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During 2024 I wrote a column in the weekly Keeping in Touch to celebrate our church’s 125th anniversary. I’m reviving that idea: making connections to our history and some of the parishioners on whose shoulders we stand.  This one is about a soldier and two military nurses. The soldier, I’ve written about before, but the nurses are new.

Blitz is a recent movie directed by Sir Steve MacQueen about a boy searching for his mother in war-time London, after he had been evacuated on a trainload of children to the British countryside. (The movie is streaming on Prime). In his odyssey through the London’s bombed streets and subways, in a scenario much like Dicken’s Oliver Twist, he is forced to loot for a gang of bad characters. One of their targets is a night club where a bomb has killed most of the occupants. You can see the movie scene here, via the New York Times.

This nightclub is the Café de Paris in London’s West End, considered an oasis of safety during the Blitz because it was three floors underground where air-born bombs couldn’t reach. But on March 8th, 1941 a 50-kilogram bomb fell down a ventilation shaft into the basement ballroom and exploded in front of the stage. At least 34 people were killed and around 80 injured. 

One of the victims was from Waterloo, indeed originally from our parish, Phillip Frowde Seagram. He was born Apr 15, 1911 to Edward Frowde Seagram and Edna (nee MacLachlan), and lived at Willow Hall, the Seagram mansion at 22 Willow St. (It later became an orphanage, and in 1962 was demolished to build St John’s (now Trillium) Lutheran Church.) Phillip moved to Toronto and was a stockbroker, marrying Martha Telfer on April 3, 1937. He was a Captain with the 48th Highlanders Regiment and was the aide-de-camp to General AGL McNaughton.

In the aftermath of the bomb blast, another Canadian survived, an army nurse form Dunnville Ont. Helen Marie Stevens, 23, immediately worked to assist the injured until ambulance attendants arrived. 

Seagram was buried in Brookwood military cemetery in Surrey, UK, but later his remains were re-interred in Mt Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto, alongside his young wife who died just 3.5 months after him (May 21st, 1941). They had one daughter.

Another nurse story: There is one woman on the Honour Roll of WW I enlistees from Holy Saviour Church. Hazel Gertrude Dawson, born in 1888, was from Waterloo and signed up as a Nursing Sister in Montreal in 1916 (age 28). She served in England and France and was demobbed in Dec 1919, with a “Medaille des Epidemies ‘en Argent’” award. In the 1911 Census, she lived with her parents and a servant in a house on George St, a block from our church. Her mother died in 1912, her father in 1920. She was married in Florida in 1925 to Robert Hoeflich. She died in Sarasota in Oct 1982.

Back to the Seagrams. Both cornerstones on our sanctuary and parish hall mark the substantial gifts from that clan. The stone at the front corner of the sanctuary was commissioned in 1937 by E.F.N. and T.W. Seagram, aka Edward Frowde (1973-1937) and Thomas William (1887-1965). Edward Frowde Seagram was the father of Phillip Frowde (above).

The Parish “House” or Hall was erected in circa1910 by Edward’s father, Joseph Emm Seagram (1841-1919) in memory of his wife, Stephanie Erbs (born in France 1847, died 1909). Joseph was the founder of the Seagram Distillery in Waterloo, in 1857.

Though no Seagrams are in our congregation today, we are grateful for their financial support through the twentieth century. Indeed, we stand on their shoulders.

-Chuck Erion, with help from Brooke Skelton