A bronze tablet on the right side of the main entrance to the Old Vic building on the U of T campus is dedicated to the memory of 75 Victoria College students and graduates who gave their lives in the Great War, 1914-1918. An angel mourns on either side of the college crest, under the assurance that “they were valiant in life, triumphant in death.” The tablet, designed by sculptor Alfred Howell, was presented by the Alumni and Alumnae Associations and dedicated on 12 October 1923.
Lily Denton Keys is the only woman listed on the tablet. Kappa Kappa Gama Lily Denton graduated from Victoria College in 1911 and then studied in Munich. Her fiancé, Norman Keys, enlisted when war was declared. They married when he returned to Canada in February 1918 and moved to Ottawa. Lily began nursing training at the Sandford Fleming Military Hospital. She died while on duty in September 1918 (some accounts say of pneumonia, others of influenza). According to the Acta Victoriana War Supplement (published in Dec 1919 by the united literary societies of the men and women of Victoria College as a memorial to her sacrifices and a record of her part in the war), “although of a quiet, unobtrusive disposition, her unselfish and happy temperament won Lily Denton many friends in her undergraduate days.”
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Great War 100 Reads 