Canada Day is forever Memorial Day in Newfoundland

On July 1, 1916, nearly 800 members of the Newfoundland Regiment went over the top at Beaumont-Hamel in northern France. A day later, just 68 answered roll call.

It was 9:15 a.m. on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest battles of a bloody war, and two waves of Allied troops had gone before them.

The lead elements were all but wiped out. Still, the Newfoundlanders, citizens of what was then the hardscrabble Dominion of Newfoundland, were ordered on. And, so, on they went.

“There were no waverers, no stragglers, not a man looked back,” said Major-General Beauvoir de Lisle, commander of the 29th British Division, “it was a magnificent display of trained and disciplined valour, and its assault only failed of success because dead men can advance no further.”

Two hundred and thirty-three men were killed or died of wounds; 91 were missing or presumed dead; and 386 were wounded. Every officer who went forward in the attack was either killed or wounded.

On July 1, 2025, retired colonel Gregory Burt, a member of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment Advisory Council, stood beneath the towering National War Memorial in Ottawa and told the story of Beaumont-Hamel.

Before him was an audience of several hundred, including delegates to the 35th conference of The Royal Commonwealth Ex-Services League (RCEL), an organization created after the First World War to care for Empire veterans in the Caribbean, Africa and Australasia. The wars didn’t stop, and the RCEL has continued its good works ever since.

Hailing from places as diverse as Australia, Lesotho, Guyana and Malaysia, many in the crowd had likely never heard of Beaumont-Hamel or the Newfoundland Regiment, which received its Royal title from King George V in December 1917.

They left the cenotaph with much to ponder.

“Since the tragic losses at Beaumont-Hamel 109 years ago today,” Burt told them, “the first of July has been, for Newfoundlanders and Labradorians, a day of reflection and mourning first, and a celebration of Canada second.”

In a poignant ceremony that takes place annually before the celebrating starts a stone’s throw away on Parliament Hill, natives of the country’s youngest province performed many of the ceremonial duties.

Kathleen Mercer, who recited the Commitment to Remember, is the great-great granddaughter of a veteran of the Newfoundland Regiment. Commander Jennifer Gosse, a military chaplain who offered a spiritual reflection, had a great-uncle wounded at Gallipoli and killed at Beaumont-Hamel.

“The lives they left behind in the dominion had nothing to do with the fight they were about to face,” Gosse said in a heartfelt message to the gathered.

“But their sense of duty—and, yes, probably a sense of adventure, as well—led them to sign their lives away en masse to fight strangers who were causing turmoil in the lives of other strangers.

“Many of them—so many of them—never came home.”

Newfoundlanders—many with WW I connections—placed wreaths at the National War Memorial, including Dr. Carol Gardner-Kirby, who lost three uncles in the Great War, including one at Beaumont-Hamel. She placed a wreath on behalf of the 821 Newfoundland families whose loved ones were never found.

Commodore Keith Coffen’s maternal grandfather, Henry Benjamin Vere-Holloway, a private bugler in the RNR, was wounded twice and used to show him the scars from bullet and shrapnel wounds he had suffered. Coffen placed a wreath on behalf of the Canadian Armed Forces.

Retired lieutenant-commander Richard Wayne MacWhirter’s great-uncle, Private Hugh Walter McWhirter, was the regiment’s first soldier killed in action—on Sept. 22, 1915. Hugh’s brother, George-William, was wounded while serving with the regiment in July 1916, then wounded again and captured on March 12, 1917. He remained a prisoner of war until August 1918.

MacWhirter placed a wreath on behalf of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment 110th, in Gallipoli.

Retired captain Joe Blanchard, a member of the Qalipu Mi’kmaq First Nation and his brother Tim, a veteran combat engineer living near Corner Brook, N.L., placed a wreath on behalf of serving and veteran Indigenous Peoples. Their great-uncles Benjamin and Thomas Blanchard both served in WW I.

Herb Davis placed a wreath on behalf of the people of Newfoundland and Labrador. A distant cousin, Private Lester Barbour of the RNR, died of wounds in Belgium.

Kathleen Mercer and Arya Burt placed a wreath on behalf of the Youth of Canada. Burt’s distant cousins, Gidion and Steven Sweetapple, both served in the RNR.

And Legion President Berkley Lawrence, a Newfoundlander and veteran, placed a wreath on behalf of the RCEL. His grandfather, Stephen Lawrence, served with the Newfoundland Regiment, was wounded at Beaumont-Hamel on July 1, 1916, and twice more later that year.

There were others, including highly decorated RCMP Sergeant Curtis Barrett, a military veteran and native of Stephenville, N.L., who placed a wreath on behalf of the national police service.

Even a Newfoundland dog, named Margaree, participated in the wreath-placing, accompanied by Joan Fisher, whose two sons continue a military family tradition. She placed the wreath on behalf of the Atlantic Voices Choir. Margaree is the choir mascot.

The choir performed “The Ode to Newfoundland,” a hymn-like anthem that is deeply engrained in the province’s history and culture.

A storyteller in his province’s finest tradition, Burt then gave a moving account of the opening salvos of that attack so long ago, how young men left a trench called St. John’s Road, and found a meagre path forward amid the hail of lead and artillery shells that Saturday morning.

“They advanced from this trench, which was actually behind the front line, because the sheer number of soldiers involved in earlier attacks who were dead or wounded were clogging the route to the front trenches,” Burt said.

“This meant that the regiment had to traverse more than 200 metres before they even made it to the Allies’ own front line.”

“They all instinctively tucked their chins into their chests and advanced shoulder-to-shoulder as they had so often done when fighting their way home against a blizzard.”

— an eyewitness to the action at Beaumont-Hamel

Entering no man’s land, they were met with tangles of barbed wire. The enemy trenches were more than half a kilometre away.

“As the Newfoundlanders advanced toward the enemy, there was an opening in the wire by a tree partway down the slope that marked the spot where German fire seemed to become particularly intense,” continued Burt.

“This gnarled tree was nicknamed the ‘danger tree’ by the Newfoundland troops and it marked the spot where many of them would fall that morning.”

The German machine guns were trained on the gaps.

“They all instinctively tucked their chins into their chests and advanced shoulder-to-shoulder as they had so often done when fighting their way home against a blizzard,” said one observer.

“But this time it was not snow flying all around them.”

Some 6,241 men from Newfoundland and Labrador served in the Royal Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War. Records vary at between 1,281 and 1,305 killed. Another 2,284 were wounded.

More than 2,466 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians served in other branches—the Newfoundland Royal Naval Reserve, the Newfoundland Forestry Corps—and another 3,296 joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

In all, over 12,000 served from a population of just 240,000, including about 175 Newfoundland women who served overseas as graduate nurses or with the Voluntary Aid Detachment.

At least 15 Inuit men, mainly from Labrador, joined the Newfoundland Regiment, many as scouts and snipers. Others served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

More than 22,000 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians answered the call in the Second World War. Two-thirds of the 1,089 Newfoundlanders and Labradorians killed in WW II died at sea serving with naval forces and the merchant marine.

Memorial Day in Newfoundland and Labrador—and in Ottawa—now commemorates not just the regiment at Beaumont-Hamel, but all of the province’s servicemen and women who died at war.

The chaplain, Gosse, concluded her thoughts with a poignant message.

“May we, inspired by their love, live our lives in such a way as to make them proud,” she said. “May we, faced with adversity, demonstrate the same tenacity that made them ‘tuck their chins in’ and go walking through a blizzard when the blizzard that day was bullets.

“May we be loyal to our families, our country, our homeland, so that we ensure their sacrifices were not made in vain, but respected by a people who continue to fight for justice and freedom for all.

“And may we, like them, find our final resting place, our peace, our comfort at the last, in the land we love. May it be so. And may we work to make it so.