This week, as we mark Remembrance Day, the School's chaplain Father Don Aitchison shares insights on how TCS honours those who paid the ultimate sacrifice. 

Written by guest blogger, Father Don Aitchison

The Trinity College School calendar is replete with many annual events such as the Oxford Cup, the Carol Service, Reunion Weekend and Speech Day, but Remembrance Day stands out for me, as one of the most moving and meaningful ceremonies of them all, for many reasons.

Our Remembrance activities have evolved over the years since the first TCS students went to war in South Africa in 1899.

In the years following that war plaques and windows were dedicated to the memory of the fallen in the old chapel.

Following the First World War, the School began to hold an annual Remembrance ceremony on Trinity Sunday (which falls eight weeks after Easter) which would begin in the chapel and end at the Memorial Cross which was unveiled and dedicated in June 1922. It contains the names of the 122 students and one teacher who lost their lives in the Great War. 

The cross was originally located on the edge of the hill to the south of Ward Street overlooking the lake and surrounded by a garden. It was moved to its current prominent location following the fire of 1928 and now forms the central feature of the terraces.

During the Second World War, whenever news arrived of the death of an Old Boy, Charles Scott, the Brent housemaster, would fashion a small wooden cross, engrave it with the name of the Old Boy and place it near the much larger granite cross. By the end of the six-year-long war there were 60 crosses surrounding it.

Each year we place replicas of those original crosses around the Memorial Cross for the week before Remembrance Day. Six crosses are held back and during the chapel service six prefects tell the stories of those Old Boys. We then proceed to the Memorial Cross where the names of all the WWII fallen are read and the six crosses are placed with the others as their names are called out. It is very moving.

The prefects gather much of their information from a book the School published in 1948 called Trinity College School Old Boys At War. It contains full page bios of the fallen and a second section in which the service of the more than 800 alumni who served in the war is summarized.

In the preface to this volume it is mentioned that a similar publication honouring the First World War fallen would be greatly valued but almost impossible to pull together given that 30 years had expired since the Armistice.

In recent years, thanks to the internet, that information has become widely available. For the last number of years I have been researching the over 600 WWI alumni with the goal of publishing a fuller account of TCS’s contribution to the First World War.

One of the incredible things I have learned from this research is that the students who made up the School in the years before the war shared many familial connections.

When the Memorial Cross was unveiled, those attending the service would have recognized many of the names listed as sons, brothers, nephews, cousins and in-laws. At the time of writing I have been able to connect more than 80% of the names to a family tree of the School in those days.

I have made some surprising connections and one is quite poignant and makes Remembrance Day even more special.

Each year we read John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields. Many Canadians of a certain age would have learned this poem in elementary school. In its time it was one of the best known war poems in the English speaking world.

If you know the poem, you may not know that McCrae wrote it on May 3, 1915, the day after he had buried a friend from his home town of Guelph, Ontario, Lt. Alexis “Lex” Helmer. Helmer was descended from a long line of United Empire Loyalists and had connections to several TCS families.

You also probably don’t know that before he went to war, John McCrae had been dating Nona Gwyn, a young woman from the Hamilton, Ontario area whose older sister Amy was dating McCrae’s older brother Thomas (they eventually married). Amy and Nona’s brother William Trevor Gwyn had attended TCS. 

McCrae proposed to Nona before he left for the war but she turned him down. He died in January 1918 of pneumonia. After the war Nona married a returned army chaplain named Cecil James Scott Stuart. He had graduated from TCS in 1901.

Nona and Amy’s middle sister, Marion, was married to Britton Osler. They would send their three sons to TCS and, most significantly, they would save the School from bankruptcy in the 1930s through a timely donation. The dining hall is named for them and their portraits watch over us day by day.

As the students like to say, there is always a TCS connection.