1936 Canada Vimy Pilgrimage Passport | Only 8 Survived
The Rarest Canadian Passport I Own: A 1936 Vimy Pilgrimage Story
A Passport I’d Never Seen Before, Tied to a National Tragedy
I stumbled across this unusual Canadian passport during research, and it was the first time I’d ever encountered one like it. What makes it remarkable isn’t just its rarity as a collectible: it’s tied directly to one of the defining moments in Canadian national memory. The Canadian National Vimy Memorial stands for every Canadian who served in battle during the First World War. Sixty thousand Canadians were killed in that conflict, and more than 11,000 of those who died in France have no known grave. The memorial itself bears the inscribed names of 11,168 missing Canadians, killed in action in France, whose remains were never found or identified.
Why 6,000 Free Passports Were Issued for a Single Pilgrimage
The Government of Canada issued this special passport specifically to send thousands of citizens to France for the 1936 unveiling of the Vimy Memorial, free of charge. Around 6,000 Special Vimy Passports were distributed to Canadians who wanted to make the pilgrimage to France for the dedication ceremony and to visit other sites of Canadian sacrifice on the Western Front.
More than 6,000 pilgrims set sail on five ocean-going steamships out of Montreal on July 16, 1936: the S.S. Montrose, S.S. Montcalm, S.S. Antonia, S.S. Ascania, and S.S. Duchess of Atholl. The S.S. Montrose alone carried 300 wreaths destined for Canadian memorial sites along the 1914 to 1918 Western Front. Another 1,000 or so Canadians traveled in from England to join them.
The Dedication Ceremony That Drew 100,000 People
The unveiling took place on July 26, 1936, in front of a crowd of roughly 100,000, a gathering that says as much about the scale of postwar grief as it does about the memorial itself. The attendees were overwhelmingly Canadian, British, and French ex-servicemen, alongside about 8,000 Canadian veterans who had made the journey from home. Family members of surviving veterans stood beside widows, mothers, dignitaries, and royalty. Fifty children came from the five French communes that had donated the land to Canada as a gift, joined by another 200 from Arras.
King Edward VIII unveiled the memorial in his capacity as King of Canada. Before his coronation, as Prince of Wales, he had served on the Staff of the Canadian Corps in France during the war, which gave the moment a personal weight beyond the ceremonial one. French President Albert Lebrun took part in the official unveiling alongside him. During the ceremony, King Edward pulled the cord releasing the Union Flag that had covered the statue of “Mother Canada” on the memorial’s northern wall.
In 1996, sixty years after that ceremony, the Vimy Memorial and its surrounding battlefield site were designated a National Historic Site of Canada, one of only two such sites located outside Canada’s borders (the other being the Beaumont-Hamel Newfoundland Memorial on the Somme battlefield, out of more than 950 National Historic Sites in total). Veterans Affairs Canada maintains the site today.
The Passport in My Collection: Issued to a Police Constable
This particular passport carries the number 673 of roughly 6,000 issued, making it a very early example, and the document survives in excellent condition. It was issued in Ottawa on May 2, 1936, to Police Constable Charley Bumstead Esq., and it expired on August 1, 1937. Page nine holds its only stamp: a Quebec Immigration mark dated September 25, 1936.
How Many of These Passports Have Survived Nearly Ninety Years?
Only eight examples of this passport are known to exist today, based on information collectors have shared with me over time. Five are held by Canadian collectors, two reside in Canadian archives and museums, and one is in my own collection. Against the roughly 6,000 originally issued, that means perhaps one percent has survived nearly ninety years of history: a survival rate that says a lot about how disposable a “just a travel document” felt to its owner once the pilgrimage was over.
For more background on the memorial itself, The Long, Long Trail’s entry on the Canadian National Vimy Memorial is a useful starting point.
Tom Topol | Passport Historian & Author
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