Located inside the Peterborough Armoury, the recently founded Peterborough Military Museum offers a look at the area’s past.
It was started in 2019 by the late historian Don Down and now museum volunteers Ian Kyle and Don Willcock are following through on Down’s vision.
“We have a very deep history here in Peterborough and it gives people an opportunity to look at our Armed Forces — what they are today, what they were, what our roots were, and we should be very proud of the fact that we’ve never shirked our duty here in Canada and definitely not in Peterborough,” said Kyle, the museum chair.
Some of the collection is from the Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment Museum in Belleville, with other pieces from private donors.
“This is a surgical set from the First World War,” Kyle said during our show-and-tell-style interview at the museum. “It is on loan from the Trent Valley Archives, and it belonged to a doctor from Cobourg who served in the First (World) War and, as far as we know, it was used in Gallipoli.”
He said the memorabilia ranges from past to present.
“We have a lot of different uniforms from different eras we are trying to work from the foundation of military organization here in Peterborough to present day,” said Kyle.
“We’ve got medals, equipment, helmets, gas masks, military models, a bit of everything.”
Kyle, who served 37 years in the Armed Forces and comes from a long family line of military service, said the museum is a way to pay tribute to those who have served and noted that some of his family collection is on display.
“This is a badge collection donated to the museum. It was put together by my dad after the Second World War and we worked on it for many years and have now donated it,” he said while going through the collection of about 800. “It is the badges of Canadian and British forces going back to the First World War.”
Willcock said it is that up-close and personal experience that he hopes will teach people about the past and, for some, act as a way to remember.
“People will come in and look around and they will see something, and they will have story,” he said.
“History books have been reputed to be dull and dry because it’s dates and battles, but it is the stories that the participants tell that make the real history. Once those stories are gone, so is the history.”
Willcock pointed out a model of HMCS Peterborough, “which is a corvette that served on the North Atlantic patrols in 1944-1945,” in one of the displays.
“It was named for the city of Peterborough, and the interesting thing about the Peterborough is that its commanding officer, Jack Buxton Raine, was from Peterborough, so that is a bit unusual.”
The museum isn’t open to the public on a regular basis just yet, but a team of volunteers is working out the details on more regular hours.
Until then, you can visit on Remembrance Day from 12 p.m. to 1 p.m., following Peterborough’s service at the War Memorial.
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