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Oak Bay Cenotaph
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Oak Bay, British Columbia
The Oak Bay Cenotaph was constructed in 1948 on behalf of 97 young men and one woman from Oak Bay,
who died in WWII. On Armistice Day, November 11th, 1948, the Cenotaph was unveiled by the Lieutenant
Governor, the Honourable Charles H. Banks, C.M.G., and dedicated by the Venerable Archdeacon A deL. Nunns and the
Reverend Dr. W.W. McPherson.
A wall of concrete with granite finish frames a nine-foot tall statue of a woman, her eyes
downcast upon the 97 names of Oak Bay's war dead. The inscription reads: "Greater love hath no man than
this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."
Early in 1948, the Oak Bay Town Council decided that a suitable memorial be erected. A young former airman from
Ontario, James Saull, had made his home in Victoria after the war. He had been a pupil of the well-known Toronto
sculptor Emmanuel Hahn (Hahn sculpted the Bluenose schooner on our dime, the caribou on the quarter and the
Indians in their canoe on the silver dollar), and the young man's talent had become known locally. It took Saull
about seven months to complete the nine-foot monument, for which his wife was the model. The monument is located
in Uplands Park on a rock out-cropping, facing Beach Drive. Since the concrete monument had been built on
a rock out-cropping, there wasn't any problem with settlement but, over three and a half decade, it had been
exposed to the extremes of weather. It was then that Mr. Saull was called upon by the Town Council to rebuild and
repair the entire structure.
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