 With PETER BLACK Plains of Abraham
If Lord Grey had been a better fund-raiser, the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City today would be adorned by a monument a whisker taller than the 46-metre Statue of Liberty.
As it turns out Grey couldn't rustle up the cash for the Angel of Peace and so history remembers him not for a towering statue but for the Birks bowl he bequeathed to that peaceful endeavor called Canadian football.
Grey, governor general of Canada from 1904-11 and a British imperialist of the first order, wanted to turn the Plains into a spectacular monument to Wolfe's fabled victory, an ambition that was conveniently timed for French-speaking civic officials who dreamed of a similarly spectacular tricentennial of Champlain's founding of Quebec City in 1608. So, in typically Canadian fashion, a remarkable achievement was borne of competing visions.
In 1908 Wilfrid Laurier acted to preserve the Plains from developers who had already drawn up subdivisions carving up the land, then owned by religious orders, the military, and private interests. Since that crucial act of historical conservation, the Plains have continued to be a crossroads - a carrefour - of Canada.
It is the only place in the province, for example, where a huge Fête Nationale party is followed a week later -- in a different part of the park -- by an increasingly grand Canada Day celebration.
I feel compelled to sing the praises of the Plains from time to time because, living a cannon-shot away, as I like to say, I get to soak up the place's beauty, history, and activity all year-round. Our house, we have learned, is actually on the historic battlefield, our street named for the Fraser Highlander regiment which formed part of the left flank of the original thin red line that fateful day, September 13, 1759.
(A neighbour down the lane has unearthed a cannonball from his backyard, courtesy of a metal detector, a discovery that was recreated for a National Film Board documentary on the meaning of the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, by veteran film-maker Jacques Godbout.)
Returning to Lord Grey, he was not the only governor general to take inspiration from the Plains to name a sports trophy. Sixteen years earlier, Lord Stanley proposed a shinny prize during a meeting of the Amateur Hockey Association of Canada held at the Quebec Skating Rink building on the Plains.
The Rink's shareholders, by the way, were among the last hold-outs when the newly created National Battlefields Commission started expropriating land for the park. Even though the building was destroyed by fire in 1918, the dispute over the land on which it stood, which now forms the main entrance to the park, dragged on until 1938.
There are enough fascinating Plains nuggets that the place could easily have its own Trivial Pursuit game. A few examples: It was the site of central Canada's first golf course, it hosted Canada's first stakes horse race, it was the site of Canada's first observatory, it's been the scene of several public hangings, it was where O Canada was first sung, it was a landing strip for Charles Lindbergh, it has an underground lake, and on and on.
But what makes the Plains even more special is how the park has adapted over the years. For example, it is now the coolest place in the city for the legions of in-line skaters to throng and strut their stuff on a huge oval track, wisely built by the park's overseers. It is host to a regular program of musical events, including, for the first time, the main stage for the smash Quebec City summer music festival.
This year there'll be two more milestones on the Plains. First, the park will welcome the International Festival of Military Music (Aug. 26-29), bringing together hundreds of Sousa-philes from around the planet. Then, in the depths of a Quebec winter, 10,000 boy scouts and girl scouts from all over the world will camp out on the Plains to mark the Millennium, in an event called Jam des Neiges, or Snow Jamboree.
Lord Grey, we suspect, would be amused, and pleased, by what wonders his Plains have wrought over the years - perhaps wonders to rival his Angel of Peace.
Copyright © 1999 Peter Black/Log Cabin Chronicles/8.99 |
