On the 100th anniversary of Armistice Day, a deeply personal and passionate exploration of the necessity of remembering those who died--no matter the side on which they fought--in a war that was meant to end all wars, from one of Canada's most respected and beloved actors R.H. Thomson.
The men of R.H. Thomson's family were all former warriors. His father served on north Atlantic convoys during WWII. He told stories of storms at sea and U-boat attacks and standing at night as his ship, carrying military supplies and food, corkscrewed its way to Londonderry and back to St. John's. His grandfather and five great-uncles, whose names young Robert could never keep straight, on his mother's side fought in WWI. As a boy Robert heard about Art and Jack who had come back alive, even though Jack ended up in the "San," but much less was said about the three brothers--Joe, George and Harold--who never came home. There was, however, a trove of letters. From the front or stationed abroad, all five of the Stafford boys mailed letters home to relatives in Ontario, 750 letters in all, a rich and tragic correspondence dutifully collected and preserved, typed and collated with photographs by Thomson's great aunt Mae, and the inspiration and source material for R.H. Thomson's 2001 one-man play The Lost Boys.
But there were always those unanswered questions about what the Stafford boys couldn't share in their letters home; about what remained unspeakable when Jack and Arthur returned; and about what might have been written in the letters going east, what the Stafford women might have had to say about their wartime experiences and the impact of the tragedy on the home front. And then there were the questions left hanging in the broken chain of letters that followed the deaths of George, Joseph and Harold. In this book, a passionate and determined act of remembrance, R.H. Thomson dives into those silences, digging more deeply into his family's intimate history and the world that swirled around them. Born in 1947, he recalls the impact of war on his own life, noting that- "The living memory of the aftermath of the war that was meant to end all wars was in my generation. With that has come my sense of responsibility to remember."
For the last four years, as the producer of The World Remembers, R.H. Thomson has devoted himself to the project of remembering. In public installations, projections on civic buildings and screens in a network of schools, libraries and museums, TWR displays the names of those from participating countries who lost their lives in WWI. The initiative launched R.H. Thomson on a world tour, negotiating the inclusion of as many of the more than nine million military personnel killed in the fighting between 1914-1918 as possible. From France to Germany, the United States to Turkey, Australia to Russia, he has confronted vastly different cultures and politics of remembrance, and those insights are woven into his own personal and family history. The result is a profoundly moving and thought-provoking study of how and why we remember the fallen.
