A new name for Kitchener?
We’re removing statues and renaming streets. What about this city?
In Waterloo, public school trustees are already looking for another name for Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary School.
In Kitchener earlier this month, red paint was thrown on the statue of Queen Victoria in the park that bears her name.
In Toronto just a week ago, city council voted to rename one of its most prominent streets. Dundas Street will be named something else, after a 14,000-signature petition said that 18th-century Scottish minister Henry Dundas delayed the end of the British slave trade.
Will the City of Kitchener be next for a name change?
Some people want that to happen, reasoning that British Secretary of War, Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener, after whom the city was named in 1916, was a colonizer and an imperialist.
A protester at last year’s Black Lives Matter march held a hand-lettered sign. “Fact: Kitchener is named after Lord Kitchener. Also fact: I am protesting white supremacy in a city named after a white supremacist.”
That really says it all.
And given the speed with which we’re changing our minds about whom to honour by naming buildings, streets or cities after them, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Kitchener council seriously discussing this within the next year.
The community has gone through several names as it evolved through the past 200 years. Ebytown, Berlin — and then, since 1916, Kitchener.
The story of that wrenching decision, made in the difficult years of the First
World War, is one of the most interesting pieces of local history around.
At the time, the strong Mennonite pacifist sentiment, combined with many people of German descent who settled here, meant there were few men from Berlin and Waterloo willing to sign up to fight against Germany.
By the end of the war, the three towns that now make up Cambridge had put 1,548 residents or native sons into uniform and 332 of them died, an analysis of library and casualty records reveals. Enlistments represented almost 10 per cent of its pre-war population, my colleague Jeff Outhit has reported.
Meanwhile, Kitchener and Waterloo had put 595 residents or native sons into uniform and 100 of them died. Enlistments represented three per cent of the pre-war population.
Tensions rose as the war ground on. The German Concordia Club was broken into and vandalized, its contents burned on King Street. A bust of Kaiser Wilhelm I, which had stood in Victoria Park, was tossed into the lake. Threats were made that locally manufactured goods would be boycotted because they were imprinted with “Made in Berlin.”
The renaming proposal said it was “absolutely impossible for any loyal citizen to consider it complimentary to be longer called after the Capital of Prussia.”
When a German mine sank a ship that Kitchener was on as he travelled to Russia, the idea of naming Berlin after him was born.
Kitchener, of course, was already a household name, since the war’s recruiting posters showed his face with a finger pointing at the viewer and the words, “Britons: Join Your Country’s Army.”
He was to the First World War what Winston Churchill was to the second. His death was mourned intensely.
“Generally, he was a massive war hero to the public,” said local historian rych mills.
“Ninety-nine per cent of the people revered him.”
The name Kitchener was selected in a referendum. But only 892 people voted, and only 346 people voted for Kitchener. University of Waterloo historian Geoffrey Hayes noted in his book “Waterloo County: An Illustrated History” that 11 fewer votes would have made Brock the winning name instead.
Commenting on the low voter turnout, a local newspaper noted: “The outstanding feature was the absolute indifference displayed by ratepayers.”
Historians agree that Kitchener’s name was chosen only because the community needed to show complete loyalty to the British cause
A small minority were not happy with the new name.
For pacifist Mennonites, it presented a problem. First Mennonite Church, on King Street near Stirling Avenue, had been called Berlin Mennonite Church until 1916. In order to avoid having the church named after a warmonger, it was decided to change the church’s name to “First, “said Laureen Harder-Gissing, historian and president of the Mennonite Historical Society of Canada.
Now, of course, Kitchener’s work defeating the Germans in the First World War is no longer the controversial issue.
It’s more about whether he was a ruthless enabler of the colonization urge that saturated 19th- and early 20th-century Europe.
That he most certainly was. He strategized to take British control of parts of East Africa. He was commander-in-chief to India. In the South African war, he administered (but did not invent, as has often been alleged) concentration camps, to contain civilians that were assisting the enemy. The camps were rife with overcrowding, malnutrition and disease, and tens of thousands of people, Black and white, died.
Small wonder that last year, when Kitchener city council was presented with a petition to change the name of the city, it responded with an anemic statement that the legacy of the man “is not one to be celebrated.”
“While we in no way condone, diminish or forget his actions, we know that more than a century after our citizens chose this name for their community, Kitchener has become so much more than its historic connection to a British field marshal.”
And that’s really the heart of the problem right there.
If we were choosing a name for our city today, we would not be honouring a British secretary of war from 105 years ago. But the story of how that name change happened, if we choose to remember and retell it, tells us a lot about who we were then.
How we handle symbols — like the name of a city or school, or the statue of a queen or prime minister from long ago — is taking up a lot of collective space and energy in 2021.
These symbols don’t matter as much as substantial changes to society, like justice for Indigenous people, fairness for Black people and people of colour, and global equity.
But they are connected to those other issues.
Once a name is changed, or a statue removed, it’s not easy to put everything else back where it was.