The Holden Cenotaph

Written By Dane Ryksen

  • 50th (Main) Street & 50th Avenue, Holden

  • Artist: Major Frank Norbury of Edmonton

  • Erected: 1923

  • Designation: Municipal Historic Resource

Holden, Alberta. Three-hundred-and-fifty people call it home. It’s a sleepy village, located an hour Southeast of Edmonton along Highway 14. Incorporated in May 1909, Holden developed due to the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway’s westward expansion into the province. Like the railway’s other tiny spawn, time has not been kind. Its population is stagnant, its storefronts aging. Ignoring the odd new home or remodelled building, very little in the village has changed since the days steam trains pulled up along its long demolished elevator row. Holden is an unassuming place. Perhaps surprisingly then it’s home to one of Alberta’s best monuments.

Back then, as now, Holden was small. By the outbreak of the Great War it was only home to some five hundred citizens. Despite that, eighty Holdenites answered the call of duty to serve during the conflict. When the war came to its end in the cold November of 1918, the village had lost nine sons. The seventy-one who made it felt compelled to memorialize them. As they returned over the following months and year, Holden’s retired soldiers established a branch of the Great War Veterans’ Association and got to work.

Fundraising and planning for the proposed memorial was handled solely by the G.W.V.A. The Association’s grand vision — a respectable and permanent reminder to the village’s lost, located in the heart of Holden — won favour with the Village Council. A spot was soon dedicated for a cenotaph in the middle of Main Street. Work on the tangible monument began in earnest in August 1922, when they contracted their artist. Chosen for the task was Edmonton-based sculptor Frank Norbury.

Norbury arrived at Edmonton in 1920, leaving behind a distinguished arts career in his native England. In his homeland he received formal arts training at the Liverpool City School of Art and later the University of Liverpool, where he became a professor. A journalist and art critic in his free time, Norbury also served as a Royal Engineers reservist, where he rose to the rank of major. When the Great War came, he served with distinction at the Battle of the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres. For his service he was awarded both the Italian Croce di Guerra, and the Order of the British Empire.

While Norbury’s military record was of note, what caught the attention of the Holden G.W.V.A. was the man’s raw artistic ability. The year prior Norbury had been commissioned to design the Red Deer Cenotaph — what he produced was a remarkably truthful depiction of the average war-weary Canadian soldier. As Alan Livingstone MacLeod, a photographer and historian with a special interest in Canada’s war memorials, described:

“Each of [Norbury’s works are] distinctive, original and real. Norbury was a newspaperman and, by contrast with most of the memorialist sculptors, a war veteran. Some memorial sculpture tends toward the ostentatious, grandiose, glorious. Not Norbury. His soldier figures are natural, understated, authentic.”

His design for the Holden monument encapsulates that lived experience. Norbury’s Canadian isn’t square-jawed, steely-eyed, or sightly. He stands there exhausted, eyes drooping and tired, his collar undone and Small Box Respirator hanging at the ready. He isn't standing at attention, in memory, or in thrust. He stands alert, peaking precariously around rubble, clutching his bayoneted S.M.L.E. Rifle nervously in his left hand. He readies a Mills Bomb to be lobbed at the enemy in his right.

As MacLeod writes, the Holden monument and its subject display a realism not seen in the country’s other Great War statuary. “The effect of the figure is instantly powerful, but rather than a glorification of what is depicted, it is somehow simple, unvarnished reportage: this is what war is all about. Soldiers are about to die.”

Holden’s cenotaph was unveiled to the public on Monday, June 4th, 1923. As a courtesy to the “many Holdenites at present residing in Edmonton,” Canadian National Railways offered trips to the village. The ceremony began at 1:30 p.m. when “the G.W.V.A. formed up at the lower end of Main St. under the command of Col. Weaver and led by the Viking Band playing a martial air, marched to the main square of town where the simple but impressive unveiling ceremony took place.” Anglican Bishop Henry Allan Gray presided over the ceremonies. He gave a dedication and speech “listened to by a gathering of over 1,000 people.”

Time may have forgotten Holden, yet, that doesn't mean Holdenites forgot. Each Remembrance Day, ninety-seven years on, the few hundred who call the village and surrounding county home dutifully funnel down Main Street to give their respects in the shadow of the province's most powerful monument.

The Cenotaph was designated a Village of Holden Municipal Historic Resource on November 17th, 2014. In-all, the monument is dedicated to eighteen men lost in the First and Second World Wars:

1914-1918

  • Cecil Mumford

  • Gertle Baker

  • Anthony Braden

  • Peul Paulson

  • William Dain

  • Jack Potts

  • John McKlosky

  • Lloyd Fleming

  • Tudor Stolee

1939-1945

  • Ralph Chetney

  • James Foran

  • Theodore Foran

  • Harvey Gorrie

  • John Thieme

  • Allan Josness

  • Bryan Roberts

  • Harold Robinson

  • Edward Stewart

Image Gallery:

Sources:

Dane Ryksen
Previous

Fire Hall No.7
Next

The McLeod Block