Commemorating People 2 - Great Canadian Non-Ceramics - 1820-1920 - 5

This phenomenal bust, sculpted from a block of marble, once was in the Argus Corp headquarters at 1 Toronto Street - where she watched disapprovingly as Conrad Black stealthily carried boxes past her - oops, and a video camera - full of evidence of millions he stole from shareholders...

In this exact same corner of the auction house, an oil portrait of Conrad's father was ignominiously auctioned off among the other starving artist art, by the receivers, to try to get some of the looted money back, for which Conrad got some slap-on-the-wrist jail time...

With its huge marble plinth it must weigh 1,000 pounds. It was bought at auction by an auctioneer who will donate it to a museum. Nobody else would buy it... However fine, it's just too damn heavy and huge.

So even for the most passionate collector, it's either the wife, or this thing... Hmmmh...

This fabulous bronze by Hamilton MacCarthy has guarded the front of the Armouries in downtown Brantford for over 100 years.

Go to the Story Behind this Bronze

Go to Hit me with Bronze Statues

The McKenney & Hall Indian Chiefs, including Canadian ones, were a landmark publication, starting in 1838, as hand painted lithographs and were issued in large quarto or small octavo sizes. They are spectacular.

Go to McKenney & Hall 1839

Currier and Ives started about the same time and soon became the pre-eminent publisher of commemorative and pictorial prints in the US and Canada. The Death of Tecumseh was a very popular seller at a time when most whites agreed that "The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian."

Go to Currier & Ives 1846

You wish... Trouble is its a fake, a repro from the 1950s. Better bone up on your fakes before you spend big money on things that look genuine and aren't...

Go to The Fakes Pages

These two are the finest of the type we've ever seen.

Go to Commemorating Gordon

Go to Military Heroes

So, who's the Hero?

Except for the face, bosom, and the background around her head, which is painted, everything is made up of hundreds of individually embroidered threads of coloured wool.

The embroidery is a carbon copy of an oil painting of Queen Victoria at the time which Annie saw and used as a template for her spectacular piece of work.

Go to Annie Rogers

He was Commander-in-Chief of the US Army from 1883-1888, when he died. An admirer with some painting skills, who may have served with him in the Civil War or during the Indian Wars out west, chose to commemorate him with this fabulous folk art painting.

Go to Little Phil Sheridan

He had an amazing record of service in battles of the British Empire, all listed on the card.

Many of Britain's soldiers settled in Canada after leaving the service, in the early and middle 1800s.

Go to Birthday Card

Dargai had been a huge battle in Pakistan, where the Highlanders stormed the heights, as Piper Findlater, though grievously shot up, continued to play during the assault.

He became a huge hero on his return to London.

Go to Dargai Sheet Music

Go to Holloway's Dargai

The back is all splotchy with old brazing residue on the hanger, and whitish brasso stains from sloppy children who once were charged with keeping this shining, over a hundred years ago.

Go to Pin Trays

This old chestnut remains Stephen Harper's winning domestic strategy in 2011; it has worked for five years, in a minority no less.

For foreign policy, since Canada has no imperialist bloodletting legacy of its own, Harper just follows his six-gun sidekick, drone mad heroes in the US Right.

Go to More Fabulous Chromolithographs

The Beginning of a Bad Idea - This tribute is to US Admiral Dewey who annihilated the Spanish Fleet at Manila Bay, in the Philippines, in 1898, during the short Spanish-American War. which can be said to mark the end of US isolation from world politics.

It also marked the beginning of the Age of American Imperialism, when the US would obliterate anyone, who dared interfere with global US economic, political and military hegemony. This was years before Clint Eastwood and John Wayne popularized this philosophy of "just shooting anyone they found disagreeable."

It was ushered in by Teddy Roosevelt's "big stick," which endures and expanded in the 21st century with Obama's hundreds of drone attacks, ramped up troop deployments, and God-awful human carnage of women, children, and men, in whichever helpless Muslim state the American President chooses to target next.

Clearly the anger is growing enormously among the 1.5 billion Muslims in the world.

And Canadian Prime Minister Harper, who has killed more Muslim women, children, and men, than any Canadian of any kind in History, after joining the American war against the Muslims in Afghanistan, has been successful, in historic proportions, at turning Muslim anger at Canadians.

Go to Fabulous Tapestries

At a time the only air conditioning was mother nature, with open doors providing important air circulation for home and office, doorstops were as necessary as paperweights, to keep the papers from blowing away in the ensuing gusts...

It dates from a time when the British, not the Americans, were seen as the Imperial terrorists around the world.

To get the war they wanted against the backward, sleepy Boer Republics in South Africa they created their own fake "weapons of mass destruction" scenario in the media, for a cassus belli. But unlike the American corporate calumnists, who were after access to cheap oil, the British plotters were after the gold that had been discovered under the Boer farmlands.

Canadians would send their first ever military force to fight in an overseas war for Queen and Country, not gold thank you...

Go to the Dead Horse

It summarized Lord Roberts' victories of 1900: capture of the two Boer capitals, Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and the lifting of two sieges, Mafeking and Ladysmith. In spite of it all, because the Boers wouldn't fight fair, fighting wars the traditional way, was all a waste of time; the war went on for two more years, with guerrilla warfare.

It was used in a Canadian household as it came from the estate of a long-time Niagara Peninsula antique collector.

Go to Trivet

Anonymous Tommy Atkins figures of all kinds were produced, including these fabulous heavy and high end brass candlesticks. The uncomplaining, long suffering British foot soldier who got little pay, and often an early death in a foreign field, was a hero in poetry, song, and memorabilia.

Go to Candlesticks to Die For

The "Gentleman" was taken from a Rudyard Kipling poem celebrating the underappreciated British foot soldier.

Go to A Gentleman in Kharki

Go to Flag Crazy

Unlike modern generals who command from far behind the lines with a Blackberry, Bobs is shown leading from the front, and looking back to encourage his men to follow him, up front where the bullets are flying. That's how he won his Victoria Cross as a young officer.

Go to Blackberry Generals

Go to Bugler Dunne

Lots of boys went to war in Victorian times.

Go to Boys at War

Lots were buglers.

Go to Boys and Bugles

Some were Canadians.

Go to Edward McCormick

In 2011, the Globe is still rabidly patriotic, and one of the biggest media boosters of the war against the Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, etc. - in short, wherever they can be found...

All of the many other tin boxes popular in Canada in the late 19th century had only British monarchs or generals on them.

Including the most famous tin right of the entire Victorian/Edwardian period, in which Queen Victoria made a gift of chocolate to all her soldiers serving in South Africa in the Boer War.

Go to Tins to Die For

The base is heavy cast iron, the figure spelter, and the clockface celuloid.

And it surfaced at an estate sale in a small town in southern Ontario where it had made its home for over 100 years.

Those utilitarian Canadian grannies, or teenage girls, used it too to hold their pins and needles when sewing. Hence the tiny chips on Otter's face. More far-sighted collectors, put their away and so have few paint scuffs.

Go to Fabulous Pin Trays

Here kids could "take a crack" at dastardly President Kruger of the Boer Republic and "draw his teeth." The dexterity puzzle was to see who could roll those five tiny balls into position in his mouth.

Go to Puzzle

If you want to know who originally bought it, in 1900, and played it - we traced her name...

Go to Bert Walter

In later life he would go on to head the Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps, as Major General, and to become the Lieutenant-Governor of Quebec.

And he had a jig composed in his honour by a Quebec fiddler.

Go to Captain Fiset

Frederick Pocock was a member of the much feared Canadian Scouts, founded by Gat Howard during the Boer War in South Africa in December 1900.

Frederick was killed a year after Gat Howard had met his own end in February 1901.

Now Fred's wife, who probably wore this for the rest of her life, has passed on. As have all the other people who once knew him and cared for him and his memory.

Now the locket has been rescued from the trash heap of history by the Canadian Anglo-Boer War Museum.

Go to Gat's Death

How do we know? By tracking down the age and dates or associated historical events from the hundreds of items cemented into the work.

Go to What's All in this Anyway?

How many blew their noses, into the face of the royals, is another question. Most probably used them as neckerchiefs, or just draped them over sofas, or framed them.

Go to Flag Crazy

Unlike many medallions from the period, which are made of lightweight metal alloys - like the 3.5 cm Queen Victoria Jubilee medal from 1897 right - these are quality strikes, made of copper, big at 5.5 cm, and very heavy..

Above a silver one from Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887, and a 1902 Coronation of Edward VII in newfangled gutta percha, a sort of plastic material.

Note the Irregular pebbling, not the uniform grid of dots found on modern reproductions.

Cheap picture reproductions, like all the Robert Bateman prints, and most photographs you see, look like this in close-up when viewed through a loupe.

They are no match for the glorious range and depth of colour found on late 19th century chromolithograph "original" prints.

Go to Dinner That Never Was

To celebrate Confederation in 1867, Alexander Muir wrote "The Maple Leaf Forever," which became a Canadian anthem that was sung with genuine gusto by countless schoolchildren, and men as they marched to battle in Canada, South Africa, and Europe. For almost a hundred years, it was "the" national anthem for Canada, and Canadians, before it was replaced by the more culturally correct dirge "Oh, Canada," which was the de facto National Anthem since 1939, and officially since 1980.

Nothing, in the later musical memory of this 9-year-old, newly arrived immigrant to Canada, has surpassed, in 61 years, the joyous sound of 40 of his classmates in a rural public school, as they belted out "The Maple Leaf Forever," their voices drifting across the farm fields of southern Ontario, in 1950 below.

Alexander's "chromolithographic-rendered" eye, made up of countless irregular pebbles of colour. Which is why, unlike reproduction prints, chromolithographs are each produced individually and are considered "original prints."

Go to Chromolithograph Tutor

The medallion reads right side up, but when transferred to dough, would have shown up as reversed and unreadable...

Still a very heavily used item, showing signs of having been in an oven many times.

This trivet features the British bulldog - a stand-in for John Bull and the British Empire - who would not be budged from the huge patchwork of red that covered every world map in 1900.

"What we have, we'll hold" was the clarion call of John Bull to any and all challengers from the Sudan War, the Boer War, World Wars I and II, which each produced commemoratives featuring this theme illustrated with a bulldog standing on the Union Jack.

Go to Brass Galore

It features a youngish Duke who would become King George V, ten years later, in 1911. He dedicated Boer War monuments and handed out medals to Canadian veterans who had just returned from the wars in South Africa.

Go to Ottawa Visit

The flour was grown on the prairies which were being settled heavily in the 1890s under Prime Minister Laurier, and were in full swing by the time King George V was crowned in 1911, from when this flag dates.

Canadians proudly emblazoned memorabilia items with no nonsense labeling calling the British King George, and Lord Roberts as their "Leader."

Go to Fabulous Plates Index

Alas, though they look impressive on their statues, French generals were no better at modern war than the British. Over a million Frenchmen soldiers and civilians died to Make the World Safe for Democracy.

Go to Bronzes

Go to Remembrance Day

It was manufactured in the US, which had just completed its war against Spain in 1898, features a US/British sailor, a British soldier of World War I vintage, and topping it off with a British bulldog, and a Canadian beaver under the clock. And emblazoned below with the British slogan that started during the Sudan campaign of 1898 but would hold for the Boer War, and World Wars I and II.

Go to Clocks

66,000 Canadian boys who bought the message, "bought the farm" and never returned from a war that started between the hereditary royal houses of Europe and that ultimately claimed 16 million lives.

The democratic politicians that sent them packing from directing the affairs of state were no better, turning the peace they dictated into a weapon of war that, less than 20 years later, led to another total war between the same parties - the victors and losers of WWI - into an even larger bloodbath that claimed 75 million lives.

Now, what was it you were saying about those Muslims?

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