Among the letters exchanged between Pte. R.Murray Dennis and Margaret Munro was this last one, a final love letter to Dennis that was returned to Munro upon his death on the battlefield in France in 1918.
November 5, 2014 - 8:45am
“Just got back from a four mile route march. The houses are very much different from Ontario and the roads flanked with hedges. There are no able bodied civilians around here and in fact no one but old people. The country is surely pretty. Still there is no country like ‘my ain country’ and no girl like my own.”
--Letter from Private W. Murray Dennis, stationed in England before heading to WWI’s front lines, to his fiancée, Margaret Munro in Stratford, ON, May 5, 1917
STRATFORD, ON: Yellowed with age and hidden in the bottom of a drawer for more than 50 years, a bundle of 43 letters tied up with a ribbon depicts a World War I love story that began in Stratford, ON. The story of Private W. Murray Dennis and his young love Margaret Murray will be memorialized in a choral commission premiering with the Stratford Symphony Orchestra and performed by the Canadian Men’s Chorus on Saturday, Nov. 15.
Creating a new choral work to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of WWI in 2014 was a goal for Toronto composer Chris Meyer, who has been working with the Stratford Symphony for four years.
Meyer set out on his project by enlisting the help of his wife, an historian at the University of Toronto. In her online search for a WWI story with a Stratford connection, she discovered the story of Private Dennis in the Canadian Letters and Images Project (CLIP, CanadianLetters.ca), a rich online archive of the Canadian war experience held and maintained by students and faculty at Vancouver Island University (VIU) in Nanaimo, BC. Begun in 2000 by History professor Dr. Stephen Davies, the project includes more than 18,000 digitized letters, thousands of photos, and an array of other related correspondence and printed material from wars in Canadian history.
The story of W. Murray Dennis to be memorialized in Meyer’s oratorio is titled Our Murray, with a score taken entirely from the letters exchanged by Murray and his fiancée, Margaret Munro, as well as letters of condolence from Munro’s family after his death during the Battle of Amiens in August 1918.
“The Canadian Letters and Images Project is a treasure trove of wartime stories,” Meyer said. “I got in touch with Dr. Davies, and he was very happy with how these letters were to be used in this project.”
Dr. Davies, in fact, remembered the story amongst hundreds that have been mailed to the CLIP Project, where they are digitized and originals always returned to their owners.
“The letters came to us in 2001 from Margaret’s son. She married about 1930 and when she died the family was cleaning out her place, and in her dresser, tied up with ribbon, were the letters from Murray,” Dr. Davies said.
“Her family knew nothing about him – she had never spoken about him – but they were the letters of very likely her first love. Her family was so moved by that, that they have preserved them, even though they have no connection to him,” added Dr. Davies, noting that the CLIP project tried to track down family on Murray’s side, to no avail.
Meyer is looking forward to the premiere of Our Murray, the first major choral work in his music career.
“I really love writing vocal music, and some of my favourites are the great orchestral choral masterworks,” he said.
Our Murray, an oratorio for baritone solo and male chorus, will premiere at the Stratford Symphony Orchestra’s Nov. 15 World War One Remembrance performance at Knox Presbyterian Church in Stratford.
VIU’s Canadian Letters and Images Project continues to build a free, open resource through its acceptance of new materials for its collections, which are returned to their owners once digitized and archived. To learn more, see www.CanadianLetters.ca.
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FOR MORE INFORMATION
To learn more about composer Chris Meyer and Our Murray, see: http://meyercreations.com/Works/Murray.html
To learn more about W. Murray Dennis through letters exchanged in WWI, see the Canadian Letters and Images Project page: canadianletters.ca/collections/all/collection/20525
Media Contact
Shari Bishop Bowes, Communications Officer, Vancouver Island University
P:250.740.6443 C: 250.618.1535 E: Communications@viu.ca T: @viunews
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