Alvinston Cenotaph
Municipality/Province: Alvinston, ON
Memorial number: 35039-001
Type: Shaft, statue - granite
Address: 3251 River Street
Location: Alvinston Library
GPS coordinates: Lat: 42.8209999 Long: -81.8622468
Submitted by: Shipley. Derek Pullen. Victoria Edwards.
Photo credit: Tim Laye, Ontario War Memorials
On June 29, 1921, the Alvinston Cenotaph was unveiled, with great ceremony, to honour the local men killed in the First World War. The statue was sculpted by Emanuel Hahn for the Thomson Monument Company of Toronto. Toronto’s own Ned Hanlon modelled for the statue, which depicts a soldier draped in cloth, holding a down turned sword in one hand, symbolic of the end of conflict, and holding up broken chains in the other - symbolic of freedom. Names of the men lost in the Second World War were inscribed after 1945.
The statue has a twin located in Toronto (Malvern), Ontario. In 2011, the sword on the Alvinston statue was used as a reference to create a copy of the missing sword on the Malvern statue.
Emanuel Hahn moved to Toronto at the age of seven with his family of artists and musicians from Germany, in 1888. He studied commercial design and model-making at Toronto Technical School and Ontario College of Art and Industrial Design. At 25 years old Hahn began a nearly lifelong contract with Thomson Monument Company of Toronto. Two years later, he also started work as a studio assistant to sculptor Walter Seymour Allward. Part of his duties included assisting on Allward’s significant works such as the South African War Memorial in Toronto.
In 1912 Hahn began an association with the Thomson Monument Company of Toronto. It was there, along with several assistants, he made the many war memorials that are found across Canada: Fernie, British Columbia; Killarney and Russell, Manitoba; Alvinston, Bolton, Cornwall, Hanover, Lindsay, Malvern, Milton, Petrolia and Port Dalhousie, Ontario; Gaspe, Quebec; Moncton, New Brunswick; Springhill and Westville Nova Scotia; Summerside, Prince Edward Island.
Hahn is probably most famous as the designer of the Bluenose on the back of the Canadian dime and the Caribou on the back of the Canadian quarter. He was a victim of anti-German sentiment in the years following the Great War, when his design for the Winnipeg Cenotaph was rejected in 1925.
Inscription found on memorial
[front/devant]
OUR HONOURED DEAD
CHARLES G. RILEY
STANLEY E. WEBB
HAROLD W. KETCH
JOHN F. DUFFY
VERNON C. AUGUSTINE
CLIFFORD H. ATCHISON
ALEXANDER D. HAPPER
FREDERICK MERNER
MORTON M. BLONDEL
JOHN A. GROOMS
CHARLES A.W. FORBES
MORRELL ENGLISH
ROY E. ACTON
NICHOL MCLACHLIN
FRANK CHAPMAN
[right side/côté droit]
YPRES
THE SOMME
VIMY RIDGE
PASSCHANDAELE
CAMBRAI
MONS
[back/arrière]
TO OUR
HONOURED DEAD
WORLD WAR 2
1939 1945
MORLEY C. AUKETT
GRANT CLARK
J. EDWARD CODE
DONALD M. DUFFY
JOHN C. ESSELMENT
DAVID H. MCMASTER
HAROLD G SMITH
WELLAN A. SMITH
[left side/côté gauche]
TO OUR
HONOURED DEAD
AND THOSE
WHO CARRIED ON
IN THE GREAT WAR
1914 - 1918
FROM
BROOK & ALVINSTON
Street view
Note
This information is provided by contributors and Veterans Affairs Canada makes it available as a service to the public. Veterans Affairs Canada is not responsible for the accuracy, currency or reliability of the information.
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