A museum on Vancouver Island to honour ship crew members who lost their lives during the Second World War is marking its final operating day on Nov. 11.
The HMCS Alberni Museum and Memorial in Courtenay pays tribute to the 59 men who died when their warship, the Corvette HMCS Alberni, was sunk off the coast of England during the Second World War.
But now, the museum says it has to close after years of declining visits and revenue.
“Until about two years ago, we had no idea that we would be in this situation,” Lewis Bartholomew, founder and executive director of the museum, told Global News.
“We’ve been in similar situations in the past when, for instance, a landlord would want our space and then we’d have to scramble for a new space — but we always knew that we would open if we moved to somewhere else.”
Bartholomew said the museum has faced a lot of challenges over the years, but has managed to survive them all.
“We’ve had three flash floods in this building that have closed us down for short terms,” he said.
“We’ve had two arson attacks against us here. We survived through the COVID pandemic. We’ve also survived moving probably 18 times since 2012 for various reasons.
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“But this one here sort of came out of the blue for us. We weren’t expecting the new changes to have affected us so much.”
The museum is located inside a small mall on Cliffe Avenue, next to the Connect Temporary Shelter and Service Hub.
The building that was leased from the city was intended as a temporary space for the area’s homeless population, but that was six years ago.
The museum operators say they know there is a need for housing, but the expectation when Connect moved in was that it would be there for six to 12 months before a new location would be found.
Bartholomew said the museum dropped from 6,000 to 7,000 visitors per year to only 759 visitors last year and the majority of their income comes from donations.
“Two years ago, the board saw the writing on the wall, that the three of us that work here or volunteer here could not keep paying the bills out of our own pocket,” he said.
“And so plans were made originally to completely liquidate, which really hurt me personally because this is my child, I guess you would call it. And then we realized that we could not possibly close completely.
“First of all, we’re an official Canadian Veterans Memorial for the crew who served on HMCS Alberni. The other thing is that over the years, people have families that have entrusted us with their own family’s personal history, with their personal remembrances that they have that they’ve wanted to make public.”
Bartholomew said the museum has so many artifacts that mean so much to many families that they didn’t want to pass them on to another museum or a private collector.
So they are giving themselves at least two years to restructure and reevaluate their programs, including for veterans and children, and to convert exhibits into portable ones to tour museums and other festivals on Vancouver Island.
“We just won’t have a physical presence for a while,” Bartholomew said.
He added the community has always stepped up to help in times of need, but they would require more funding from a foundation or an individual benefactor to secure a permanent location.
Bartholomew said the museum will be open until sunset on Remembrance Day.
“We’ll start our ceremony of bells of peace and that will start right about 5:30 in our hallway, of which we will ring the bell 100 times, naming off a random list of names, veterans, and we’ll also allow members of the public who are attending this to ring the bell for themselves for their own particular loved ones,” he added.
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