Roy Victor Jones: a Vimy Cross fragment brought home for a Parkdale boy

On my rainy day walk at Park Lawn Cemetery in Toronto’s west end, I visited the family plot of Roy Victor Jones, a Canadian soldier from Toronto who died at Vimy Ridge during the First World War. He’s buried overseas at Canadian Cemetery No. 2, on the grounds of the Canadian National Vimy Memorial in France.

Though his body remains in France, a memorial marker near the family monument caught my attention — the surviving remnant of a wooden cross that once marked the spot where he fell on April 9, 1917.

I learned that someone had physically brought this fragment home from the battlefield and placed it before the family monument. Standing there in the rain, I felt a brief wave of emotion as I took in the worn patina and the fallen, scrambled numbers, along with the words engraved on the monument:

   “Mark a Stone, But Let Me Lie”

The Jones family when they installed the monument makes its purpose unmistakable. It doesn’t claim Roy’s body lies beneath it — it says the opposite. The inscription asks that a stone be raised at home, but that Roy himself remain where he fell, with the men he fought and died beside on Vimy Ridge.

Roy Victor Jones had been a student at Parkdale Collegiate Institute

before he enlisted — one of many Parkdale boys whose names ended up on the school’s war memorials rather than its graduation rolls. Roy, you’re still remembered and that matters.

Lieutenant Roy Victor Jones died on Easter Monday on April 9, 1917 on a brutally cold day in his 23rd year.

Post-War Metal Plating: In unique cases, families who repatriated personal battlefield crosses after the war went to great lengths to preserve them. For example, the family of Lieutenant Roy Victor Jones had his wooden Vimy grave cross completely copper-plated to protect it.