Private William O. Howie was stationed on the frontline at the Battle of Vimy Ridge, 1917, when he heard a terribly loud noise —a mortar explosion so close that a piece of loose shrapnel flung up, hit his face, and pierced his eye — damaging it beyond repair.
“When we were kids our favourite past time was to watch him take out [his artificial eye] and have him show it to us,” said granddaughter Marie Kerr from Ancaster Ontario. “He was a jovial type person—fun loving, not too serious.”
Howie perhaps replayed the battle many times over in his head—maybe even revisiting the scene in his memories. So in 1936, when he was presented with the chance to go back there, he jumped to it.
He and his wife made their way to France for the unveiling of the Vimy Ridge National War Memorial. The Royal Canadian Legion paid the fare of eight thousand veterans so that they, and their families, could attend the inaugural celebration. Clifford Bowering’s History of the Royal Canadian Legion (1960) said that some days as many as eight hundred letters arrived at the Dominion Command Headquarters in Ottawa seeking information or making application for the trip.
Construction of the memorial began in 1925, but it would not be completed for another eleven years. On July 26th, 1936, King Edward VIII dedicated the monument.
The unveiling was held in the afternoon rather than at 11:00 a.m. so that the broadcast would correspond with prime airtime back home. More than one hundred thousand people attended the event and thousands tuned in from their living room radios.
Following the dedication, Howie accepted an invitation from the British government to accompany his fellow veterans in attending a garden party at Buckingham Palace.
Kerr said that Howie didn’t talk much about the war but she can remember him going to the dedication, “it was quite a big thing, to get to go… I’m sure it must have been a proud moment for him.” The memorial sits on two hundred acres of parkland donated as a free gift to the people of Canada, on behalf of the French nation.
Howie was born in Collinsburgh in Fifeshire, Scotland on June 19th, 1887. He served in the 19th Battalion, Argyle Sutherland Highlanders and enlisted December 7th, 1915. After the war he worked as a sheet metal foreman for the Steel Company of Canada in Hamilton, Ontario.
He died of a heart attack in 1946.
Do you have an ancestor who served in the Great War? Submit their story and it could be included on this Great War Album website.