nothing approach. According
to this scenario, all the various repair
insertions would have been removed, and
the honesty of the decay process revealed
for all the world to see. The surviving original
material, damaged or not, would
have been stabilized but not replaced .
This approach would have led to a more
and more ruinous state, over time, but
at least the integrity of Allward's vision
would not have been compromised by
half-hearted attempts to maintain an
Our monuments, however designed and
conceived, are doomed to decay with
time. Our memories also decay, and in
some ways the healing process of the
reforestation at Vimy and elsewhere is
about a deliberate decaying of memory,
about a letting go of the terror embedded
in the war landscape.
In this approach, the formal purity of the
original conception would be recreated
in the imagination of the visitor. And this
brings back the question of representation.
One of the reasons decay does not
seem to be an acceptable option when
dealing w ith modernism is that the
physical object seems the only testimony
to the ideas it embodies. The use of the
photograph and the measured drawing
scape of ruins, part of an assemblage of
fragments of classical civilization. Then,
in the late eighteenth century, Stuart
and Revett produced an extraordinary
book, The Antiquities of Athens, which
provided two powerful and contrasting
views of the Parthenon: one a perspective
showing a romantic vision of the
overgrown site with its seductive hints
at former greatness (fig. 12); the other a
magnificent elevation of a restored Parthenon
in all its pristine purity (fig. 13).
Both are copper plate etchings, but the
approach in each was very different - the
second is not placed within a landscape
setting, but simply engraved with meticulous
care as a free-standing image.
The absolute symmetry of the forms was
reflected in the design of the book itself,
54
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008

J ULIAN S M ITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG . 11. VILLA SAVOYE, LE CORBUSIER, RESTORED. I PIE.IUI£ ou PREY 1987.
which arranged the plates in careful sequence
starting with the perfect whole
and then exploring the parts. The impact
of Stuart and Revett's work was significant.
It helped create an appreciation for
Greek architecture, and more broadly for
Greek civilization, as epitomizing purity
of form and conception. It created
a Greek architecture of the imagination
that has become, over time, as significant
in later interpretations of the classical as
the monuments themselves.
Like the Parthenon, Vi my exists as a formal
abstraction and as an evocative element
within the surrounding battlefield landscape.
The retention of a pockmarked terrain
of suffering and terror, as a setting
for the monument, strongly differentiates
Vi my from its other World War I counterparts.
The juxtaposition works when we
see the whiteness and perfection of the
monument against this dark and messy
landscape. Were the monument to decay,
would the power of this juxtaposition be
reduced? If we had to rely only on photographic
images of the site, the answer to
this question would have to be yes . The
stark contrast would fade over time. On
the other hand, if the perfection of the
monument lived on in our imagination,
reinforced by appropriate representation,
it is possible that we could accept decay
and still sense the power of the site as
Allward envisioned it.
Retention of value through modes of representation
is a complex subject, and not
well developed as part of the discussion
of conservation options. It is not surprising
that the option chosen for Vimy was
full physical restoration of the monument.
It was one of two valid options,
and it was the one most consistent with
expectations. There was also the more
specific issue of the names. These names,
engraved on the walls, are the only surviving
vestige of so many lives sacrificed for
the greater good. Since these are the sol ­
diers whose bodies were never recovered
or identified, there is no tomb at which to
lay a wreath, no other place at which to
honour their memory. The importance of
the names was one of the reasons a full
and careful restoration was chosen . The
decay of the walls had become so severe
that some of the names were no longer
legible, and this translates into a loss of
tangible fabric and intangible memory at
the same time.
We will perhaps never know, however,
whether Vimy could have survived as a
monument in decay, a monument with
an imagined reality and a physical real ­
ity that were both separate and intertwined.
And it may be that we in the
restoration community need to explore
the issue of representation much more
extensively before we can make wise decisions
about complex sites, particularly
sites of memory.
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008
55

J ULIAN SMITH > ESSAY I ESSAI
FIG. 12. COPPERPLATE ETCHING FROM JAMES STUART AND NICHOLAS REVETI,
ANTIQUfTIES OF ATHENS, VOL II, CHAPTER 1, PLATE IV, FIGURE 1, 'A VIEW
OF THE EASTERN PORTICO OF THE PARTHENON'.
FIG. 13. COPPERPLATE ETCHING FROM JAMES STUART AND NICHOLAS REVETI, ANTIQUITIES
OF ATHENS, VOL. II, CHAPTER 1, PLATE VI, 'ELEVATION OF THE EASTERN PORTICO OF
THE PARTHENON'.
In conclusion I return to the challenge of
dealing with emerging modernism. Our
principles for conservation come out of
a nineteenth-century preoccupation with
monuments from the preindustrial age.
Medieval cathedrals and Renaissance palaces
were built by hand, with an obvious
exploration of the material qualities and
textures involved. There is an authorship
that has to do with craftsmanship, and
that therefore defines authenticity in material
terms. The fundamental principle in
such cases is retention of original material
and differentiating it from contemporary
interventions. When John Ruskin and William
Morris were developing conservation
theory and practice through the Society
for the Protection of Ancient Buildings,
they were taking preindustrial monuments
as their point of reference.
In this context, a limited repair and upgrade
option would be a reasonable approach.
The repair itself would be part of
an ongoing evolution, with the goal being
to arrest or slow down the processes
of decay but not deny their reality.
In the case of emerging modernism, the
application of the principles becomes
more complicated. If formal abstraction
and purity of form become fundamental,
it is not clear how one incorporates
repair in the same way. We tend to return
examples of modernism to an abstract
ideal that is considered appropriate to
their underlying value. The conservation
principles that apply to modernist
architecture are not well understood or
enunciated.
The Vimy Memorial is not fully part of
the modernist tradition. The cladding was
still stone, hand-tooled and finished. The
sculptural work relied on traditional stone
carving techniques, although Allward did
use pantographs to transfer the design
and left the marks of this technology on
the surface perhaps as subtle reminders
of this application. But he also used re -
inforced concrete, then in its infancy, as
the underlying structural system. In fact,
his combination of stone and concrete in
a new and untested way partly led to the
gradual degradation of the monument
and necessitated a severe intervention
approach. Similar to Allward's own mixture
of new and age-old techniques, the
restoration at Vimy was a subtle blend.
It involved a strong commitment to
preserving every single original stone that
was salvageable either as is or through
any one of a variety of sophisticated
repair techniques; at the same time the
introduction of new elements was done
seamlessly, without the usual regard for
distinguishing old and new. The surfaces
were cleaned, as in Allward's time, to create
a uniform surface. The tooling and the
relettering were carried across the joints
as before. Each small scale decision was
part of a larger philosophical commitment-
to respect the intellectual intent
as much as the physical manifestation of
Allward's work. The conditions of emerging
modernism that had shaped the original
were used to shape the restoration.
NOTES
1. Section 9.0, " Options Analysis and Recom ­
mended Option", in Vi my Monument Historic
Structures Report, Heritage Conservation Program,
Public Works and Government Services
Canada, 2002.
2. For a detailed discussion of the full restoration
process, see Wertheimer, Eve, 2007, Documentation
of the Vimy Monument Restoration,
Heritage Conservation Directorate, Public
Works and Government Services Canad.
56 JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008

POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
ALLWARD'S FIGURES,
LUTYENS'S FLAGS AND WREATHS
PIERRE DE LA RUFFINitRE DU PREY recently
conce1ved the exh1b1t1on Pa/lad10 m Prmt currently
on d1splay at Queen's Umvers1ty until 31 October,
>PIERRE DE LA
RUFFINIERE Ou PREY
2008 . He also wrote the eponymous exh1b1t1on
catalogue
"!Taking another whiskey. I It was after I
came back here - in that awful affair on
Vimy Ridge - I knew I'd go mad if I didn't
break the strain". R.C. Sherriff, Journey's
End, act 1, 1928.
Before the First World War ended an
artistic tug-of-war began. The architects
who advised the Imperial War Graves
Commission shared a bias against the
use of sculpture in cemeteries. As one of
them, Reginald Blomfield, put it in his
Memoirs: "Many of us had seen terrible
examples in France, and were haunted
by the fear of winged angels in vari ­
ous sentimental attitudes".' Francophile
though he was, Blomfield denigrated
the figural sculpture that dominates
many French monuments. His statement
helps to explain the architectural quality
of most Commission war graves, notably
those by Edwin Lutyens at Etaples,
Villers - Bretonneux, and Thiepval.
Unconstrained by such guidelines, the
Toronto-based architect/sculptor Walter
Allward worked independently for the
Canadian Battlefields Memorials Com ­
mission. Allward's imposing monument
at Vimy uses figural sculpture in con ­
trast to Lutyens's more abstract reliance
on carved flags and funereal wreaths.
Both architects, however, communi ­
cate in their different ways the same
poignant message by uniting under one
somber banner the sister arts of architecture
and sculpture.
FIG. 1. ITAPLES MILITARY CEMETERY, FRANCE: EDWIN LUTYENS.j PIERRE ou PIIEY 1987.
To turn to Lutyens first, already by 1918
he had embarked on designing the
war cemetery at Etaples, overlooking
the English Channel from a hillside on
the French coast at the site of a former
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57

P IERRE DE LA RUFFINitRE Du PREY > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
FIG . 2. ~TAPLES MILITARY CEMETERY. FRANCE: EDWIN
LUTYENS. CLOSE-UP OF ONE OF THE PYLONS. I P1ERR£
DUPREY 1987.
hospital and base camp. Seen from the
train line below, or from the main road
among the trees up above, a carpet of
around 10,000 gravestones, including
2010 Canadian ones, creates an awesome
sight (fig. 1). Religious symbolism
was deliberately restricted to the minimum.
The centrally positioned Cross of
Sacrifice, a standard feature designed by
Blomfield, is flanked at either end of the
platform by twin Lutyens pylons, anticipating
those of Allward at Vimy. Gavin
Stamp's article earlier in this issue calls
these pylons "cenotaphs", thus drawing
attention to their similarity to Lutyens's
Cenotaph on Whitehall in London
(cf_ Stamp figs. 2, 13).
Lutyens conceived of the end pylons at
Etaples as sentinels, or "silent witnesses
to the desolation of war", to quote the
memorable phrase of King George V during
his 1922 pilgrimage to some of the
cemeteries (including Eta pies). 2 Here, on
this artificial plateau, Lutyens resurrected
the idea of ornamenting the pylons with
drooping flags- an idea he was forced to
reject at the Cenotaph. He placed them so
they point skyward, drawing attention to
the topmost element, which is in reality a
stylized, flag-draped coffin like a Roman
sarcophagus. Specifically Christian references
fade away, and Lutyens invokes the
classical tradition to impart a feeling of
the eternal and never-changing aspects
of that tradition, as he understood it.
Further to intensify the hush, the carved
flags do not flutter bravely but rest limp
and motionless.
Focusing in on one of the pylons (fig. 2),
a laurel wreath can be seen lying on top
of the sarcophagus. On the long sides
a garland of foliage held up by ribbons
replaces the laurel wreath motif_ The
garland has a classical French eighteenth-century
look to it- appropriate to
Etaples's location - although the leaves
are obviously oak, symbolic of England.
They strike the only real note of naturalism
in the fundamentally geometric play
of simple shapes. Even the flags, according
to David Watkin "hang frozen and
deathly in the air". 3 Lutyens abstracted
their form so as to avoid the impression
of anything transitory and flimsy. No
doubt Lutyens's eye would have appreciated
the astonishing shadow cast on
the stonework by the metal crown at the
top of one of the flag poles.
Gavin Stamp and Jacqueline Hucker point
out in their separate articles that one of
the hardest - indeed grimmest- tasks
during and immediately after World War
I was deciding how best to commemorate
those lost in action . There were
hundreds of thousands of names with
no remains. Memorials to the so-called
Missing were erected at or near to the
battlefields where they were believed to
have fallen, or ports from which they had
sailed. Fabian Ware, the Vice-Chairman
of the Imperial War Graves Commission,
hoped the Dominion Governments would
join forces with the Commission, use its
architects, and follow its guidelines. But
the Memorial to the Missing Australians,
on the battlefield where they had
distinguished themselves at Villers­
Bretonneux, is an interesting instance
of what actually happened. A design
competition took place in 1925 and the
little-known Australian architect William
Lucas won it, although Lutyens eventually
supplanted him. The last of the Memorials
completed, two years later than Vimy, it
shows how Lutyens skilfully adapted the
previous design. Notably, he retained Lu ­
cas's idea of a central columnar lookout
tower to honor the 10,866 Missing.• But
Lutyens reduced the importance of classical
columns by relegating them to elegant
door frames, while still maintaining
overall classical symmetry (fig. 3). The
out-lying pavilions have pyramidal roofs,
an oblique reference perhaps to the Egyptian
cult of the dead, at the same time as
the tetrahedron shape keeps pace with
the severely elemental geometry that
Lutyens preferred in his late work. Each
corner has rain-soaked-looking flags executed
in a more stripped-down fashion
than at Etaples.
These "sad flags", so to speak, recur at
the corners on the upper stage of the
tower (fig. 4). (Notice how, in the closeup,
bullets fired by World War II German
aircraft in June 1940 scarred the surface
of the World War I monument less than
four years after its inauguration.)S
Lutyens's largest monument to the Missing,
the moving Thiepval Memorial, rises
145 feet above the peaceful landscape
where the Battle of the Somme once
raged on one of the most blood-soaked
stretches of earth in human warfare. The
commemoration of so many in a single
structure at Thiepval came about because
58
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P IERRE D E L A R UFFINI~RE Ou P REY > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
FIG. 3. AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MEMORIAL, VILLERS·BRETONNEUX, FRANCE: EDWIN LUTYENS.I PIERRE ou PREY 1987.
FIG . 4. AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL MEMORIAL, VILLERS·
BRETONNEUX. FRANCE: EDWIN LUTYENS. CLOSE-UP
OF THE TOWER. I PIERRE ou PREY 1987.
of a policy of retrenchment in the face
of French Government concern over the
growing number of foreign monuments
on French soil. Allward responded to the
same concern with regard to Vimy in a
letter quoted by Jacqueline Hucker, and
shortly to be quoted from more fully at
the end of this postscript. The decision
to consolidate resulted in the fact that
the Thiepval Memorial flies the Union
Jack and the tricolore; real flags this time
(fig. 5). The site slopes down to the back
where a token even number of French
and British unknown soldiers lie buried
beneath the lawn shoulder to shoulder,
as it were, in death as in battle (Coutu
fig. 1). The monumental edifice, faced
with French brick trimmed in Portland
limestone from England, physically embodies
the wartime alliance between the
two countries.
The view from the main approach
clearly evokes the Roman triumphal
arches that Lutyens must have had in his
imagination when designing Thiepval.
By making only simplified and oblique
references to the classical tradition,
however, he avoided odious overtones
of victory and emphasized tragic solemnity
instead. Sculpture is limited to laurel-leaf
wreaths of the same sort Lutyens
used earlier at Eta pies. At Thiepval they
make an even more significant contribution
. In all they number twenty
four, eight positioned around the top,
and the rest on the lower walls which
from a distance look like a base of plain
white limestone.
Observed closer up (fig. 6), however,
the 64 wall surfaces of limestone are inscribed
with the names of those missing
in action - according to Gavin Stamp the
staggering number amounts to 73,000!
By selecting triple arched openings
Lutyens allowed himself the opportunity
to increase many-fold the letters of
the alphabet he could fit in . So the walls
are not walls at all, but honour rolls of
such a magnitude as to defy comprehension
. Notice some revealing details: the
flooring where local red brick entwines
with imported white stone in a sort of
Anglo-French tango; the English oak
leaves and acorns on the torus molding
of the base course. 6
Above the names "TO WHOM FORTUNE
HAS DENIED THE KNOWN AND HON­
OURED BURIAL GIVEN TO THEIR COM­
RADES IN DEATH ", as the inscription
reads, hang weighty bound-wreaths
seemingly suspended by ribbons from
what appear to be two pins (fig. 7). The
name MIRAUMONT, written inside the
wreath illustrated here, represents a
bloody engagement in the Battle of the
Somme. Something about the lettering
of the apparently endless list conveys a
sense of tragic sadness and futility rather
than a buoyant proclamation of victory
over death. The carved wreaths droop as
if in mourning, like Lutyens's sad flags
observed earlier.
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59

P IERRE D E L A R UFFINitRE Ou P REY > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
FIG . 5. MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING OF THE SOMME AT TH IE PVAL, FRANCE: EDWIN LUTYENS. I PIERRE ou PREY 1987
In comparison to Thiepval, the Vimy
Memorial enjoys a commanding location
at the edge of the ridge of Hill 145. It
is the most dramatically situated of the
World War I grave sites on the Western
Front. The architect/sculptor of Vimy,
Walter Allward, never had Lutyens or
Blomfield's advantage of touring the
battlefields before sitting down at his
drawing board. He lived in Toronto and
designed the Vimy monument from his
imagination, based on material provided
by the Canadian Battlefields Memorial
Commission. But, as Lane Borstad points
out in his article, Allward had received
various commissions for Ontario war
monuments early in his career, before
winning the Vimy competition in 1921 .
Allward was unanimously selected by
an international jury of architects on
the strength of his remarkable dreaminspired
preparatory drawings, illustrated
by Borstad and by Julian Smith in
this issue (Borstad fig . 24; Smith fig . 3) .
Equally remarkable, as Sm ith notes, the
completed structure departed very little
from the initial parti, a good French word
that architects use to mean the overa ll
arrangement of a scheme. In Allward's
case, to compound the brilliance of the
achievement, the monument was originally
designed for Hill 62 at Saint-Jul ien
near Ypres, over the Belgian border in
Flanders, and the location only changed
to Vimy the following year.
Allward had training as an architect in
Toronto and considered himself a member
of the profession. He used the twin
60
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P IERRE D E L A R uFFINitRE O u P REY > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
FIG . 6. MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING OF THE SOMME AT THIEPVAL, FRANCE: EDWIN
LUTYENS. CLOSE-UP OF LISTS OF NAMES. I PIERRE ou PREY 1'187 CLOSE-UP OF A WREATH. ! PIERRE ou PREY 1'187
titles architect and sculptor on his aston- architecture and sculpture are so closely Croatia with sculptures on it carved out
ishingly large and detailed blueprints interwoven ... ". 7 of the same material. Over the course of
for the Vimy monument, preserved in
Queen's University Archives. Soon after
winning the competition, moreover, Allward
wrote a letter, also preserved at
Queen's, to Colonel Henry C. Osborne,
Secretary of the Canadian Battlefields
Memorial Comm ission, in which he
stated: "I am going to Flanders to act as
Architect (or designer) and sculptor and
will have to serve as both from the beginning
to the end of this work, because the
People who cross the bomb-cratered
Vimy Memorial park do not often realize
how much architecture and engineering
lies out of view: the massive concrete
substructure w ith the twin pylons resting
on top; the intricate series of ramps,
stairs, and terraces leading up to or
down from the main platform (fig. 8).
All this, of course, is hidden behind a facing
of stone quarried from the coast of
time problems have arisen with the stone
cladding, as Julian Smith's account of the
extensive recent restoration makes clear.
But the structural elements beneath
the surface continue to pay tribute to
Allward's architectural knowledge and
his close collaboration with the British
engineer Oscar Faber who, Jacqueline
Hucker points out, had previously col ­
laborated on Blomfield' s Menin Gate
Memorial (Stamp, fig . 19).
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61

P IERRE D E L A R UFFINIERE Ou P RE Y > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
FIG. 8. CANADIAN NATIONAL MONUMENT. VI MY RIDGE, FRANCE: WALTER ALLWARD. FROM THE NORTH EAST. I PIERRE ou PREY 1981
including the manuscript Allward letter
alluded to earlier, refer to the wall as " intended
to suggest a line of defence .. ." .
Several features intentionally recall town
fortifications, like those the French mil-
itary engineer Vauban had constructed
for King Louis XIV at Ypres, and from
which Blomfield took his cue in designing
the Menin Gate there.
On closer inspection, beside the Breaking
of the Sword statuary group to the right,
there protrudes from the pseudo-fortification
wall the mouth of a cannon draped
w ith a laurel leaf and ol ive branch wreath,
as if to suggest that the guns are silenced
(fig. 9). Full scale drawings in the Allward
Looking from the north east of the ridge,
to the left of the flags of Canada and
of France, which officially ceded the
land for the Vimy Memorial in 1922,
a long wall in front of the pylons supports
the embankment and a terrace.
At the right end a statue group shows
sympathy to the helpless and that at the
left symbolizes the act of breaking the
sword of war. In the centre stands what
Allward's competition-w inning drawing
calls "An heroic f igure of Canada brooding
over the graves of her valiant dead "
(Borstad fig. 24). Up the side walls and
at the back, carvers inscribed the names
of 11,285 Canad ians missing -in -action in
France (Sm ith f ig. 4). Several documents,
Fonds at Queen's University indicate that
he paid careful attention to this wreath
motif, forcefully rem iniscent of Lutyens's
work at Etaples and Thiepval.
Apart from the telltale wreaths, and despite
the fourteen years Allward spent
in London working on the Vimy commiss
ion, research in the Allward Fonds
indicated no contact between him and
his artistic counterparts in England, until
evidence came to light from an unexpectedly
obvious source. The evidence takes
the form of an Allward clipping from
the front-page of the December 5, 1933
Toronto Globe and Mail newspaper. 8 The
headline reads: " Huge War Memorial
62
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PIERRE DE LA RUFFINitRE Ou PREY > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
FIG. 9. CANADIAN NATIONAL MONUMENT, VI MY RIDGE, FRANCE: WALTER ALLWARD. CLOSE-UP OF
THE SOUTH END. I PIERRE DU PREY 1987.
FIG. 10. CANADIAN NATIONAL MONUMENT, VI MY RIDGE, FRANCE: WALTER ALL WARD.
CLOSE-UP BY CLAIR DE LUNE.I PIERRE ou PREY 1987.
Placed on Vimy Ridge Soon to be Com ­
pleted ... Design and Impressiveness
Lauded by Great English Authority".
The well-informed journalist, William
Marchington, derived his information
from a reliable source: Colonel Osborne
in Ottawa, Allward's stalwart supporter
on the Canadian Battlefields Memorial
Commission. The article begins "Sir Ed ­
win Lutyens, eminent British architect
who designed the Cenotaph in London ...
recently visited the Vimy Ridge Memorial,
and described it as 'this great masterpiece'
.... in a letter to Colonel Henry C.
Osborne". So, at last, there is conclusive
proof of a connection, however tenuous,
between Lutyens, Vimy, and Allward.
The connection transcends specific borrowings,
and consists of one independent
genius's esteem for another's ability
to express the sadness of war and the
gladness of peace.
Marchington's informative article con ­
tinues by quoting further from the
Lutyens letter, perhaps written shortly
before or after he attended the August
1932 inauguration of his nearby Thiepval
MemoriaL According to Marchington:
Sir Edwin writes : "The main structure is
practically complete, but the magnificent
statuary upon which you are now engaged
cannot be hurried. To spoil this work by
haste would mean that the time already
spent would be wasted and the quality of
the monument as a whole would be spoilt. I
am sure that when it is unveiled it will make
a great impression for all time .... The world
will only then realize how worthy a memorial
Canada has raised to her glorious dead".
Surely Lutyens was prompted to write in
part because someone - perhaps Allward
himself- had mentioned that the fate of
the Vi my monument's completion hung in
the balance due to lack of funds and pressure
to finish the job after so many years'
delay. Whatever the case, Lutyens rose
to the crisis with a timely, generous, and
heartfelt tribute. How right he proved to
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63

P IERRE D E L A R u FFINIERE D u P REY > POSTSCRIPT I POSTFACE
be about the happy outcome and positive
world opinion. Vi my's "marble arms ... like
the architecture of heaven", as Canadian
novelist Jane Urquhart recently described
the pylons, were inaugurated by King
Edward VIII on 25 July, 1936.'
A decade before, Allward had addressed
Andre Ventre, architecte en chef of the
French Commission des Monuments Historiques,
a revealing letter. Allward ended
it by way of explanation and justification
with these words:
From my youth I have admired the qualities
in the work of your great sculptors. and in
making my des ign for Vimy. I endeavored to
erect a memorial which might be acceptable
to your people. fully appreciating their high
regard for art.. s ome thing artistic ! . !
s piritual ! . ! and broadly human in its
ex presion I sic! -"
Who can doubt that he achieved his aim
by infusing mute Croatian stone with a
human voice, while avoiding the mawkish
sculpture the English War Graves' architects
like Blomfield abhorred? Allward's
figures imbue the architecture with
pathos in the same degree as do Lutyens's
flags and wreaths.
Allward's letter to Monsieur Andre Ventre
includes the following, deeply felt
personal observation: "The two Pylons
were an endeavor to create an outline
against the sky that would ... suggest
the upper part of a Cross . In the afternoon
when a shaft of sunlight will break
through the space between the pylons,
and, illuminating part of the sculptures,
will suggest a cathedral effect".
Allward's intended "cathedral effect" is
beautifully evoked in a picture of Vimy's
soaring pylons framing a half moon
at that bluish time of day the French so
fittingly calll'heure bleue (fig. 10).
NOTES
1. Blomfield, Reginald, 1932, Memoirs of an
Architect, M ac millan, p. 1B1 . Examples of the
sentimentality to which Blomfield alludes may
be seen in the legion of monuments illustrated
in de Bu sscher, Jean -Marie, 1981, Les folies de
l 'industrie, Brusse ls, Archives d'Architecture
Moderne.
2. King George V, as quoted by Stamp, Gavin,
2006, The M emorial to the Missing of the
Somme, London, Profile Books, p. 100.
3. Watkin, David, "Cities of Silence: The Cemeter·
ies and Memorials of the Great War", Country
Life, val . 162, no 4193, 10 November, 1977, p.
1400.
4. Lucas's unexecuted competition-winning de·
sign, which looks rather like a columnar grain
silo, is illustrated in Hurst , Sidney C. , 1929,
Th e Silent Cities ..., London, Methuen, p. 223.
The Australian architect-general Joseph John
Talbot Ho bbs, one of the victors of Villers·
Bretonneux and an adjudicator in the com·
petition, is sometimes erroneously given credit
for the design. It would certainly seem that he
had a hand in transferring the job from Lucas
to Lutyens.
5. Blunden, Edmund, 1967, Th e Unending Vigil.
A History of the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission 1917 - 1967, London, Constable,
fig . 49, illustrates the damage to Villers·
Bretonneux.
6. Th e acorns and oak leaves were brought to
my attention by Crellin, David, 20 02, "'Some
Corner of a Foreign Field ': Lutyens, Empire and
the Sites of Remembrance," In Andrew Hopkins
and Gav in Stamp (eds .). Lutyens Abroad:
The Work of Sir Edwin Lutyens outside the
British Isles, Rome, The Brit ish School at Rome,
p. 104
7. Queen's University Archives, Allward Fonds,
Bo x 1, Vimy Correspondence, letter dated 16
December, 1921 .
8. Ibid, Box 2, Vimy Clippings. Jacqueline Hucker's
note 16 to her article in this issue, refers
to an exchange of letters between Lutyens
and S. C. Mewburn, Chairman of the CBMC ,
which took place in early 1932 . Thi s may help
to date the time of Lutyens's visi t or visits to
the Vi my construction site.
9. Urquhart, Jane, 2001, The Stone Carvers,
Toronto, McClelland & Stewart, p . 352 . Urquhart's
work of fiction was based on extensive
co nsultat ion of Qu een's Un ive rsi ty
Archives' All ward Fonds.
10. Quee n's University Archives, Allward Fonds,
Box 1, Vi my Correspondence, letter dated 12
April, 1926. The letter exists in a typed copy
with manuscript addenda. Jacqueline Hucker
kindly informs me that among uncatalogued
papers in Veterans Affairs, Ottawa, is the initial
letter of enquiry from Andre Ventre (1B74
- 1951).
64
JSSAC JSEAC 33 > 1 > 2008

REVIEW I COMPTE-RENDU
GAVIN STAMP, THE MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING OF THE SOMME
(LONDON: PROFILE BOOKS LTD. , PAPERBACK EDITION 2007).
PART OF PROFILE BOOKS 'WONDERS OF THE WORLD' SERIES.
214 +PAGES, 32 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS.
JOAN COUTU holds degrees 1n Art H1story from
the Un1vers1ty of Toronto. Queen's Un1vers1ty. and
>JOAN C OUTU
the Un1vers1ty of London She IS an assoc1ate
professor 1n the Fme Arts Department of the
Un1vers1ty of Waterloo In 2006 MeGill-Queen's
Umvers1ty Press published her book PersuasiOn
end Propaganda Monuments and the Eighteenth­
Century Br1t1Sh Emp1re
More books like this need to be written.
The book is nominally about
Edwin Lutyens's Memorial to the Missing
of the Somme at Thiepval in northern
France. Yet, in one 190-page pocket-sized
paperback, Gavin Stamp has also captured
the futility, the carnage, the loss, the devastation,
and the general horror of World
War I as well as the infrastructure of commemoration
that emerged even before the
war was over. Stamp draws upon a range
of academic scholarship and infuses it with
his own superlative knowledge of architectural
forms and history to write a lucid,
limpid book for a general audience.
The Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
is a dynamic brick and stone monolith
intersected by arches that looms quietly
alone in the landscape that was the site
of the four and a half month long battle
of attrition. In the end, when Field Marshall
Douglas Haig declared the campaign
officially over on 18 November 1916,
there were over a million casualties on
both sides and fewer than seven miles
of pulverised land had changed hands.
Lutyens's Thiepval Memorial commemorates
the 73,357 British soldiers who disappeared
in that putrid muddy hell. As a
figure on paper 73,357 is enormous but
when each of the names is inscribed on
the inner stone walls of the sixteen massive
piers that are the bases of the multiple
arches, the scale of the loss becomes
unimaginable. Every direction one turns,
one sees name after name after name.
FIG . 1. MEMORIAL TO THE MISSING OF THE SOMME ATTHIEPVAL. FRANCE: EDWIN LUTYENS.
VIEW LOOKING OVER HEADSTONES. I PIERRE ou PR£Y 1987.
Stamp pulls no punches in his condemnation
of the Somme offensive and the war
in general. On page 4, he sets the tone,
describing the Battle of the Somme as an
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008 > 65 67
65

JOAN COUTU > REVIEW I COMPTE-RENDU
exercise in "industrial slaughter" perpetrated
"with unprecedented ruthlessness
by [the] governments" of Europe. Haig,
the architect of the British offensive, is
portrayed as the aloof military technician
bent on success no matter the cost
involved. This is reinforced by David Lloyd
George's disparaging description of Haig
as "brilliant to the top of his Army boots".
Stamp's sources are recent revisionist histories
of World War I that move away from
the biographies of great men and great
battles to examine the tactical disasters
of the war and the life and death of the
common soldier. Likewise, he has little
time for 'trainspotting' military historians
who, in their obsession with tactical
plans, turn the war into a tabletop display
of military games thereby missing the
gravitas, or solemnity, of the occasion .
Stamp has organized the book in a manner
that knits together the disparate
threads of war, commemoration, and
architecture. He starts with a harrowing
account of the Battle of the Somme which
is followed by a discussion of the war memorial
in general, exploring the paucity of
such monuments in London in contrast to
other European cities and Britain's former
colonies prior to World War I. Lutyens's
Cenotaph in Whitehall is situated against
this backdrop. The Cenotaph, in turn, sets
the scene for a biographical chapter on
Lutyens. He is characterized as a brilliant
architect (countered by the apparently
not so brilliant Herbert Baker) whose penchant
for cracking terrible, often painful,
jokes earned him a rather sad public persona
. As Stamp sees Lutyens, however, his
religious beliefs and philosophical interests
- the rather guarded appreciation of
theosophy he gained from his aristocratic
wife Lady Emily Lytton - add depth to his
character and underpin the pantheistic
stance of the Cenotaph and the Thiepval
Memorial, especially in the face of opposition
from the established Church .
The subsequent chapter examines the
infrastructure of commemoration during
and immediately after the war with
the creation of the Imperial War Graves
Commission and the establishment of
the military cemeteries. Comparisons
are made with other nations' cemeteries
and, here again, the pantheistic,
non-sectarian quality of the British
cemeteries is emphasized . This chapter
offers a counterpoint to the next
which deals with the memorials to the
thousands of dead whose bodies were
never found; known simply as the missing.
Stamp broadens this discussion by
articulating the French government's
disquiet at the prospect of numerous
monuments - at least twelve from the
British Empire alone - that were to be
erected on French territory. The number
was ultimately reduced to four which, in
the end, had the effect of significantly
reducing the obtrusive grandiose British
presence in a place where France had
suffered as much as Britain and where
France was burdened with the financial
costs of rebuilding.
The last of the chapters narrows the discussion
to Thiepval and the monument itself.
Stamp describes the trenches, the tunnels,
and the battle, and thereby highlights the
curious pride of place that had developed
amongst the German soldiers who had built
by hand such a complex (however odious)
infrastructure. As such Stamp repopulates
and gives depth to the quiet plain that is
Thiepval today. He proceeds to a discussion
of the actual design of the Memorial,
with only the occasional dry passage. He
reinforces our appreciation of Lutyens's
architectural abilities, recognizing his fundamental
understanding of the subtleties
of the Roman arch design, and he sees in
the Memorial's display of rich geometry
and proportions, an example of Lutyens's
"architectural logic and intellectual con ­
trol". Again, Baker suffers by comparison.
As with the Cenotaph and the cemeteries,
the Memorial conveys gravitas. Its strength
lies in its absence of sentimentality.
The final chapter is about the legacy of the
Thiepval Memorial. Stamp addresses the
lack of critical commentary at the unveiling
of the monument, connecting it to the shift
in perceptions of the war; by 1932 the true
tragedy that was the war was finally being
acknowledged and the Memorial belonged
to an earlier ethos of "faith in the value of
sacrifice". Perhaps, simply, the unveiling was
not the time for critical commentary. Stamp
then tracks the subsequent life of the structure,
the problems with the poorly made
bricks and down pipes that were too small.
As such, it is another case of sacrificing aspects
of the structural integrity in favour
of overall design. The chapter ends with
almost panegyric praise of the "supreme
importance" of the memorial; that it stands
as a "universal monument". Stamp takes his
cue from Geoff Dyer's elegiac musings on
the Memorial at the end of his The Missing
of the Somme (1994). It must be said that
the Thiepval Memorial to the Missing does
not stand alone. In Dyer's words it casts "a
shadow into the future ... beyond the dead
of the Holocaust, to the Gulag, to the "disappeared"
of South America, and of Tiananmen".
Surely the Vimy Ridge Memorial
and the other monuments to the missing
of World War I stand together, casting an
extremely long and ponderous shadow.
The book ends with appendices that help
to plan for a future visit to Thiepval and
to prepare for it with further reading.
Throughout the book there are numerous
illustrations. Unfortunately, the quality of
reproduction was sacrificed to achieve
a moderately priced paperback. A central
signature of photographs on better
quality paper would be preferable.
Is the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme
a wonder of the world? Architecturally,
66
JSSAC I JStAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008

JOAN COUTU > REVIEW I COMPTE·RENOU
it is hard to place it on a par with the
Parthenon, the Colosseum, the Temple
of Jerusalem or the other structures that
form some of the subjects in the 'Wonders
of the World' series. But architecture alone
does not make something a wonder; the
inclusion in the series of the Rosetta Stone
makes that clear. The Thiepval Memorial
is really about death, loss, commemoration,
and, ultimately, about colossal human
folly. Ironically, a little book like this
can focus one's attention on these bigger
issues. As we approach the centenary of
the war to end all wars, it is useful to remind
people of the monuments to the
missing of that war. Monuments are built
to be constant reminders. Yet, by virtue
of their constant presence they are often
forgotten, ignored, and neglected.
JSSAC I JSEAC 33 > N• 1 > 2008
67

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