[PHOTO] Looking back on the dead of Earlscourt, Toronto

[rfmcdonald]

Back in August of 2017, while walking through Toronto's Prospect Cemetery, I took this photo of this cenotaph. Prospect Cemetery extends as far south as St. Clair Avenue, touching Earlscourt, and back a century ago when this neighbourhood was a newly-annexed municipality on the northwest fringes of the City of Toronto, Earlscourt was a new community home to many recent British immigrants. These people volunteered by the thousands to serve on the Western Front, and died in the hundreds. The Archives of Ontario feature a collection of letters taken from one such family, on the Gray family who had immigrated from Kent a year before the war began, seeing one son live and another die.

After the First World War, this memorial was built in Prospect Cemetery, Earlscourt’s local cemetery, in honour of the neighbourhood’s dead. Future king Edward VIII lent his presence to the ceremonies surrounding of this cenotaph in 1919. I can only imagine the sheer amount of psychic trauma that must have been around in this one community, just a few minutes' walk north and west of my home, for this monument to come about, only coming to surface on occasions like this. I can barely imagine the extent of the grief across Canada and the wider world. Almost all memory of this vast grief, all lived memory at least, is gone. I wonder, looking at these mute monuments, if we might be the better--the less troubled, at least--for that void.