At the Montreal YMCA, one of the first of these members to be killed was Lysle “Laddie” Millen, a 20-year-old Lance Corporal in the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, who was killed in January 1916 in France. Millen was a member of the prewar Boys’ Division and also the son of a prominent member of the YMCA. In a note home to Millen’s parents, David Evans, a former Boys’ Work Secretary who had enlisted in the CEF in 1914, wrote that Laddie was the “ideal of a young man” and that “he left home with a fixed determination to adhere closely to the Christian ideals that he had accepted.”

(Source:  Jon Weier, “The Building of Boys for War: The Militarization of Boys' Work in the Canadian and American YMCAs” Children's Literature and Culture of the First World War. Routledge 2016.)

McGill University continues to offer the "Laddie Millen Memorial Prize" which established by Mr. J. Ernest Millen in memory of his son, Laddie Millen, who was killed in action in World War I. It must have been a substantial endowment because the prize is still several thousand dollars today. 

Louise Carbert