The London plane trees that line Shelbourne Street in honour of B.C. soldiers who died during the First World War could soon be the subject of a short film.
Saanich Coun. Susan Brice is recommending that her district contribute up to $7,000 toward the project in order to raise awareness of the trees, the first of which was planted in 1921 — making Shelbourne the oldest Road of Remembrance in Canada.
Council will consider her motion Monday night.
The idea for the film stems from the ongoing work of the district's Memorial Avenue committee led by Ray Travers to preserve the street’s legacy through its Shelbourne Street of Unfinished Dreams Project.
A year ago, the committee and district rededicated Memorial Avenue on Shelbourne to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War.
In preparation for the ceremony, Saanich installed 30 medallions — each depicting a red leaf from a London plane tree flanked by two poppies — atop street signs along Shelbourne from North Dairy Road to Mount Douglas Park. Victoria has continued that work on its end of the street.
As well, Travers’ committee has been in talks with Saanich Parks about adding audio to interpretative panels along the street so that visitors can learn about its history and listen to interviews.
Brice said the idea for a 12- to 15-minute film spun out of that work and discussions with Geoff Bird, an associate professor at Royal Roads University. Bird, who has agreed to pursue the project, heads the university's War Heritage Research Initiative, which has produced more than 30 documentary vignettes on sites of war memory, including the recent documentary, Remembering HMCS Athabaskan.
“The idea here is to look at the symbolic importance and meaning of the London plane trees,” Travers said.
“There were three big symbolic reasons given for planting memorial trees back in the 1920s. One is they were a living memorial, a symbol of a life over death.”
The second, he said, is that many of the soldiers would have marched off to battle along similar lanes of London plane trees in France.
“The third one was that it was a place for local people to grieve,” he said. “In those times, many people didn't have the resources to go to a battlefield and find the grave of their father or their brother or their fiancé or their nephew.”
Historians say the original vision for the memorial was to plant one tree for every B.C. soldier killed during the war. There was space for 800 and 600 got planted, but that fell far short of the more than 6,000 soldiers who died, Travers said. In the end, the project was never completed and, over the years, a number of the trees were lost to disease, development and road improvements.
The memorial committee plans to replace many of those trees in the years ahead.
Travers said he hopes a film will further those efforts.
“The way I like to say what we’re doing is we’re restoring the civic memory of the trees,” he said.
