Thick paint peels away from a metal door. Dark holes encircled by glass shards pass for windows. Overgrown vegetation peeks out from under a blanket of snow.
Time has not been kind to the Flin Flon armoury, but beneath the decay lurks the story of a forgotten northern Manitoba landmark.
And with the armoury set for demolition this winter, making way for a new Co-op store, many residents with connections to the one-time military headquarters are taking time to reflect.
“It’s sad to see it go,” says Morley Naylor, a former commanding officer of the 21st Field Engineer Squadron, the military engineer unit that once occupied the building.
The armoury may have opened in peacetime, but its roots are in wartime. Around 1940, early into the Second World War, a volunteer unit of military members took root in
Flin Flon.
That unit gave way to the Fort Garry Armoured Regiment, a squadron of armoured-tank operators that trained recruits at the old Flin Flon Community Hall. This was followed by a Royal Canadian Artillery unit from 1946 to 1949.
Finally in 1949, after the Second World War ended, the 21st Field Engineer Squadron was formed. The unit supplied military engineers – responsible for battlefield duties such as building bridges, clearing landmines and supplying clean drinking water – to the Canadian Armed Forces.
The late Maj. Ben Grimmelt, commanding officer at the time, pushed hard for Ottawa to build the unit its own armoury. Within the ranks of the day, there was broad agreement that such a facility was overdue.
“They had originally been parading in the Community Hall and the facilities just weren’t adequate for them,” says Frank Gira, who served as commanding officer of the unit in the 1970s and again in the ’80s. “It was small. There wasn’t anything for storage for the equipment and whatever they wanted, and to expand their [options] they had to move into a proper facility.”
The 21st Field Engineer Squadron got its wish when the armoury opened just off of Highway 10A in the fall of 1956.
Naylor, whose father was also in the unit, attended the opening ceremony as a child. He remembers it as quite the affair.
“Everything was so slick and clean and neat compared to the old Community Hall, and they had a big parade and the big shots were in,” he says.
Budgetary figures are hard to come by, but total construction costs for the armoury were somewhere below $300,000, or under $2.67 million in today’s dollars.
L-shaped with a brick-and-metal exterior, the 10,500-sq-ft fortress of a building would welcome thousands of recruits. It would also serve as a social gathering place for the engineers, known as sappers, and their families.
The sappers served two functions. First, as members of a reserve unit, they were on call should their country need them in a time of military conflict. Second, sappers could voluntarily sign up to serve in a campaign, which many did.
In addition to sappers, the armoury for decades housed three military-funded youth groups in the army, sea and navy league, and air cadets. As a result, the building holds a special place in the hearts of thousands of people who never even joined the military.
While the armoury looks almost identical today as it did on opening day – save for the wear, tear and vandalism – it underwent two key expansions.
As time and funding permitted, sappers excavated wheelbarrows full of dirt to establish a basement below the building. The basement was completed piece by piece over a period of at least two decades.
“It was affectionately known as Area Z,” says Naylor. “If you screwed up, you got a shovel and went down there [to dig].”
Another expansion came with the addition of a garage in the early 1980s. Years later, when the armoury became a high school, this garage would be used for an auto-mechanics course.
In 1982, the squadron received the City of Flin Flon’s highest honour to a military unit, the Freedom of the City, for its contributions to the community.
“People don’t realize how important that is and what it means,” says Naylor. “We marched down Main Street, bayonets fixed, to the old City Hall for a ceremony. That was a highlight of my career.”
By the early 1990s, amid Naylor’s second stint as commanding officer, the 21st Field Engineer Squadron appeared as healthy as ever with a strength of about 90 personnel.
“It go so big that we had to bring in portable classrooms and build them outside,” he recalls.
Unfortunately for its proponents, 21st Field Engineer Squadron was nearing its conclusion. The Canadian Armed Forces centralized its recruitment efforts, leaving local recruits waiting for up to a year to join.
Such delays, combined with a declining Flin Flon area population and the military’s desire to base units in larger centres, took a toll on local recruitment. In 1995, Ottawa announced the unit would close along with the armoury.
“It was heartbreak when they shut the place down,” says Gira.
In 1996, the armoury began a new life as an educational facility. Alternative high school Many Faces Education Centre moved in along with Keewatin Community College (now UCN) and the Campus Manitoba distance-university program.
Students remained in the building until 2007, when it closed for good and later became a storage facility for the City of Flin Flon.
In 2015, word came that North of 53 Consumers Co-op was considering building a new store at the armoury property. The final announcement came in 2016, setting the stage for the armoury’s demolition.
For Gira, the armoury carries a proud legacy. His favourite memories revolve around winter mornings when the sappers would return from rigorous training exercises in the frigid weather.
“[I would give] them the encouragement that there weren’t too many other people in Flin Flon that could do what they had done in the previous three or four days while they were out there under those conditions,” he says. “It was heartwarming that they would allow themselves to undergo this kind of training under those conditions, and be satisfied in themselves that they were capable of undergoing that kind of training.”
Naylor reflects not so much on the building, but on the difference the training it afforded made in the lives of the sappers.
“It still happens today where I run into some kid that was in the unit, and they’ll thank you for what you did for them because they’re either a band cop or they’re working in another good job,” he says. “There isn’t one that won’t say, ‘Thank you very much for getting us on the right track with discipline and leadership.’”
Gira and Naylor are also proud of the many community projects the sappers undertook, from bridges along ski trails to the development of recreational fields for youth. Such projects gave sappers valuable training while benefitting the region.
“That was really important, the community projects,” says Naylor.
While Naylor and Gira are saddened to see the armoury go, both men wholeheartedly support the Co-op’s decision to build a new store on the property.
For Naylor, the store is a marker of progress for Flin Flon.
“What better thing to replace it with?” he says.
