Remembrance Day Flags
A new tradition begins.
In 2004 a number of small Canadian flags began to appear on the graves in the cemetery's four Fields of Honour. It was a private intiative started by local resident Kelly Hake which was picked up by the Cemetery which helped purchase additional flags.
A new tradition was born and now each year Mountain View staff set out over 1000 Canadian flags in time for Remembrance Day.
Read more about Kelly and the flags.
Vancouver's Mountain View Cemetery is the final resting place of more than 12,000 veterans. See our military burials page for more information.
If you have a relative who is a veteran not buried in one of the Fields of Honour, please let us know where they are interred so we may mark their grave with a flag in the future. Contact us at mountainview.cemetery@vancouver.ca
Flags in the Cemetery: a personal story
Ever since I can remember my family would attend the Remembrance Day services at South Memorial Park. Then after the service we would go to MountainView Cemetery and lay our poppies on the graves of my two grandfathers. (Fred Hake and Stephen Joseph Dalton) Both of them served in WW1 and are buried in the Horne 2 section of the Veterans area.
I grew up not knowing either of my grandfathers. Fred Hake died in 1937, when my dad was just 15 years old, from complications of being gassed in the war. Stephen Joseph Dalton died in 1959, before I was born, from cancer. They had both come to Canada from England, for a better life. So when the war broke out they both decided to help their new adopted country and joined the Canadian Expenitionary Force. Fred in the 7th then later 1st Battilion and Stephen in the 38th Battilion. My father was very proud of his dad and my mother was very close to her father too. Although they did not like talk about the war throughout the year, Remembrance Day was the one day they would.
Later when I was older, I came to realize what Remembrance Day was all about and why it meant so much to my parents. My father (Joffre Hake) served in the Navy in WW2 and lost a great many of his childhood friends. Remembrance Day was a day to remember them and his family.
Every year my father was disppointed that when we went to the cemetery there weren't more people coming to pay their respects for all the soldiers that had given their lives during the wars and later. Our flowers would stand in the section alone on the two gravesites. Then it seemed to make it worse when the headstones in Horne 2 section were laid flush with the ground around 1979 to make it easy to up keep the cemetery. My father would comment now it looks like we have planted a few flowers and any one looking this way wouldn't even think there were good men and women buried here because from a distance you couldn't see the headstones any more.
In 1977, my grandmother (Elizabeth Helen Hake) passed away and was laid to rest with her husband, Fred. Later my mother (Winnifred Beatrice Hake) would join them in 2001 and my father (Joffre John Brayley Hake) in the late 2002. As my sisters and I continued the annual tradition on Remembrance Day and other family days, I would remember what my father said all those years about no one else coming to the cemetery.
So on November 11th 2004, my sisters, my cousins and I, got up early and went to the cemetery. They didn't know what I had planned till the day before. I had ordered 1000 Canadian Flags which I thought would give meaning to Remembrance Day to those who stroll the cemetery and may not know that these were once active men and women. I did it not for recognition but to make everyone stop and think when they saw the flags that it just wasn't another holiday. If I had accomplished this I know my father would be proud at what I had done. I only contacted Glen Hodges [the cemetery manager] a few days after to say that if they needed help in the removal I would come to do it. And well Glen Hodges decided to continue the flags every year since then.
So on November 11th, my sisters and I will be either at the South Memorial service or at the Comox Army Base. We will pass on to the next generation of our family why this day is not just another holiday.
Kelly Hake
