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101 bells for Remembrance Day in Whonnock

Maple Ridge News - 11/18/2019

The bells pealed 101 times at Holy Spirit Anglican Church in Whonnock in honour of Remembrance Day.

On November 11, everyone in the congregation took a turn ringing the steeple bell including honoured members representing various aspects of the war service.

Last year the bells were rung 100 times to mark the centenary of the end of the Second World War. This year they were rung 101 times as a plea for peace.

Two men aged 20 and 23 represented those that served because the were exactly the age of those who left Whonnock to enlist in the First World War.

A 92-year-old Second World War veteran was present who drove wounded soldiers between docked troop ships and hospitals in Halifax as a member of the Canadian Women's Army Corps.

A member of the parish represented those that had to resist because their mother and grandmother had been couriers in the Polish Resistance in Warsaw and were eventually send to prison camp.

And another member of the congregation represented the innocent children caught in the war because his childhood memories that included planes in the air and tanks on the streets of Germany before he made it to West Germany ahead of the erection of the Berlin Wall.

Rev. Miranda Sutherland, the new vicar at the church lead a plea for peace and the Imam from the Jamia Riyadhul Jannah British Columbia, which translates into Garden of Heaven Mosque, located beside Holy Spirit in the former Whonnock United Church, also participated as a gesture of peace.

Following the bell ringing was a minute of silence during which violin music was played.