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Jack Knox: The wide-ranging impact when a Legion branch closes

They stood and cheered when the Greater Victoria Police Pipe Band, fresh from a Remembrance Day ceremony, played its way into the Britannia Legion on Sunday.
Photo - Royal Canadian Legion
Royal Canadian Legion Britannia Branch 7 at 780 Summit Ave. in Victoria.

They stood and cheered when the Greater Victoria Police Pipe Band, fresh from a Remembrance Day ceremony, played its way into the Britannia Legion on Sunday.

It was a full house, most of the tables and chairs taken — but not sardine-can full, not like in the old days when the fire marshal would have had a jammer, had he been able to elbow his way inside.

“Years ago, on Remembrance Day, you couldn’t fall down in here,” recalled longtime member Dave Darcy, plunked at a table near the bar. “It was jammed.”

No more. Like so many of Canada’s Legions, the century-old branch at Nanaimo and Summit has seen membership decline — one of the reasons this year’s Nov. 11 gathering was its last. The building is for sale.

Nationwide, Royal Canadian Legion membership is half what it was 30 years ago, and more than half of those who remain are over age 65, the Canadian Press reported last week.

That will draw nothing but a shrug from many. Everything has its time. Is there still a point to the Legion?

Yes, its supporters reply. It’s not just an old guys’ social club, but an organization that does much good work in the community. That’s why they’re determined to keep the Britannia branch’s charter alive, even after the building sells.

The Legion began as the kind of fraternity to which you didn’t really want to earn membership, a refuge for First World War veterans seeking the fellowship of those who could relate to what they had been through. The organization boomed after the Second World War, in which more than a million Canadians served in uniform.

“The Legion before was mainly all servicemen,” said Don Cliffe, medals gleaming on his blue blazer, a tie neatly knotted at his neck. “Years ago, you saw lots of Second World War vets, even First World War guys. Their wives participated, too. They could talk a common lingo.”

Cliffe was 17 when he joined the Air Force, spent the war as a flight engineer on a four-engine Halifax bomber. “The oldest guy in my air crew was 22.” After the war he became a Mountie, retiring as a chief superintendent.

The thing is, people such as Cliffe are in the minority now. The Legion is an organization for, but not necessarily of, old soldiers. Its core mission remains to support veterans, serving military and members of the RCMP, but civilians with no military connection have been welcomed since 1998.

In Vancouver, some branches have become hipster hangouts. For years, many younger veterans haven’t thought it’s the place for them; some felt betrayed in 2005 when the Legion backed Ottawa in dumping lifetime benefits in favour of one-time payouts for disabled veterans.

The Britannia branch might still have the trappings of a military mess — framed medals on the wall, the Queen’s portrait above the bar — but veterans comprise only 25 per cent of the 400 members, and they’re not the ones who show up to eat lunch and shoot pool. Many of the old boys just pay their annual dues as a way to support their fellow veterans, and leave it at that.

Membership is $70 a year, about half of which goes to Legion headquarters. That leaves roughly $35 for the branch. Multiply that by 400 members and you get only $14,000, which doesn’t go very far. The property taxes alone (unlike other municipalities, Victoria doesn’t give the Legion a break) cost the branch well over $30,000. The rest of the budget depends on the bar, Wednesday and Friday meat draws, revenue from a parking lot next door, and the money from wedding receptions, memorials and the like.

Still, it’s manpower, not money (the branch is actually doing OK financially, albeit trending in the wrong direction) that led to the decision to sell the building and the adjoining parking-lot property. There simply aren’t enough qualified younger people willing to take over from the older volunteers who have been running things.

“We have reached a point where our dedicated souls and weary bodies can no longer keep pace with the needs of the branch and our community,” said Britannia president Keith Yow in announcing the decision to close the building by the end of August 2019.

The branch isn’t folding, though. To keep the charter, the executive is only required to meet six times a year, which it will do at the Trafalgar Pro Patria branch on Gorge Road or other venues.

Why keep it going? Because selling the properties will provide a nice chunk of capital, the interest from which can be funnelled to the causes the branch supports: Post-traumatic-stress disorder, the Wounded Warriors, cadets, bursaries and Colwood’s Cockrell House, where homeless veterans get help rejoining society.

That’s what gets lost. Yes, the branch might look a bit like Cheers most days, with the regulars walking in the door at the same time and sliding up to the same tables. (Sitting in the wrong chair can earn you the stink eye.) And yes, they find a comfortable camaraderie. A pint of locally brewed Blue Buck is $5.50. There’s no bar-scene nonsense, nobody leering over the server in the little black dress.

“We get a lot of widowed women coming in,” Yow says. “They can come into a bar like this and not get hassled.”

But there’s more to it than that. It’s the Legion that drives the Remembrance Day poppy campaign. It’s the Legion’s service officers who help veterans negotiate the red tape when applying for benefits (you know how many 1-800 numbers need calling just to get a pair of hearing aids?).

On Sunday, a photo of Winston Churchill glowered down at a group of women clustered around a table. One of them, Nelles Shackleton, said they like to volunteer at Legion events to help veterans. In Shackleton’s case, she does so in honour of the men she grew up admiring in Vancouver’s Chinese community, the ones who spent the Second World War in the jungles of Burma, and of Victoria’s Gordon Quan, a demolition-expert commando who created havoc behind Japanese lines in that country. Canada wouldn’t allow them to vote, but it let them fight its war.

“In their memory, that’s why I’m here,” Shackleton said.

What will happen to those women and the work they do when the branch closes? And what about the other community groups that use the building? Victoria has several darts leagues and eight-ball pool leagues, all of which raise money for charity, and all of which are having trouble finding places to play with the disappearance of working-stiff pubs. Cribbage and euchre leagues anchor at the Britannia branch, too. The RCMP mess is in the building.

“When this goes, it’s another venue that’s taken away,” Yow says.

Remember, he says, this isn’t just another bar. “It’s a service organization.”