For a few days last week, a small piece of the dike on Westham Island, was turned into a battlefield from more than a century ago.
A trench was dug and reinforced with timbers, the way the Canadian troops did in the First World War, in the Somme area in northern France. Poppy plants also were planted along a mud embankment.
“Behind every one of those poppies is a dead soldier,” says one of the crew shooting the latest episode of Heritage Minutes.
Historica Canada produces the videos to show parts of Canada’s history that people may or may not know.
The episode features Megan Follows (Anne of Green Gables) portraying Canadian icon Mary Riter Hamilton, the first female war artist.
Hamilton was a Canadian artist who travelled to the battlefields just after the First World War ended in 1918. Day after day, for more than a year, she lived among the squalor to paint the bloody hangover from years of trench warfare, creating about 350 works, with paintings such as the Trenches on the Somme becoming famous. Canada Post in 2020, featured the image on one of its stamps.
Historica CEO Anthony Wilson-Smith said while her paintings were well received after the war, they decreased in popularity as people wanted to move on and forget the bloodshed.
The battlefield set also served for another Heritage Minute featuring legally blind actor Bruce Horak (of Star Trek fame) portraying Edwin Baker.
Baker was a Canadian soldier who lost his sight in battle and who then went on to help found the Canadian Institute for the Blind.
Back then, being blind meant a life of disability and reclusion, but Baker wanted to change that, said Wilson-Smith.
He said the hope of the episodes is to get people intrigued about a topic and maybe lead them to do their own research about parts of Canada’s past, noting they’re used in classrooms across the country.
Wilson-Smith, is the former editor-in-chief of Maclean’s Magazine and said, “We don’t know our history as well as we should,” adding that’s not the fault of individual Canadians.
That could be improved by having the provinces and territories agree on a general curriculum, with allowances for teaching regional history. A basic starting point would be to make Canadian history a mandatory course in the final years of high school.
“Our mandate is teaching Canadians about history, things they don’t know. How do we become better citizens by understanding more about our history, both the things we’ve done well and the things that we didn’t,” said Wilson-Smith.
“We’re fanatical about accuracy,” he said adding they research each Heritage Minute for about three months before starting production.
Wilson-Smith said he’s wanted to do a Heritage Minute about Hamilton for about 10 years.
“She really sort of got under my skin, this remarkable woman, that nobody knew about,” he said.
Heritage Minutes has about half a million followers on social media and the episodes are shot across Canada.
The two episodes in Delta were produced by Scopitcone Films out of Vancouver.
So far, about 105 Heritage Minutes have been produced, including the initial series done in the 1990s.
