Music Niagara presents Remembrance Day concert following cenotaph ceremony Monday

When the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 124’s Remembrance Day ceremony wraps up at the Queen St. cenotaph on Monday, make sure you take the short trip to St. Mark’s Anglican Church for a moving and beautiful musical tribute to our veterans presented by Music Niagara Festival. 

The free concert will include a performance of The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughn Williams and Scottish Fantasy by Max Bruch. Music Niagara’s artistic director Atis Bankas will perform on violin, joined by his talented student, violinist Sora Sato-Mound, Elina Kelebeev on piano and violinist Milda Shaluchkaite, all veterans of previous Music Niagara presentations..

The young Sato-Mound is a pleasure to behold in concert. The Grade 9 student in the gifted program at Toronto’s Western Technical-Commercial School in Toronto has been playing his instrument since age four. The student at the Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists in Toronto has been recognized with awards at music festivals in the Czech Republic, Vienna, North York and Oakville. 

The concert will also feature Broadway actor Stephen Wattrus reading from Hubert Dudley Jennings’ Diary of a Young Soldier. Wattrus’ performance takes on a deep meaning Monday as Jennings was the California resident’s great-grandfather.

Hubert Dudley Jennings was born the youngest of seven children in 1896 in London. When World War I broke out in 1914, Jennings volunteered for military service. He served for several years and was wounded more than once, losing his left eye in one such instance. 

Jennings became a teacher after the war and soon moved to South Africa. While there he became fascinated with the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa and went on to be recognized as the world’s leading Pessoa scholar. Later in life, Jennings, who lived until 1991, wrote his memoirs, which included a powerful account of his life as a soldier. 

Following a tradition begun in 2019, Music Niagara’s Remembrance Day concert will be collecting donations in support of the Last Post Fund, specifically for its Indigenous Veterans Initiative, which provides dignified final arrangements for Indigenous Canadian veterans.

The Last Post Fund has its roots in 1908 Montreal, when veteran Arthur Hair, an orderly at Montreal General Hospital, found an honourable discharge certificate for Trooper James Daly, who had been brought in as a homeless man suffering from hypothermia and malnutrition.

Daly died a few days later at age 53. With no friend or family member to claim his remains, his body was to be delivered to the morgue. But Hair raised sufficient funds to provide Daly with a dignified funeral and burial in the NotreDame-des-Neiges cemetery on Mount-Royal. His act of charity became the founding event of the Last Post Fund in Montreal in April 1909. 

Since then the fund has arranged funerals and, where necessary, burial and grave markers for more than 150,000 Veterans from Canada, Britain, Scotland, Ireland, Australia and other allied countries. The Fund also supports other initiatives aimed at keeping alive the memory of Canadian Veterans including its own military cemetery, the National Field of Honour in Pointe-Claire, Québec where more than 22,000 burials have been performed since opening in 1930. 

For Maria Trujillo, the Indigenous Veterans Initiative’s project coordinator, whatever funds are raised in Niagara-on-the-Lake Monday are a bonus atop her real mission, raising awareness of the many Indigenous veterans whose service since World War I has gone unrecognized. 

Trujillo estimates that there have been 12,000 Indigenous men and women who have served in Canada’s Armed Forces since the first World War. Over the past six years, the initiative has received more than 400 applications for gravestones for Indigenous veterans and has placed over 270 tombstones. 

Each tombstone is personalized to recognize the late soldier’s life and culture. 

“We work with the whole community,” Trujillo tells The Local on the phone from her office in Montreal. “We’re often contracted by family members. We ask if the veteran had a traditional name and if the veteran’s family would like a culturally relevant symbol for the tombstone.”

Trujillo talks of working with an Indigenous researcher who helped the Last Post Fund’s initiative locate 18 Indigenous veteran gravesites in British Columbia’s Nicola Valley. In Ontario, Trujillo recently collaborated with the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte First Nation’s community to identify ten graves that needed markers there. 

The cost of each tombstone varies, ranging from $1,500 to just over $3,000, with the costs increasing depending on shipping to and installation in more remote communities. 

NOTL resident Garry Hatton, a retired Royal Canadian Navy veteran, will represent the Last Post Fund at Monday’s event, as he has for the past three years. 

Hatton has been involved with Last Post since he was stationed in Halifax in 1994. The son of another veteran started with a volunteer program at Camp Hill Hospital, whose Veterans' Memorial Building houses restorative rehab and geriatric outpatient care. He became a member of Nova Scotia’s Last Post Fund branch and is a past president of the Ontario branch.

“I’m honoured to be able to represent the fund here,” Hatton says. “It’s great to see this making a great impression on the local population here.”

Admission to Monday’s Remembrance Day concert is free. Guests are welcome to enjoy a warm bowl of soup donated by Sandtrap Pub & Grill served on arrival in Addison Hall across from the church. All proceeds raised through donations will support the Indigenous Veterans Initiative.