war memorials beyond cenotaphs
landscape | onsitereview . ca / exhibitions s white
memory mi l itary fear survival
On the HMCS Prince Robert : We were off the coast of Africa. It was a still and calm evening. I was on watch and I heard the sound of bagpipes. I mentioned it to the Jimmy who told the Captain, ‘Garney has heard bagpipes’. The engines were stopped and there was total silence. We waited, sitting silently in the water. Shortly after we heard the U-boat passing beneath us. We waited until it was safe to start up again. — Garnet Fay
100 years of the Canadian navy : one pinned into the granite of the Atlantic coast at York Redoubt, one on the Pacific at Beacon Hill. Rocky shoreline interrupted. 1” steel plate sheet 49’ x 20’ bent to a flat arc, 3/4” stainless steel flanges on rocker cradles at the top edge, weighted with Grade 30 chain. The flanges are hit by the wind, the chains clank. But being so heavy, they only work in heavy weather. What are ships but wind, water, steel, silent seas and a vessel of skilled hands? What is a memorial but wind, rain, sun, steel, a view and memories? Mustn’t get in the way of the memories, just allow them to return, triggered by the horizon, the cliff of a hull, metal on metal. C
An online exhibition of war memorial proposals can be found at www.onsitereview.ca/exhibitions
Now such plate, in corten, would come from Essar Steel Algoma’s 166” Plate Mill in Sault Ste. Marie. The stainless steel would come from Essar Algoma’s No 7 blast furnace. Algoma started in 1901, was acquired by Essar Steel Holdings, a division of Essar Global, Chennai, India, in 2007.
Dominion Chain Grade 30 proof Coil Chain: Carbon Steel 7/8" (.906 diameter, 2.57 length) Dominion Chain Company, originally of Welland, Niagara (above) and Stratford - that industrial belt of Ontario connected to steel production. Now a division of FKI Industries Canada in Oshawa, head office in Fairfield Connecticut, part of FKI Plc, UK.
Sydney Steel Plant, Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Constructed 1899-1901 by Dominion Iron & steel Company. SYSCO decommissioned the mill in 2000. The Plate Mill was constructed to supply plate steel as part of Allied effort in WWI. The War ended before the mill came into use. It was moth-balled and recommissioned in WWII. It supplied the plate steel for Canadian Navy and Convoy ships.
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