June 18th: Remembering War, part two

St. Matthias’ was officially founded as a mission of St. George’s, Place du Canada, in 1873, which means our community is 150 this year! For the next 12 months, we’ll be diving into the archives to shine the spotlight on particularly interesting parts of our history.

On January 16th, 1949, St. Matthias’ 11am service was neither Eucharist nor Morning Prayer, but a solemn service of dedication. Nearly twenty years after the Men’s Association had first proposed it, St. Matthias’ finally had a memorial to all the members of the parish who had been members of the military in the two World Wars, not just those whose families and friends could afford plaques and stained glass.

Compared to some smaller parishes, St. Matthias, whose parish rolls counted 1,890 members in 1940, was lucky: a little less than 2% of the parish was lost. But each of those young people was a beloved child – in some cases almost literally, as many of our war dead would never see their twenty-first birthdays – and a cherished member of the larger family of the church. It is perhaps unsurprising that the bulletin for the dedication service is the most elaborate in our archives, trimmed with military braid and embossed in gold. The hymns, too, reflect that this service was primarily a musical one – par for the St. Matthias’ course – and in addition to hymns about sainthood and peace there are two war hymns as well.

What is surprising, however, is the single reading in the service: from Ecclesiasticus, an apocryphal book included in Roman Catholic Bibles but that had not been included in Church of England Bibles since the 1820s. The American Bible Society would not lift its ban on including the Apocrypha in published Bibles until 1964, and the British Society in 1966. Although Article VI of the 1604 39 Articles, the guides to Anglican doctrine, allows the reading of the Apocrypha for “example of life and instruction of manners,” and the Apocrypha is today enjoying a bit of a renaissance, it would have been uncommon indeed in 1949 to have a Sunday service use Ecclesiasticus as its only reading. And yet, knowing what we know about the love the people in this congregation had – and have! – for each other, the use of this passage is not so surprising. Ecclesiasticus 44 is about the memory of those who have died, including those who have no memorial but whose righteousness cannot be forgotten.

Above the honour roll, and above our organ today, stands perhaps the most impressive war memorial in St. Matthias – and it is not to a soldier. The Honourable Gordon Wallace Scott, whose window features the Holy Spirit descending on Jesus in the form of a dove in addition to heraldry, angels, and plentiful foliage, was merely the financial advisor to one of the federal war ministers, who had the bad fortune to be on his way to England to support a meeting about Canada’s entry into the war when his transport was torpedoed. The Western Prince lost only 15 of its nearly 170 people, and Gordon was one of them. His window’s ornateness is likely due in part to the fact that he had been the Treasurer of the provincial cabinet and then a member of the Legislative Council in the 1930s – a prominent man in a community full of prominent people. This prominence is likely the reason why the window was installed in 1941 – during the war and less than a year after Gordon’s death. Almost all of our other war memorials antedate their respective wars, usually by several years, so it is unusual that Gordon’s window was installed at the same time that St. Matthias’ was praying for soldiers, sailors, airmen, chaplains, doctors, and nurses, all of whom had Matthian representatives in Canada’s WWII forces.

Gordon’s window is not the only memorial dedicated to a non-military personage, but it is the only war memorial thus dedicated. Indeed, St. Matthias’ long history with the military is on display for us every week even if we do not stop to read the plaques on the walls or the inscriptions in the stained glass. We are the home, it turns out, of a number of historic military standards, not just those of the Royal Montreal Regiment. Royal Canadian Air Force standards, although not the flags carried into battle, are also in our current memorial chapel, and were the flags hanging over the original honour roll when it was dedicated in 1949. These were donated in memory of James Dalton Bilkey and James A. Baldwin, who died a year apart in 1940 and 1941, respectively, at 24 and 29. We can see in the inscription on their plaque that, unlike scripture references in WWI memorials, which tended to associate soldiers with Jesus, references the Book of Revelation’s promise to faithful members of the early church, warning of trials to come but promising that those who hold firm will have their souls saved. It is no coincidence that this perhaps cold comfort comes from a book also known as The Apocalypse.

The RMR standards are the oldest: they were originally granted to the regiment by Prince Arthur on January 4th, 1919, on a battlefield in Germany. Four months later, on Easter Sunday, they were carried in triumph through the streets of Montreal, echoing the Church’s rhetoric of holy war. In July of 1945, the City of Westmount replaced the 1919 colours with new flags, and the originals made their way into the possession of Mrs. Edward Ashworth Whitehead (Ella May Sicotte), whose eldest son, also an Edward Ashworth Whitehead, had been a member of the RMR who had died in 1916 at 22 – he had been wounded and returned home briefly in 1915, and then when back out to the front. Edward, nicknamed “Arch” by his Royal Military College classmates, had an infectious smile and the kind of tenacity that saw him playing football with a broken wrist and not losing sleep over his inability to keep time on the parade ground. Ella May donated the RMR colours to St. Matthias’ in his memory, and in October 1951, the RMR laid them to rest in the church. If you look closely at the flags, you’ll notice that one has the King’s Colours with the RMR crest superimposed on them, and one has the Regimental Colours, which indicates that the RMR was the 14th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force in WWI, and shows the highest number of orders that any one colour can carry.