Her Worship Ms. Kate Quarrie, Mayor of Guelph
receiving a Tulip Friendship Garden of 600 Tulips Bulbs
in honor of the WWII Veterans

The Bulbes will be planted at Riverside Park’s enabling gardens and on Col. John McCrae Legion Grounds on York Road.

 

Mayor Kate Quarrie´s father, Clifford Vickery,
was also a WWII veteran and a liberator of the Netherlands

Mrs. Grietje Bouwman of Guelph, age 89,
gives a beautiful speech

Corporal James A. Milne - WWII Veteran was honoured with a gift and liberation story by sisters Johanna Haan, Anneke Haan, Hilda Visser and Klaaske Stoffelsen (absent was Cindy Slotegraaf). The Sisters were honouring Corporal Milne on behalf of their parents.

“The Canadians saved us” Joanna Haan, one of Haan’s five daughters, said during the ceremony. “When we heard the war was over, we ran into the streets and started to party.

Then we saw the Canadians coming down the road and people asked them to sign their identification papers they had to show everywhere for 5 years under German Occupation.

“Getting the soldiers to sign those papers was a final act of defiance against the Germans so we could wave them in their faces.”

The Haans immigrated to Canada in 1955 and unbeknownst to them, moved just a few km away from Milne’s Rockwood home.

They met him for the first time 7 years ago, but eventually lost track of him. Anneke Haan, one of Anne’s grand-daughters, was going though some old documents recently and found the signed papers. The family began searching for Milne again.

But it wasn’t until he was spotted on television doing an interview at a liberation ceremony earlier this year that the family learned he was still in the area. They convinced him to meet with them at yesterday’s ceremony.

“I remember that day in 1945 well”, milne said yesterday.

“They all wanted us to sign their papers. It was a big celebration”
 ....story by Alan Ferris / Mercury Staff / Guelph Mercury 9/9/05..

right to left:
Sisters Johanna Haan of Chatham, left, Hilda Visser of Clinton and Klaaske Stoffelsen of Brantford present WWII veteran Jim Milne of Rockwood with a plaque and flowers

The plaque is a framed copy of the identification papers of 21-year-old Anne Haan signed by Corporal Jim Milne.
It was just a simple autograph scrawled on a government document 60 years ago.

But Corporal Jim Milne’s signature on the identification papers of a young Dutch girl in Apeldoorn was considered a symbolic act of triumph over Nazi powers.

The Canadian soldier signed the papers so Anne Haan could wave them a retreating German forces as they left her town.

Alex Colville was born in Toronto on the 24 of August 1920, but considers himself a Maritimer having moved with his family to Nova Scotia in 1929. He studied art at Mount Allison University, N.B. and on graduating in 1942 joined the Canadian Army and served in Europe as a member of the War Art program. He taught art and art history at Mount Allison University from 1946 to 1963 before devoting himself full-time to his painting and print-making.

     Mr. Colville's work has been exhibited in many parts of the world -in North America, Europe and the Far East - and has been eagerly sought for museum, corporate and private collections. He has received many honours; he was chosen to design a set of coins for Canada's Centenial in 1967 and that year was made an Officer of the Order of Canada and raised to Companion, the highest level of the Order, in 1982. He has been awarded eight honourary degrees and from 1981 to 1991 served as Chancellor of Acadian University, N.S.

I was with the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division, and Nijmegen was one of the places where the paratroopers landed in mid-September of 1944.  That was the 82nd Airborne Division and also the 3rd Canadian that I served with to relieve the 82nd Airborne.

Once the action is over, the parachute people tend to go someplace else.  We were in Nijmegen from some time in November, until, I think early February, so it was quite a long time.  We were actually quartered right in the small village.  That was the longest period of my stay in Holland. I was in the army for 2 years, and because I had been a fine-arts student, I am now a professional painter; I was made a war-artist in May of 1944, and flown rather dramatically to London.  I was only a lieutenant, and to be flown to London....I couldn’t imagine what as happening.  When I got to London I was told by a colonel that I had been made a war-artist, and I took it from there. I had been trained as an infantry officer, the bottom of the army, in the sense that they are on foot and have comparatively light weapons and I did a painting, when the war ended, it was based upon numerous drawings, it was called "Infantry."  It is now in the Canadian War Museum.  It simply represents about a platoon of Canadian soldiers marching along, not in formal, marching order, with one section on one side of the road, and the other on the other side of the road, spread out in a typical way of moving across the country.  They would be scattered, so that they would not be all killed at once with one shell. This painting has been reproduced a lot for things having to do with WWII in Canada.  I think that expressed in a way my sense of feeling about war, not so much a melodramatic and heroic thing, although it was that too, but it was a question of persistence, of walking in the rain and the melting snow and the cold and the constant element of danger and so on....the endurance factor.  Particularly admirable in the infantry, and characteristic of the war which wasn’t, it seems to me, melodramatic so much, as it was dogged persistence.