‘I just had to do it’: unique project remembers fallen soldiers

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This article was published 30/10/2018 (2697 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Winnipeg fabric artist has a mission: to commemorate the almost 900 local soldiers who died during the First World War by hanging banners outside their former residences.

Letty Lawrence, a retired fundraiser, estimates she and her friends have already placed about 500 banners on city trees, hydro poles and light standards, with a few hundred more to go.

“I’m getting to know a lot of streets in Winnipeg,” Lawrence said Monday.

“These are all people who died either in the war or as a result of the war. (The names) all come from Veterans Affairs and the archives… all the deaths are tragic, but it is especially tragic when you see many were listed as missing and then you see ‘presumed dead.’”

Lawrence said she has wanted to commemorate, in some way, the end of the First World War a century ago since, while visiting Australia in 2014, she knitted six poppies as part of a project marking the allied landings at Gallipoli. More than 50,000 were created, and a square in Melbourne was covered with them.

“I wanted to identify and recognize these individuals through handmade fibre art — who were they, where did they live, what were their professions?” she said.

Lawrence said the first person commemorated lived at 11 Assiniboine Ave., near the Manitoba legislature. The house had long since been torn down.

“It was for David Leland Bawlf, and the headline in the paper says he was ‘killed in aerial fight with Huns in France’ on April 21, 1918,” she said. “He was 18 and a student when he enlisted.”

Lawrence said placing all the banners will take longer than Nov. 11 to complete. They will be in place until the end of the year.

“Some people have asked me if they can keep the banners for their house history,” she said, adding the banners will be donated to the Army Navy Air Force Veterans Rockwood branch at 341 Wilton St.

“I’ve paid for all of this — I took money out of a TFSA to do this,” she added. “Sometimes, I think I’m crazy, but I am passionate about this.

“I just had to do it.”

Arlington Street resident Sandy Fernandez was out for a walk Monday, and stopped to read a tribute to William Gilbert Hackland, a labourer who lived at 176 Arlington St. Hackland was 21 when he died July 25, 1918.

“This is pretty fantastic,” said Fernandez, who stopped to read the sign flapping in the wind south of Portage Avenue.

“Wolseley has all these stories and history,” he said. “I’m very curious.”

A few blocks away, a passerby stopped to read one of the signs posted on Furby Street at Wolseley Avenue. Each bears a hand-drawn poppy and a request to “please honour this commemoration” and do not to remove it until Dec. 31.

“It’s beautiful,” Patricia Muench said of the banner for William John Spence, who lived at 47 Furby St., which is now a small apartment block. It described him as a railroader who died Sept. 28, 1916.

“He was only 19,” Muench said. 

“It’s really personal,” she added, wondering if a family member posted the tribute. “It’s like it was written by someone who loved this person.”

Muench said her mom’s brothers are Second World War veterans who survived, and her family has always observed Remembrance Day, but she’d never seen anything before that hit so close to home like the neighbourhood signs pointing out where the fallen had lived.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca