His name was James Peter Robertson, but everyone called the CPR locomotive engineer “Singing Pete” over his habit of crooning songs during the run between Medicine Hat and Lethbridge.
In 1916, with the Great War raging, like many local residents, Robertson signed up to fight, says Robert Bruce Shepard, curator of the Esplanade Museum, which is putting on a major exhibit, called Medicine Hat’s War, 1914-1918.
By November 1917, Robertson was at the Battle of Passchendaele, leading a small platoon of men who came under heavy machine gun fire. Robertson outflanked the machine gun, killed the crew and turned the weapon on the fleeing German infantry. Later, he went into no man’s land to rescue one of his men who’d been wounded; returning for a second soldier, Robertson was killed by a shell, Shepard says.
The Victoria Cross recipient is one of the local heroes commemorated on the Medicine Hat cenotaph, which sits at Riverside Veterans’ Memorial Park.
The war affected the community greatly, Shepard says.
Close to 1,800 soldiers from across Western Canada signed up in Medicine Hat, which was just shy of 10,000 at the time, he says. More than 250 were killed. Many who returned home were never the same, such as veteran Bill Bliss, who took up residence in trenches and dugouts on a Medicine Hat hillside, living rough and shepherding sheep until he died, never quite recovered from the battlefield.
As for the memorial, this is what historians know: before the Great War even ended, there was discussion in the local press to establish a lasting monument to honour the soldiers who’d died, says Shephard. When the war was over, veterans and community groups teamed up with city officials to develop a memorial. A subscription campaign raised the funds for the red granite cenotaph.
But close to 100 years on, mystery surrounds where the cenotaph was made and how its design came to be.
“We clearly know it was purchased, we know the inscriptions were made, but we’re still trying to find out where they obtained it,” says Shepard.
“It’s a bit of a mystery and we will solve it, but for right now it remains a bit of a question mark for us.”