The Canadian War Museum now boasts all three Victoria Crosses won by Winnipeg soldiers during World War 1 … who all lived on the same block of Pine Street (now Valour Road):
When Acting Cpl. Lionel B. (“Leo”) Clarke was faced with the choice to surrender to the enemy, or to fight his way out of the trenches against all odds, he chose the latter. And, for that act of valour on Sept. 9, 1916, in which he killed or captured 18 German soldiers and two officers, Clarke — then 24 years old — received the highest honour awarded to Canadian soldiers: The Victoria Cross.
Less than two months later he was dead, dying in the arms of his brother Charles at the Battle of the Somme.
On Monday, Clarke, a native of Waterdown, Ont., who volunteered to go to war in 1915 as a bomber, was again honoured in a ceremony at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
It marks an extraordinary occurrence in Canadian military history: in different years and different battles during the First World War, three men from the same block of Winnipeg’s west-end Pine Street earned the Commonwealth’s highest military honour. And with the acquisition of Clarke’s medal, the War Museum now owns all three Victoria Crosses awarded to the men of Pine Street, which in 1925 was renamed Valour Road.
Each of the three men — and the 96 other Canadians who bear the honour — won it for “the most conspicuous bravery, a daring or pre-eminent act of valour or self-sacrifice or extreme devotion to duty, in the presence of the enemy.”
Update: And, if I watched a bit more TV, I’d have known what David Stamper just pointed out to me on Facebook … that they were featured in a Heritage Moment TV spot:
