HORSE GUARDS HONOUR PRIVATE THOMAS REDDICEN WHOSE GRAVE WAS UNMARKED 106 YEARS
Photos and story Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
GRAVENHURST — On the eve of Remembrance Day — 106 years after his death — Private Thomas Phililp Reddicen can finally rest in peace.
If only his family knew.
Saturday morning the Governor General’s Horse Guards righted a wrongat the grave of an unknown soldier here.
Commanding officer Lt.-Col. Gerald Moore called it a “correction of a miss,” when they officially dedicated a headstone in his memory at the Lakeview Cemetery in Gravenhurst — with military honours.
He said it’s part of the Toronto and Canada’s largest reserve regiment’s maxim about not letting any soldier or “member of our family” go unrecognized — no matter how long.
The stone was laid in 2019, but due to COVID the ceremony was delayed.
A year before that Judy Humphries, of the Gravenhurst Archives, was contacted by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission which had heard from the community of Middleton, England. The Lancashire County citizens had traced all but two of their residents who had died in the First World War.
One was in Iraq — the other they thought was interred in Gravenhurst.
Humphries easily found Reddicen’s name among a half dozen soldiers buried after dying at one of the four tuberculosis sanatoriums in Gravenhurst.
Finding his plot was a little harder — but not much.
With the help of cemeteries superintendent Rick Pierre — then in charge of the town’s 14 cemeteries — they narrowed their search to an almost forgotten section the cemetery. The other half of what was considered the Catholic cemetery.
Back off Fraser Street at the end of Mary Street there’s a small cul-de-sac where buried are more than 100 people who helped build the lumber, shipping and tourism town.
Among those few almost hidden down a slight slope next to the turnaround are a handful of additional Canadian war heroes — far away from other legionnaires across town at the Mickle Cemetery where the Royal Canadian Legion has a section in which most local war dead continue to be laid to rest.
Five of these graves belong to young Englishmen who immigrated to Canada, returned home to fight for their old and new countries and who contracted TB in the war with Germany and were “killed by the disease.”
He was 26.
“And now they belong to us,” said Humphries, “because their families couldn’t be found or they couldn’t afford to repatriate them back to England.”
Prvt. Reddicen was one of them.
But he had no headstone, unlike the rest, including George Henderson — “who was one of our own soldiers from Gravnenhurst” who died here at a san from TB.
Humphries was the right person to contact as she’s an expert on those from Gravenhurst who died in the Great War and is still working on a book about them. She often walks the cemetery identifying people when requests come in and has given tours of Lakeview as well.
At the windy ceremony under giant oak trees — their big brown leaves nicely blown aside for service by Pierre’s successor Ryan Collins — she said: “The people in Middleton were trying to find every one of their boys they had lost in the first war and make sure they all had a stone.
“And they got down to the last two of 800 they lost. One was in Iraq — and they couldn’t do anything for him; and they said ‘we think the other one was in Gravenhurst.’”
That was five years ago.
“Rick and I came out — he had all the records — and we found him in an unmarked grave over there.
“Hal (her husband who died last spring) and I scraped all the moss off the curbing.”
Humphries gave the Commonwealth War Graves the information and in 2019 they arranged to have the familiar national stone marker with the maple leaf prominently on it installed by a company in Orillia.
“I stood and photographed and watched over him as they put the stone on (the previously unmarked grave) and waited for the ceremony, which the pandemic killed,” Humphries said afterwards.
It’s kind of come full circle, ending a five-year journey.
“I’m so, so happy to have been here for this,” she said adding she wished Hal could have been around for the “lovely” service. “He walked that journey with me.”
She said it was “wonderful and beautiful.”
A bugler played Last Post and Reveille, and then Regiment chaplain Monique Roumy gave a blessing while four Horse Guard corporals stood, rifles in hand, at attention along with the colour guard from the legion.
A dozen members of the public, councillors and Mayor Heidi Lorenz also attended.
Before helping unveil the headstone, a “choked up” Lorenz quoted from Rudyard Kipling’s 1916 poem “My Boy Jack” about 16-year-old Jack Cornwell, the youngest Victoria Cross recipient, the price of war and the supreme sacrifices paid by so many worldwide.
She said after she wasn’t specifically thinking about her own son Jack though he did come to mind when it was suggested.
The Horse Guards are putting together video of the day and documentation for the people of Middleton and Reddicen’s family — if and when they find them.
Unfortunately no one has been able to contact his next of kin to inform them of where he now rests in final peace.
“We’re going to keep trying to find them,” said Sergeant Major and Chief Warrant officer Kevin Kalk “and provide closure for them.
“We are just happy to have done justice for the soldier and close the loop.”
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