The Sappers’ role in the Royal City’s history will be emblazoned in neon for all to see – and it will be hard to miss.
The Brewery District has erected a neon neon public art sign along the wooden hoarding wall on the Brunette Avenue side of the site that faces the Fraser River. Inspired by one of the oldest graffiti tags – “Emily/Jack/Peter was here” – and the popular culture expression “Kilroy was here” from the Second World War, the 133-foot-long neon sign reads “The Sappers Were Here.”
“Holy mackerel,” said retired Sapper Jim Harris. “You’ll be able to see that from the space station.”
Harris, a retired sergeant major who spent 34 years as a Sapper, is over the moon about the public art that was unveiled on June 6.
“It’s a marvellous idea,” he said. “The history is not that well known. The sign is really going to improve that.”
Harris said the British Royal Engineers arrived in Sapperton in 1858, and left an enormous legacy that includes constructing roads in austere conditions, building bridges and transporting gold, not only in New Westminster and the Lower Mainland, but in the Cariboo as well.
“The Royal Engineers that came over got New Westminster started. They were almost successful in making it the capital of B.C.,” he said. “Their work was just phenomenal. They were only here for about four-and-a-half years, but they did so much, so many amazing feats. They did a lot of infrastructure.”
Harris said two groups of Royal Engineers came to B.C., one designed to map out the 49th parallel and another that laid out roads for New Westminster and created infrastructure in the area. He said Beth Hill’s book The Sappers in B.C. is a good read about the Sappers.
Harris, president of the president of the Canadian Forces Base Chilliwack Historical Society, became a Sapper in 1961 as a 16-year-old orphan.
“I was just 16 years old, just a baby,” he told the Record. “When I first started out I went through two years of training as an apprentice. That gave me my Grade 12. I started in the field engineer trade, then I spent the next 32 years travelling the globe – 34 different countries.”
Harris remained with the Sappers for 34 years, but it wasn’t until he retired and went on to work for the Bank of Montreal in the Sapperton area that he realized the rich legacy left in the area by his predecessors. He said the sign will “tug at his heart strings” because he understands the many good things the Sappers did in the area, and the hard work and hardship that went into the work they did.
“We’re here because they’re here,” he said. “They put their blood, sweat and tears into this land and we’re reaping the benefits of it.”
Harris is excited about the sign and the conversation it will provoke as people ask, “What is a Sapper?”
“I had no idea what a Sapper was until we started researching,” said Rob Shantz, owner of Neon Works. “When we figured it out, we thought it was pretty cool. It will certainly pose a lot of questions from people passing by about what it means and why the sign is there.”
The sign - the largest created during Neon Works’ 25-year history - refers to the Sappers, a division of the Royal Engineers, a British military division that played a significant role in the early history of the area and went on to become an integral part of the Canadian military.
Beau Jarvis, Wesgroup’s senior vice-president of development, said the company wanted to pay homage to the relatively unknown history of the area, while also creating a legacy public art piece to draw attention the area while the company builds the residential component of Brewery District.
“Today, most people think of Sapperton as a SkyTrain station,” he said in a press release. “But the Sappers played a huge role in the area and we wanted to create a piece of public art that would get people thinking about what used to be here, as the area evolves into a dynamic new community.”
Jarvis hopes the neon sign will spark a discussion about the history of the area around the Brewery District.
“That’s the role of good public art,” he said. “To start a conversation and get people learning new things about where they live and who came before them.”
For now, the sign will be located on the temporary wall around the Brewery District’s construction site.
“I would say at this point it’s called a temporary piece of historic/public art. We’d like to incorporate it into the development over the long-term,” Jarvis told the Record. “We have a few ideas as to where that might go, but we just thought this was a neat idea and wanted to implement it – to explain the history of Sapperton, why Sapperton is Sapperton, and who made it Sapperton and why. This is the world’s old graffiti tag.”
