Join the McMaster community for the annual McMaster Remembrance Day Service, being held virtually on Friday, Nov. 11 at 10:50 a.m.
The service, which marks 104 years of the Remembrance tradition, is open to all members of the McMaster Community and will be livestreamed at the link below.
“This service is an opportunity to consider the people who gave so much to secure for us a lifetime of opportunity,” says McMaster President David Farrar, who shares the story of a Mac grad and Hamilton rifleman named George E. Matchett, best known by middle name, Elwood.
Elwood, who founded and captained McMaster’s nationally placed rifle team, enlisted with the RHLI at the age of 29.
On Aug. 19, 1942, he was one of 6,100 men – including nearly 5,000 Canadians – to cross the English Channel and come ashore in France near dawn. He was killed by machine gun fire on his way to lead an attack on heavily defended German positions, in the now-infamous Dieppe Raid.
The McMaster Alumni Association and McMaster’s historians, librarians and archivists have been working for years to assemble the stories of Elwood and many of our fallen, Farrar says.
“Today, we remind ourselves of the great price paid by George Elwood Matchett, by his friends and family, by his colleagues on the McMaster Honour Roll and by the millions of people worldwide whose lives have been ended and affected by conflict,” Farrar says.
“Today, we remember.”