Always remembering

Last Friday, members of the McMaster community gathered at Convocation Hall for the annual Remembrance Day service. From the sound of the bagpipes, to the trumpet call of the Last Post to the singing of O Canada, the ceremony remained as traditional as it has been for nearly a century.

The McMaster Alumni Association tries its best to bring tribute to the graduates and undergraduates of McMaster who were in the World Wars and the Afghanistan War.

“The [McMaster Alumni Association] has always felt that it’s an important thing to honour the memories of our fellow alumni, and it’s a way for us to keep the names alive for even 60, 70 or 80 years after,” said Karen McQuigge, director of alumni advancement and graduate of the class of 1990.

“I think what is unique about McMaster, is that every year we stop and we read the names of the individuals who died in the wars and it’s become one of those traditions that I think we are most proud of to be able to do this for the university,” she added.

Suzanne Labarge, the chancellor of McMaster, delivered the main address for this year’s service. She told the story of Stuart Ivison, a McMaster alumnus, Baptist minister and during the Second World War, a chaplain in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. Major Stuart Ivison served on the front lines in Italy, France, Belgium, Holland and Germany.

During his military service, Ivison’s frequent letter exchanges with his family back home served as an eloquent chronicle of his experiences in the war.

The letters quietly rested over the years in a shoebox until just recently when the Ivison family decided to donate the correspondence to McMaster’s William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collections.

“Collectively, the letters are an important window on our history and an invaluable document of the experience of military service and combat.  Individually, many of the notes are nothing less than works of art,” Labarge said in her address.

While the event had a high turnout this year, McQuigge describes some of the troubles they faced in the past.

“I’ve been in the Alumni office for 18 years and about 10 years ago, I was actually quite worried. We weren’t getting as many students out to the service,” she remarked.

In recent years however, there has been a sudden surge in students coming out on Nov. 11 to pay their respects to war veterans.

“We haven’t really changed the service; we may change the poem, the address, and having the student gospel choir participating, but mostly it is the same,” she stated.

McQuigge found it very admirable that current students are coming out more to the service and that they considered it important to remember.

“I think that is the most heartwarming thing that I have seen and learnt from the student body today. I really believe that this service will always be an important part of the McMaster experience and our students are leading the way.”