Saturday, September 26, 2015

Tearing up the tarmac at Edmonton's Blatchford Field

Blatchford Field in Edmonton was Canada's first municipal airport. Wing Commander Howard Blatchford, an air ace in World War II, died aged 31 when his Spitfire went down in the English Channel while he was escorting bombers to Amsterdam. His father Keith was the Mayor of Edmonton; it was he who created the historic city airport, now closed. The Aviation Museum is open, but in late August the bulldozers were busy tearing up the tarmac to turn the land to other uses. The lines on the memorial panels (one seen at the left) are from "For the Fallen," a poem by Lawrence Binyon. One line of the oft-used Remembrance Day poem appears on each of the panels of the memorial tablet at the gate of the Museum: 
"...They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them."

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