Montreal museum sheds light on Quebec vet’s eventful career

Ruby Pratka, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

editor@qctonline.com

Open a drawer at a small Montreal military museum and you may discover a little-known piece of Quebec City anglophone history.

The Royal Montreal Regiment (RMR) Museum is inside the regiment’s headquarters on Sainte-Catherine St. West in Westmount. The museum’s compact, bilingual permanent exhibition tells the story of the first bilingual regiment in Canadian military history, composed of both English- and French-speaking divisions at its founding on the eve of the First World War. Rows of perfectly preserved uniforms, medals, medical kits, weapons and other artifacts, many of which were given to the museum by veterans and their families, trace the unit’s history from the First World War to 20th-century peacekeeping missions and involvement in Afghanistan.

Throughout the exhibit, drawers and captions highlight the stories of specific soldiers. One of these soldiers is Maj. William Jeffrey Holliday, who was born in Quebec City in 1877 and grew up on Avenue des Érables – or Maple Avenue, as it was then known – in the Montcalm district. In 1898, he joined the Quebec Bulldogs hockey team, becoming a local hero in 1901 as the captain of the second-string team, explained RMR Museum assistant curator Amynte Egun.

He and a few of his teammates interrupted their hockey careers to serve in the British Army in the Boer War in South Africa. Repatriated with an injury, Holliday, who held a day job as a ship’s purser, recovered sufficiently well to get back to playing hockey. In 1904, Holliday’s last year on the team, the Bulldogs won the Canadian Amateur Hockey League title, the equivalent of the Stanley Cup at the time. He returned to active duty with the RMR in the First World War, dying at the age of 40 in a French military hospital of injuries suffered at Vimy Ridge.

All of this, Egun and curator Ron Zemancik explained, came to light thanks to a box of artifacts bequeathed to the museum by a nephew of Holliday’s in Kingston, Ont. The box contained several of Holliday’s letters home, along with clippings from the Quebec Chronicle, a predecessor of the QCT, chronicling Holliday’s achievements on the ice and on the battlefield. Holliday’s last letter home, dictated to a nurse, a memorial scroll bearing the signature of King George V, and a wristwatch salvaged from the battlefield complete the exhibit.

Zemancik, a lifelong Montrealer and military history buff in his 70s, and Egun, a recent graduate of the Université de Montréal museology master’s program who grew up in Nova Scotia and studied in Europe, may look like an unlikely duo at first glance, but they’re united by a shared passion for military history and for keeping the memories of Holliday and his comrades alive. The artifacts on display at the museum barely scratch the surface of what has been given to the RMR museum over the years. Egun estimates that they have “five years of boxes” of donated archives waiting to be fully catalogued, with dozens of stories like Holliday’s inside. “I want to do a few of these [exhibit drawers] with a few different people from different backgrounds,” she said. “It’s always interesting to realize that they were just like us – they just didn’t have the same technology.”

“The way I see it is, no one is left to remember them except for us,” Zemancik said. “So let’s do it.”

The Royal Montreal Regiment Museum is open on Tuesdays from 1 p.m. to 8 p.m, other days by appointment, and whenever the sign is out. Access to the exhibit is free. Much of the exhibit’s collection has been digitized online at rmrmuseum.com/our-collection. To learn more, email info@rmrmuseum.com or call 514- 496-2003 ext. 2328.