William Kent, Canadian War Museum
The Canadian War Museum has painstakingly restored a 95-year-old curtain that once graced the stage of an Alberta town’s performance hall. After 55 years of storage, a historically significant and newly restored theatre curtain has returned to its home of Penhold, Alta., thanks to the efforts of a citizen from the prairie and the Canadian War Museum.
“When I first saw the curtain, I recognized it as a valuable piece of Penhold’s artistic and civic heritage,” says businessman Stewart Ford, who studied the curtain’s history and funded $60,000 for the curtain’s restoration.
The curtain is hand-painted with a scene of the bombed ruins of the Notre Dame de Brebières Basilica in Albert, France, and the legendary Golden Virgin statue. This was a familiar sight for soldiers on their way to the Somme, where many of the servicemen from Penhold died, went missing or were wounded in the First World War.
For about 40 years, the curtain was the visual centre point of Penhold’s Memorial Hall, a community centre built by the town’s Women Institute in 1919 to honour those who had fought in the First World War. In 1960, the curtain was finally removed and stored in the attic of the building. The curtain was rediscovered in 2003.
Ford, now 77 years old, is recognized as Penhold’s history buff. His family has been a part of the town for more than 100 years, running a machinery and building supply company that Ford recently sold. He remembers looking through the curtain’s peep-hole when performing in the local Christmas concerts as a child.
“I thought this is pretty important stuff and we should do something about it,” recalls Ford in a press release. “For me, it was a matter that if nothing was done to it, we would lose a piece of history. The curtain will someday be all that is left of the Memorial Hall, and it will be the continual memory to the veterans that came from this district.”
With a war-themed art design and no display room at the Memorial Hall, Ford thought the curtain would be a perfect addition to the Canadian War Museum.
“When Stewart Ford contacted us about donating the curtain to the National Collection, with his support, we welcomed the opportunity to restore this important part of Penhold’s community history and, by extension, our national heritage,” says Mark O’Neill, president of the Canadian War Museum and the Canadian Museum of History.
“The Penhold curtain is a rare artifact that embodies both the sacrifice of Canadians who served the First World War and the cultural life of Alberta towns in the years following the war.”
The back of the curtain is a representation of the entertainment history of Penhold’s community. It is decorated with a collection of names, drawings, jokes and other inscriptions left by local and travelling members of the theatrical and musical productions who performed in the Memorial Hall.
“There aren’t that many theatre curtains with personal messages easily found across Canada,” says Yasmine Mingay, director of public affairs at the Canadian War Museum. “The artifact is quite unique.”
Legris Conservation, the contractors who spent four months restoring the curtain, also noted that it was highly unusual.
“In Canada, those kind of curtains aren’t as common as in the United States. We’ve worked on a few, not a lot,” says David Legris, an Ottawa painting conservator.
The massive curtain, measuring 3.7 by 6.3 metres, was extensively damaged from the wear and tear of decades of use and poor storage conditions.
Legris cleaned and stabilized the fabric from the water damage, used sponges and scalpels to remove the dirt, and mended the tears and patched holes before retouching the paint to revive the curtain’s vibrant original colours.