News Detail
Remembrance Day 2025
Remembrance Day is a momentous date across Canada where we honour all those who have fought and died in service of our country. It has special significance at Shawnigan, where we remember members of the School community who made the supreme sacrifice. Here, Head of School Richard D A (Larry) Lamont offers his own reflections on Remembrance Day 2025
What is Remembrance Day, and what is its significance here in Canada – and at Shawnigan?
For those unfamiliar with Remembrance Day – which officially takes place on November 11 each year – it is a memorial day, observed in some countries since the end of the First World War in 1918, to mark the end of hostilities and to remember those who died in the line of duty.
This year will mark 107 years since Armistice and the end of the First World War.
Our founder, C.W. Lonsdale, established Shawnigan in 1916 – a phoenix from the ashes of this turbulent period of history.
Part of our aim for Remembrance Day this November (on the 5th rather than the 11th, as we have our November Break the following week) is to connect the Shawnigan community of 2025 back to the First World War.
During Spring Break 2025, a group of our students travelled to Brussels for a Harvard Model United Nations conference and took the time to explore the battlefields of Belgium. They came back to campus having laid a wreath at the Menin Gate and told the story in Chapel of Private Horace Leslie Ravenhill.
Private Ravenhill, 7th Battalion, the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force, was killed in action at Ypres in Belgium on April 24, 1915, aged 25. His father ran a farmstead at the north end of Shawnigan Lake and, heartbroken to lose his son, he sold it to C.W. Lonsdale in 1916. It became Shawnigan Lake School.
Private Ravenhill, a son of this land, is commemorated on the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing in Ypres. His story lives on at Shawnigan.
We invited John Pearkes ’49 (Lake’s) – the son of Major-General George Pearkes, a fellow soldier in the Canadian Overseas Expeditionary Force and Victoria Cross winner at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 – to unveil a plaque to Private Ravenhill at our Remembrance Service in Chapel.
This year, 2025, also marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War.
Shawnigan lost 45 alumni and staff in the Second World War.
In Canada, November 11 focuses on remembrance for the people who have served, and continue to serve, this country during times of war, conflict, and peace – and those who have lost their lives in the service of peace, at home and abroad.
There is a commemorative plaque in the Chapel that marks and honours them, and during the week prior to Remembrance Day each year, the School places 45 white crosses in the Quad to mark their sacrifice.
On Wednesday, November 5, we held our annual ceremony in Chapel and in the Quad, and two Prefects read the Roll of Honour.
These members of the Shawnigan community served in the Canadian, British, American, and Hong Kong armed forces, and in many theatres of the Second World War – they were lost in the Atlantic, at Dunkirk and Normandy, in the Middle East, in North Africa, and over mainland Europe.
All were men.
For me, Remembrance Day is both a time to honour those men and women (including civilians) who have fallen in conflicts and those who survived – on whichever side – and also to remind ourselves that we must strive constantly to find paths of peace.
In a darkening world in 2025 where so many lives have been lost and so many are suffering, displaced, and frightened, we can only hope that there can be an end to the senseless violence and loss of innocent lives.
On Tuesday, November 11, Kathini, Poppy and I are planning to attend the Veterans’ Day ceremony at Brown University with Ally Tuttle (Strathcona ’23) in Providence, Rhode Island. We will take a moment to think of the US alumni from Shawnigan who served and died in the Second World War.
Richard D A (Larry) Lamont has been Head of School at Shawnigan since 2018. He was previously Rektor (Head) of UWC Red Cross Nordic (Norway) from 2012 to 2018, and Head of the English Department and Head of Upper School at Marlborough College (England), spending a term in 2009 at UWC Waterford Kamhbala (Eswatini).
We acknowledge with respect the Coast Salish Peoples on whose traditional lands and waterways we live, learn and play. We are grateful for the opportunity to share in this beautiful region, and we aspire to healthy and respectful relationships with those who have lived on and cared for these lands for millennia.
Shawnigan Lake School is an independent co-educational boarding school for ages 13 –18 on Canada’s beautiful Pacific Coast. Our diverse, interdisciplinary and innovative programming helps shape the next generation of global leaders.
