Decoration Day-Sunday August 9th @ 1 pm - Read below
Welcome to the Royal Canadian Legion Branch 30 - Port Hope
Honouring Veterans is our duty
BRIGADIER GENERAL G.H. RALSTON
The Royal Canadian Legion Branch 30 - Port Hope is a service club for veterans, their families and friends. They sponsor community events, Air Cadets and donate to local causes and community organizations. The Legion holds Remembrance Day, Canada Day and Decoration Day activities. The Legion hall is available for rentals for Celebration of Life, Birthday Parties, Showers, Anniversary Parties, small Weddings, Family Gatherings, Dinners, Dances, Fundraisers, Sports, Community Meetings and Banquets.
The Royal Canadian Legion was founded by Veterans and for Veterans. We advocate for the care and benefits for all who served Canada, regardless of when or where they served. The Legion also provides representation and assistance to Veterans, including currently serving Canadian Armed Forces and RCMP, and their families, and access to our services is available to them at no cost, whether or not they are Legion members. The Legion helps thousands of Veterans each year and makes significant positive changes in their lives.
The Legion exists so that Canada never forgets
The Legion understands the importance of honouring past sacrifices and acknowledging the courage of those who served and still serve today. Through Remembrance Day ceremonies, the Poppy campaign, commemorative activities, youth education programs and more, the Legion helps Canadians to honour and remember.
The Legion serves our communities and our country
Legion Branches are the cornerstone of communities across Canada, and provide one of the largest volunteer bases in the country. With more than 1,400 Branches from coast to coast to coast, our members provide local services and supports to build a stronger Canada. Whether helping local Veterans, supporting seniors, providing youth sports programs, raising funds, volunteering to help those in need, or simply offering a place to gather for fun and celebration, Legionnaires provide essential services in their communities.
News
Re-opening Guidelines
Are you interesting in Volunteering ?
Are you interesting in Volunteering ?
WE ARE SO EXCITED TO SEE YOU, OUR MEMBERS, FAMILIES AND FRIENDS AGAIN, EVEN IF IT IS WHILE SOCIAL DISTANCING.
WE HAVE MISSED YOU ALL!
The Royal Canadian Legion Branch 30 Port Hope is first committed to the health and safely of its members, families and friends.
Following ALL Covid -19 Re-Opening Guidelines and Rules by Government Health Officials and Royal Canadian Legion Command we are so happy to announce the
Royal Canadian Legion Branch 30 Port Hope is
Now Open
Tuesday - Friday 2 - 6 pm
Entering the Building
Mask must be worn when entering
(please advise if health issues make it not possible)
Sanitize hands
Sign your Name & contact phone number in daily log book
Mask must be worn until seated while still social distancing
Sanitize upon leaving building
Please follow the advise of our Health Officials and together we will get through these difficult times together.
Keep healthy & stay safe, Royal Canadian Legion- Branch 30-Port Hope
Are you interesting in Volunteering ?
Are you interesting in Volunteering ?
Are you interesting in Volunteering ?
Re-opening!
We are excited to announce that we are re-opening and even more excited to be able to see everyone, even if it is while social distancing.
In order to keep open during these difficult times, we find it necessary to implement a volunteer system for bartenders.
If you are interested in volunteering and have your Smart Serve, please contact Wayne Stephens @ 905-885-9788 (home) or 905-396-2923 (cell).
Thank you to everyone interested in volunteering as it will help us to keep our doors open so that we may continue to support our Veterans and our community.
Training will be provided.
Thank you!
Friday Night Meat Draws
Are you interesting in Volunteering ?
Friday Night Meat Draws
Come share some comradery, laughs and smiles all while social distancing and purchase some Meat Draw tickets for $2.00 each and win some great meat for supper.
Meat purchased from Davis Independent -
Port Hope
Put your $2.00 in envelope and your name on the outside of envelope and put in the Meat Draw box.
Draws are at 5 pm
5 Draws - 5 Items to be won!
Supper at your place this weekend?
Decoration Day
Decoration Day- August 9th
Decoration Day- August 9th
Decoration Day- August 9th
DECORATION DAY-SUN AUG 9 TH @ 1 PM-LEGION PATIO GARDENS
We invite everyone to join us and place a living flower on a soldier’s grave, tend to it tenderly, embrace a veteran and thank them for those better summers of our liberty and prosperity that define this great nation we call Canada.
Remembrance must be forever
We will Remember them
“We will remember them” is a call heard at many military memorial ceremonies and parades, but it was only in 1931 that Ottawa passed an act permanently fixing Canada’s national military memorial day to the anniversary of Armistice Day, Nov. 11, 1918, marking the end of the Great War. The day was named Remembrance Day. The same act moved Thanksgiving to October from its traditional November date, still adhered to by our American neighbours.
The 1931 Armistice Remembrance Day Act became an inauspicious memorial to those who died in what was called at the time “the war to end all wars.” As the poet W.H. Auden wrote, the 1930s were “a low dishonest decade” in which “clever hopes expired.” The decade ushered in the Second World War, which was infinitely more savage and apocalyptic than the first. It was appropriate to commemorate those killed in that futile First World War with symbolic artificial paper poppies under tombstone-cold grey skies of November.
But for 30 years before, Canadians had a different memorial called Decoration Day in which we commemorated our war dead with the laying of real flowers, not in the hopeless gloom of November but in the warm light and optimism of late spring or in summer, often on the weekend closest to June 2, the anniversary of Canada's forgotten first modern battle, the Battle of Ridgeway in 1866.
On Decoration Day, Canadians gathered at war monuments, tended to soldiers’ graves after the ravages of winter and “decorated” them with flowers, wreaths and garlands, prayed that their sacrifices were not in vain and that we had come to be worthy of them. Veterans were showered in flowers as they passed, escorted by phalanxes of children. It was a popular communion of young and old with the souls of our fallen soldiers in a celebration of hope, life and rebirth.
We remembered and we remembered well.
Sadly, politics trumped memory. Decoration Day began as a protest in 1890 by forgotten veterans who had fought in the Battle of Ridgeway but received no acknowledgement from the Canadian government. Nine soldiers were killed in the battle, including three University of Toronto student volunteer riflemen plucked from their final exams the day before and thrown into combat against Irish-American Fenian insurgents who had invaded Canada across the Niagara River near Fort Erie.
The Ridgeway Nine are the modern Canadian military’s first nine combat casualties, but the boys killed that day were quickly forgotten by the bungling politicians in Ottawa who had sent them to their deaths, as were another 22 soldiers who later died from wounds and disease contracted on service during the Fenian Raids that summer in 1866
By 1890, frustrated with being forgotten for nearly 25 years, the surviving middle-aged veterans protested on the June 2 anniversary of Ridgeway by laying flowers and wreaths at the Canadian Volunteers Monument near Queen’s Park, Toronto’s oldest standing public monument. The event became Decoration Day, an annual tradition that endured until 1930 and is still commemorated today in some communities in the Niagara-Welland-Fort Erie region where the 1866 battle was fought.
Decoration Day eventually included Canadian soldiers killed in the Northwest Rebellion of 1885, and the South African War (Boer War) of 1899-1902, and the even the Great War, whose casualties were commemorated in June before there was any armistice in November of 1918.
When Remembrance Day was established in 1931, with only a few surviving Fenian Raid veterans remaining to remind Ottawa of its historical bungling, the embarrassing memory of our first fallen soldiers was purged from our national heritage and from the Remembrance Day commemoration. Today, they’re not even listed in our National Books of Remembrance, and few in Canada have even heard of the Battle of Ridgeway.
Until recently, Canada’s Veterans Affairs website used to state that Remembrance Day only “commemorates Canadians who died in service to Canada from the South African War to current missions.” Now, some Veterans Affairs web pages have begun to purge the South African War casualties, proclaiming that, on Remembrance Day, “we honour those who fought for Canada in the First World War (1914-1918), the Second World War (1939-1945), and the Korean War (1950-1953), as well as those who have served since then.” This is a further erosion of our historical memory of sacrifices that should never be forgotten no matter how long ago they might have been made.
With the recent death of the last surviving veteran of the First World War, tomorrow may see the memory of those sacrifices thoughtlessly deleted from our national heritage. And the day after tomorrow, our Second World War and Korean War fallen may be as easily forgotten, and it will be left to us to explain to our children what Nov. 11 used to signify and why we fought those wars.
Remembrance must be forever. Veterans Affairs needs to permanently restore the memory of all our forgotten soldiers who fell in service for Canada, not just the more recent ones but beginning with our very first who we used to commemorate during Decoration Day, starting with the Ridgeway Nine.
Let’s all take one more day to remember, that warm sunny one in June-August. Let’s revive Decoration Day and place a living flower on a soldier’s grave, tend to it tenderly, embrace a veteran and thank them for those better summers of our liberty and prosperity that define this great nation we call Canada. One more day is surely not asking too much to acknowledge entire lives given.
Let’s remain true to our promise, “We will remember them.”
Piling of the Drums
Decoration Day- August 9th
Decoration Day- August 9th
The Piling of the Drums
The ancient ceremony of the Piling of the Drums had its origins where new banners or colors were presented. Colors have always been regarded with great reverence. Historians record that Colors have been associated with religion from the earliest times. Israelites carried the social standard of the Maccabees which bore the initial letter of the Hebrew text. These early associations linking religion with the battle flags and standards have their counterpart in the ceremonial attached to Colours today. Many Commonwealth countries adopted the British custom for the consecration of the Colors prior to the presentation to the Units. The drums are traditionally piled to provide an altar for the consecration. The drums are brought forward and piled in the center. The pile consists of five side drums in a circle with the emblazoning the right way up, facing outwards. The bass drum is laid on the side drums and a tenor drum on top, both with the center of the emblazoning facing the person blessing the Colors. The Colors are then draped on the pile for the consecration, the pikes resting on the hoop to retain the Colors pikes in position. There is no drill laid down for the piling drums, but the drummers concerned normally turn to their left and right and marches out in a single file, forming a circle around the designated spot, turn inwards and arrange their instruments in the center. After the Colors have been consecrated, the drums are recovered in the same way. The Colors after being blessed by the various religious leaders, is handed over to the visiting dignitary, who will present the newly consecrated Colors to the CO / Commander of the Unit. The Colors are then trooped.
Many, many years ago when soldiers were in the field there were no altars on which to hold religious services, so the soldiers would pile their drums neatly to make an altar and drape the drums with their standards [flags]. A clergyman would then consecrate the 'altar' and celebrate inter-faith religious services for the soldiers.
In modern times the Legion honours those military personnel who died in all the wars by carrying on the tradition of the Drum Head Service of Remembrance.
Giving & Receiving Donations
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Branch 30 Port Hope honored to Donate to Coldest Night of the Year 2020
Coldest Night of the Year 2020 was a huge success and the team of Caring for Others - CFO's raised $ 3,250.00.
(Rose Goodall, Ziyad Sidawi, Danielle Goodall, Leah Sturzenegger, Darryl Goodall, Cindy Greer, Michele Roemer and our support walker Joe Ferguson)
We would like to Thank the Port Hope Legion for their continued support and donation of $1500.00 and say Thank you to each and every person who donated to us and to this worthy cause for the homeless and hungry in Northumberland County. The Green Wood Coalition Port Hope raised just shy of $60,000.00 for this area...how wonderful is that!
It was a beautiful and slightly chilly night and we along with over 200 walkers completed either 2 km or 5 km...(we did the whole 5 km).
We could not have done it without each and every one of you so Thank you so much...much appreciated.
Branch 30 Port Hope receives Donation from Elaine's Line Dancers
Everyone who stops in on a Thursday afternoon knows they will be entertained with the great tunes and great moves of the wonderful group of Elaine's Line Dancers. With cowboy boots and cowboy hats, this talented group recently donated $400.00 to the Legion.
Thank you so much ladies for the wonderful donation and for the great entertainment.
See you Thursday!
Giving & Receiving Donations
Branch 30 Port Hope Donates to the Salvation Army Giving Tree
Our wonderful members,families and friends donated a tree full of gifts for local children and we are proud to donate $1,000. to the Salvation Army Giving Tree along with a tree full of gifts for the children. Thank you so much to organizer Debra Switzer who has helped make a better Christmas for so many children.
Branch 30 Port Hope proudly donates to the Northumberland Hills Hospital
Poppy Chair John DeBoer along with President Andre Labrosse and Sports Officer Bill Hodges presented the NHH with a cheque for $9541.00.
Northumberland 89.7 FM receives Royal Canadian Legion Media Award from Branch 30 Port Hope
The Royal Canadian Legion Branch 30 presented Northumberland 89.7-CFWN
with The Royal Canadian Legion Media Award for their wonderful and continuous support.
The Royal Canadian Legion Media Award
has been established by Dominion Command of The Royal Canadian Legion to recognize individuals or organizations from the media who show their support by publicizing the activities and work in the community of Legion Branches, Zones, Districts and Provincial Commands.
The members and officers of the Royal Canadian Legion commend the outstanding generosity, support and assistance that
NORTHUMBERLAND 89.7-CFWN
has provided to
THE BRIGADIER GENERAL G.H. RALSTON BRANCH 30 PORT HOPE.
Events & News
Moonshot Euchre
Monday Night Darts & Cards
Moonshot Euchre
Join us every 3rd Sunday of the Month
for Moonshot Euchre
Registration is at 12 noon
Play is at 1 pm
Partner is not required
$5.00 per player
Prizes & 50/50 Draws
Great afternoon of cards with Marg & Friends
Regular Euchre
Monday Night Darts & Cards
Moonshot Euchre
Join us every 4th Sunday of the Month
for Regular Euchre
Registration is at 12 noon
Play starts at 1 pm
Partner is required or let us know if you need one
$5.00 per person to play
Prizes & 50/50 Draw
Come for a fun afternoon of Regular Cards
Monday Night Darts & Cards
Monday Night Darts & Cards
Wednesday Night Progressive Crib or Euchre
Join us on Monday Nights for some
Euchre OR Darts
FUN & RELAXING EVENING
Come when you can for either darts or euchre - play starts at 7 pm for both
Call us at the Legion 905-885-6585 for more information
Wednesday Night Progressive Crib or Euchre
Wednesday Night Progressive Crib or Euchre
Wednesday Night Progressive Crib or Euchre
Wednesday Evenings @ 7 pm
6 weeks of Progressive Euchre followed by 6 weeks of Progressive Cribbage
Euchre will start again on Wed March 11th
$20.00 per person for 6 weeks of play
Thursday Night Dart League
Wednesday Night Progressive Crib or Euchre
Thursday Night Dart League
Thursday Evenings @ 7 pm
Come join the fun as a spare dart player on Thursday evenings @ 7 pm.
Friday Night Meat Draws
Wednesday Night Progressive Crib or Euchre
Thursday Night Dart League
Friday Evenings @ 5pm
Come join us around 4-4:30 pm for laughs & comradery and be here for the 5 pm Meat Draws.
5 Draws
$2.00 per tickets
Win your supper