Ucluelet’s Jr. Canadian Rangers and Army Navy and Air Force Veterans Club teamed up to beautify the tombstones of three veterans who helped shape the West Coast.
The Jr. Rangers headed to Morpheus Island Cemetery, near Tofino, on Saturday as part of the No Stone Left Alone Program.
“No Stone Left Alone Memorial Foundation is dedicated to honouring and remembering Canada’s veterans,” reads the foundation’s website. “Our unique ceremony provides students and youth with an authentic experience that creates knowledge, understanding and appreciation of those who serve and of the sacrifice of Canada’s fallen.”
The foundation’s founder Maureen Bianchini Purvis spoke at the Army, Navy and Air Force National Convention in Quebec, which Ucluelet’s ANAF club president Bronwyn Kelleher attended in September.
Kelleher told the Westerly News that Bernie Herbert of the local Jr. Rangers rangers program had been looking into getting the local patrol involved in No Stone Left Alone and both are excited to launch it with support of patrol leader Emily Coombs.
The Jr Rangers planned to clean gravesites and place rocks with poppies painted on them to honour their service.
“I’m very honoured to be able to join in that,” Kelleher said.
Morpheus holds one of Tofino’s oldest graveyards and three World War I veterans are among the 44 residents buried there: Francis Robert Burdett Garrard, Rowland Egerton Brinckman and Frederick Gerald Tibbs.
“They were integral founding members of the communities of the West Coast before they left their home here to go serve abroad and then they came back home here and picked up where they left off with their rural, West Coast pioneering life,” Kelleher said. “That connection is the kids realizing that the veterans that fought during the First World War weren’t just people from Europe or big cities across Canada, they were people living right here in our home doing the hard work of creating the communities that we have here today.”
