In honour of the 100th anniversary of Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae’s famous poem In Flanders Fields, a new statue was unveiled at the National Artillery Memorial in Ottawa on May 3.
The statue wouldn’t have been possible without the help of Castaway Foundry in Erin.
While Wellesley sculptor Ruth Abernethy designed the piece, it was Castaway Foundry that brought her design to life in the form of two bronze sculptures.
Abernethy’s design depicts McCrae the moment after he finished writing the poem and includes the entire poem on the piece of paper on his knee.
It took the Castaway team the better part of nine months to complete the first bronze statue sent to Ottawa last week, and the business is still creating and assembling the twin Guelph statue to be unveiled in June.
Beth Wilson of Castaway Foundry explained the completed statues, almost double the size a life-sized statue, weigh between 1,200 and 1,400 pounds.
In the creation and assembly of a sculpture that size, Wilson said the business had to segment the wax-covered Styrofoam original given to them by the artist to create shells they would ultimately fill with bronze.
Once each piece is cooled and removed from the shell, it’s like putting a puzzle together to assemble the final statue; the McCrae statue had 110 pieces.
“We had pieces but we didn’t have the whole entire sculpture all at once on the floor,” Wilson explained.
“Then it just all of a sudden started coming together. One day there was nothing and then two days later there was the base … [which] was really hard to figure out because it all was rock and stone so it all looked the same.”
Wilson’s husband, Jim, has the foundry experience necessary to create and assemble a statue like McCrae’s. For the past two months he worked 18 hours for seven days a week pouring bronze into one set of shells in the morning and then heating up another batch and pouring another set in the evening because the pot used to heat the bronze can only hold a maximum of 150 pounds, Wilson said.
“It was really, really hard,” she said. However, she added she would do it all again.
“I was proud to do it. We have a military background, Jim’s family has a military background so [we] had to do it,” she said. “So it just seemed like the right thing to do.”
McCrae, the author of the famous poem In Flanders Fields, was born in Guelph. He served as a gunner in the Boer War but due to the medical degree he earned in 1989, he was commissioned to work as a physician, not as a gunner, in the First World War.
McCrae wrote the poem just after the death two artillery officers who were killed in the Second Battle of Ypres in Belgium.
The Guelph statue is set to be unveiled on June 25 at the Guelph Civic Museum.
