From Parliament to Our Cenotaph: St. Marys own Arthur Meighen and Three Drafted Names

At Royal Canadian Legion Branch 236 in St. Marys, we spend a lot of time thinking about how national history becomes local memory. As the Legion marks 100 years since its 1926 incorporation, we are bringing stories like this forward so the next generations will continue to remember these names, and to understand what these men were asked to give, and what they died for.

It is easy to tell the story of Canada’s 1917 conscription crisis as something that happened far away, in Ottawa, in newspaper headlines, in speeches and votes. Here in St. Marys, we live with that history in a more direct way. At the Legion, we stand in the shadow of our cenotaph, on November 11th we read the names, and we help carry the stories forward. When we talk about conscription, we are not talking about theory. We are talking about consequences that reached this town and stayed.

One of the principal architects of conscription was shaped right here. Arthur Meighen was born on June 16, 1874, in the hamlet of Anderson, located in Blanchard Township near St. Marys, Ontario and educated at St. Marys Collegiate right here in St. Marys. He later became one of the most forceful voices of his generation, and a prime minister. His national story still loops back to this town in a literal way, since his statue stands proud in the Park that bears his name, and he is buried at the St. Marys Cemetery.

By 1917, the voluntary enlistment system was failing to maintain troop numbers. Arthur Meighen was asked to draft the Military Service Act. In this act the federal government decided to conscript young men for overseas military service. Meighen’s pro-conscription case can still be read in the text of his June 1917 speech. It is worth revisiting because it shows the tone and logic of the argument, before later retellings softened the edges. One line captures the moral frame he chose: “The obligation of honour is upon us.” The Military Service Act became law on August 29, 1917. Orders soon followed. On October 13, 1917, unmarried men (or widowers) aged 20 to 24 were ordered to report locally for medical assessments, and exemption requests became widespread.

This is where “Ottawa” stops being a location and becomes a system that reaches into every town. Once a reporting order exists, it reaches factory floors, farms, boarding houses, and family kitchens. It reaches young men whose futures were already uncertain, and it reaches parents and spouses who had no vote in the choice but lived with the outcome.

The result was not simply political disagreement. Conscription produced one of the fiercest and most divisive periods in Canadian public life. The lines of conflict ran through language and region, but also through occupation and class. Opposition was particularly strong in Quebec City, and resistance escalated into several days of rioting and street battles at Easter 1918, leaving four civilians dead and many more injured.

In towns like St. Marys, conscription was not just policy the consequences are written in stone at St. Marys Cenotaph. Among those sixty-five names, research identifies three men recorded as having entered service through conscription and then dying in uniform. Their stories are local proof that wartime decisions did not stay theoretical. The law was argued nationally by a local man came back and forever changed families here.

The first is Archie Alexander Kemp. Our cenotaph research records Kemp as drafted into the 1st Depot Battalion at Stratford on January 4, 1918, and dead by January 28, 1918 at Kirton, Ontario. This is conscription at its starkest. The draft reaches into a small community, and the loss lands almost immediately, close to home, before an overseas posting could even become part of the story.

The second is Norman Theodore Hopkin. Our cenotaph research records Hopkin as drafted under the Military Service Act on January 23, 1918 into the 1st Depot Battalion at Stratford. It then traces him overseas with the 18th Battalion, wounded on August 27, 1918, and dead on September 10, 1918. His path is what many people imagine when they picture the Great War: the front, the wound, and death overseas. What St. Marys adds, through the cenotaph record, is the origin point. He did not enter through volunteering. He entered through the draft.

The third is William Wood. Our cenotaph research records Wood as drafted into the 1st Depot Battalion at Stratford on October 26, 1917. It also records his death as influenza on October 23, 1918 at a Canadian hospital at Kinmel Park Camp in North Wales, with burial at St. Margaret’s Churchyard, Bodelwyddan. Wood’s case matters for another reason. It underlines how the cost of conscription is not only battlefield death. By late 1918, the war’s machinery was also funneling men into overcrowded camps and hospitals during the influenza wave. In that sense, the draft did not just send men toward combat. It also placed men into vulnerable spaces where disease could finish what the war began.

By 1921, the country was actively shaping how it would remember the sacrifices. In July of that year, now Prime Minister Meighen travelled to Vimy Ridge and delivered a major tribute to the Great War dead at the unveiling of the Cross of Sacrifice at Thelus Military Cemetery. One line stands out because it is plain, specific, and difficult to evade: “At this time, the proper occupation of the living is, first, to honour our heroic dead.” In the same speech, he reached for an image of connection across distance and time: “Across the leagues of the Atlantic the heartstrings of our Canadian nation will reach through all time to these graves in France.”

Four months later, St. Marys made its own public choice about remembrance. On November 7, 1921, The town unveiled its cenotaph beside Town Hall and carved sixty-five names into its sides. It was funded by the Women’s Institute, For us, honouring the dead is not abstract but community work and determination. It stands as list of names in public view, but it is noticing the details inside those names, including the three who entered service through conscription and did not come home.

After the war, the country faced another obligation: what came next for the living. A later profile of Meighen notes that he oversaw an initiative designed to assist financially those veterans who wished to become farmers. In practice, returned soldiers could be supported through programs aimed at land settlement, with provisions tied to land, livestock, and farm equipment. However imperfect those programs were in real life, it shows the state trying, at least on paper, to answer a hard question: what does a country owe the people it sent?

Veterans’ organizations were also consolidating into a national body in the mid-1920s. On July 17, 1926, the Canadian Legion of the British Empire Service League was incorporated under federal authority through letters patent under the Companies Act. That date falls during Meighen’s brief second term as prime minister, but the incorporation paperwork itself was handled through the Secretary of State’s department, so it is best understood as something that occurred under his government rather than a personal act. Later, the organization was formally incorporated by a federal Act in 1948, and its name was updated in later amendments.

That is part of why this history belongs at a Legion branch. We are not repeating it to reopen old arguments, or to reduce complex politics to a single villain or hero. We are carrying it forward because it connects directly to our town, our memorial, and the families who still see their own names reflected in those carved letters. As we mark 100 years, we want the next generations to remember these men as more than names on stone. We do that by keeping the record straight, by speaking plainly about how men entered service, and by returning, again and again, to the cenotaph, to the plaques on town hall, to the banners placed around town every year. Not as an artifact, but as a promise: the families of those who served will be remembered locally, with care, accuracy, and respect Remembering is not passive. It is work. It is telling the truth carefully, and then making sure it is not forgotten.

Learn More