2021 Historical Studies Journal by The Canadian Catholic Historical Association

It was not immediately apparent that the best chance for a Whelan monument on Queen Square had passed. As late as 1912 the BIS was still adding to the monument fund in dribs and drabs, but after that the only growth came from bank interest on the money being held in trust. When the provincial government wheedled $20,000 from Ottawa in 1914 to help tourism boosters celebrate the Golden Jubilee of the Charlottetown Conference, the BIS delegated McCourt to approach the Confederation Committee about a grant towards their favourite Father of Confederation.

But the Great War intervened, the Jubilee was cancelled, and the only monument that came out of it was a bas relief bronze tablet by Hamilton McCarthy mounted on the wall of the Confederation Chamber in the Provincial Building. It depicted various Fathers of Confederation. Whelan was not among them. In 1925, the City of Charlottetown unveiled another statue on Queen Square, but it was a cenotaph commemorating Islanders lost in the Great War, heroes from a more recent past.

McCourt was old and ailing by September 1928, when a special meeting of the BIS voted to use the fund’s $1,400 balance to erect a monument to Whelan at his gravesite and provide for its ongoing upkeep in the abandoned cemetery. Once again, resolutions lacked resolution, and the following June, McCourt died, like George Howlan and J.C. Underhay, without seeing his dream realized. With McCourt gone, it was left to older members to lecture the younger ones about the significance of a man whose name had ceased to be a household word.

Tired of waiting for some sort of memorial to materialize, the Emerald Branch reclaimed its share of the Whelan Fund ($560, including interest) in 1929 in order to fund a stained glass window in the new St. James Roman Catholic Church in Summerfield. It may not have been a coincidence that the window’s subject was the Crucifixion. Finally, in 1934, the Charlottetown arranged a monument of sorts. A gray slab of imported freestone was laid flat across Whelan’s grave and the family plot marked off with miniature concrete pylons and a heavy link chain. The cost came to about $100, not including the $40 set aside annually to pay for the site’s upkeep in the long abandoned cemetery. The inscription read:

Erected by the BIS of Charlottetown
To the Memory of
Hon. Edward Whelan
One of the Fathers of Confederation
And a Past President
Of the Benevolent Irish Society
1824-1867

No mention was made of his other achievements.

The Society resisted the temptation to use the balance of the Fund for other purposes, such as helping the BIS acquire its own premises, but when it finally did purchase a building in 1944, members voted to call it the Edward Whelan Memorial Hall, the first of several subsequent structures to bear the name. At the 1948 annual meeting, when the Finance Committee recommended closing out the Whelan Fund, Brother P.B. McTague objected. The fund had been in existence for such a long time, he contended, that it “served as a continuous memorial to the Late Edward Whelan.” A memorial to futility, perhaps, but something.

The BIS was Whelan’s principal, but not only, memory keeper, as D.C. Harvey’s high-profile lecture demonstrated. At the time of his talk in 1926, Harvey was professor of history at the University of Manitoba, and had just published a groundbreaking account of the French regime in Prince Edward Island. Though much praised in the press, Harvey’s words forked no lightning (unless one counts the re-print edition he edited of Whelan’s 1865 compendium of Confederation-era speeches, The Union of the British Provinces, published in 1927).94 As an influential member of the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada (HSMB), Harvey lobbied hard in the 1930s to convince his colleagues that each Father of Confederation deserved a separate recognition.95 And so, in lieu of an imposing monument on Queen Square, Edward Whelan received a modest bronze plaque on the exterior of the Provincial Building in July 1939.

At the official unveiling, descendants of the seven Island Fathers unveiled the plaques to their respective ancestors. Had W.D. Taunton been alive still, he would no doubt have been delegated the task for Whelan. But Taunton had died in 1938, and so, the honour went to Emmett J. Mullally, an Island-born, Montreal-based physician and the author of a recent, reverent paper on Whelan. Mullally was representing the Irish Society of Canada, his choice a tacit gesture towards Whelan’s Irishness. The Centennial era further focused attention on Whelan’s status as a Father of Confederation. It was a generic recognition rather than any particular acknowledgment of his genius or contributions to Island life. In fact, when the federal government undertook in 1967 to care for the graves of Canada’s Fathers the initial press release listed Whelan as “E. Winslow.”

Source: https://cchahistory.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Hist-Studies-vol-87-anglais.pdf#page=47