Past and present students of Kingston’s Royal Military College (RMC) gathered in the Sir Arthur W. Currie Hall Tuesday morning to celebrate 100 years of use in the space.
“This is, in many respects, the heart and soul of RMC,” says Class of 1961 alumnus Bob Thomas.
The retired naval captain is among the RMC alumni that are marking the centenary by donating nearly half a million dollars of funding towards restoring the decorative painting designed along Currie Hall.
“Ex-cadets wanted this properly preserved and maintained,” Thomas says. “It would have been too easy to allow it to be used for other purposes and to deteriorate to the point where it lost meaning. Now it won’t.”
And not only does the space work to commemorate history, but it can also be used as a teaching tool.
“You can actually use this setting to talk for about three hours about the Great War, but not just about war,” says RMC principal emeritus John Scott Cowan. “You can use it as a lens for a bunch of different topics.”
The graduating classes of 1959, ’61 and ’72 jointly raised the funds for the restoration — ensuring the hall would remain decorated with royal monograms, initials of senior generals, the badges of all units of the Canadian military and municipal coats of arms.
“I think the gesture of the three classes that funded the cleaning up, the re-painting of some of the decorative elements of the hall, was pretty important,” Cowan says.
“Because these things are indicative of how you treat memory. And here we are so close to Remembrance Day, it’s kind of a nice thing to see that the memory is being properly cared for.”
As the hall marks 100 years of use, efforts like these work toward another 100 years of preservation.
Comments