page_title: Canadian National Vimy Memorial
section_title: Memorial construction
hierarchical_section_title: Canadian National Vimy Memorial / History / Memorial construction
caption_attribution_description: English: The half finished statue of the Female Mourner beside a scaled plaster model that had been created by Allward in his studio.
context_page_description: The Canadian National Vimy Memorial is a war memorial site in France dedicated to the memory of Canadian Expeditionary Force members killed during the First World War. It also serves as the place of commemoration for Canadian soldiers of the First World War killed or presumed dead in France who have no known grave. The monument is the centrepiece of a 100-hectare preserved battlefield park that encompasses a portion of the ground over which the Canadian Corps made their assault during the initial Battle of Vimy Ridge offensive of the Battle of Arras.
  The Battle of Vimy Ridge was the first time all four divisions of the Canadian Expeditionary Force participated in a battle as a cohesive formation, and it became a Canadian national symbol of achievement and sacrifice. France ceded to Canada perpetual use of a portion of land on Vimy Ridge on the understanding that Canada use the land to establish a battlefield park and memorial. Wartime tunnels, trenches, craters, and unexploded munitions still honeycomb the grounds of the site, which remains largely closed off for reasons of public safety.
context_section_description: Following the competition, Allward spent the remainder of 1921 and the spring of 1922 preparing for his move to Europe. After selling his home and studio, Allward finally departed for Belgium on 6 June 1922 and spent several months seeking a suitable studio in Belgium and then Paris, though he eventually set up a studio in London.
  Allward had initially hoped to use white marble for the memorial's facing stone, but Percy Nobbs suggested this would be a mistake because marble was unlikely to weather well in northern France and the memorial would have a "ghost like" appearance. Allward undertook a tour of almost two years to find stone of the right colour, texture, and luminosity. He found it in the ruins of Diocletian's Palace at Split, Croatia; he observed that the palace had not weathered over the years, which Allward took as evidence of the stone's durability. His choice—Seget limestone—came from an ancient Roman quarry located near Seget, Croatia. The difficulties with the quarrying process, coupled with complicated transportation logistics, delayed delivery of the limestone and thus construction of the memorial. The first shipment did not arrive at the site until 1927, and the larger blocks, intended for the human figures, did not begin to arrive until 1931.
  On Allward's urging the Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission hired Oscar Faber, a Danish structural engineer, in 1924 to prepare foundation plans and provide general supervision of the foundation work. Faber had recently designed the substructure for the Menin Gate at Ypres, and he selected a design that employed cast-in-place reinforced concrete to which the facing stone would be bonded. Major Unwin Simson served as the principal Canadian engineer during the construction of the memorial and oversaw much of the daily operations at the site. Allward moved to Paris in 1925 to supervise construction and the carving of the sculptures. Construction commenced in 1925 and took eleven years to complete. The Imperial War Graves Commission concurrently employed French and British veterans to carry out the necessary roadwork and site landscaping.
  While awaiting the first delivery of stone, Simson noticed that the battlefield landscape features were beginning to deteriorate. Seeing an opportunity to not only preserve a portion of the battlefield but also keep his staff occupied, Simson decided to preserve a short section of trench line and make the Grange Subway more accessible. Labourers rebuilt and preserved sections of sandbagged trench wall, on both the Canadian and German sides of the Grange crater group, in concrete. The workforce also built a new concrete entrance for the Grange Subway and, after excavating a portion of the tunnel system, installed electric lighting.
  Allward chose a relatively new construction method for the monument: limestone bonded to a cast concrete frame. A foundation bed of 11,000 tonnes of concrete, reinforced with hundreds of tonnes of steel, served as the support bed for the memorial. The memorial base and twin pylons contained almost 6,000 tonnes of Seget limestone. Sculptors carved the 20 approximately double life-sized human figures on site from large blocks of stone. The carvers used half-size plaster models produced by Allward in his studio, now on display at the Canadian War Museum, and an instrument called a pantograph to reproduce the figures at the proper scale. The carvers conducted their work year-round inside temporary studios built around each figure. The inclusion of the names of those killed in France with no known grave was not part of the original design, and Allward was unhappy when the government asked him to include them. Allward argued that the inclusion of names was not part of the original commissioning. Through a letter to Canadian Battlefields Memorials Commission in October 1927, Allward indicated his intention to relegate the names of the missing to pavement stones around the monument. The collective dismay and uproar of the commission forced Allward to relent and incorporate the names of the missing on the mem
caption: Statue carving in progress
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