Ajax to honour surviving crewmen of "their" ship

The Lake Ontario town of Ajax, named after the British light cruiser HMS Ajax (one of the three cruisers which harried the Graf Spee into internment and eventual scuttling), will be honouring 20 of the surviving crewmen later this month:

The town started life in 1940 as a Second World War munitions plant, Defence Industries Ltd. (DIL), and was named after the battleship HMS Ajax by a contest-winning plant employee. On Jan. 1, 1955, what had been called an "Improvement District," made up of 5,689 souls, became a self-governing entity.

This green scene — surely the envy of many people several dozen concrete kilometres to the west — is the result of a 1958 decision to keep the 6.5 kilometres of Ajax waterfront open, protected parkland for a width of 400 feet. With each tree planted, the memory of the town's most important players becomes rooted ever stronger, not only in soil but in the minds of current residents.

Ajax is nothing if not committed to its history. As early as 1958, the town hosted HMS Ajax Day, which included a presentation of artifacts from the ship along with a scale model. In 1963, the town council began the process of naming streets in new developments after crew members of the victorious battleship, which, along with HMS Exeter and Achilles, defeated the German "pocket battleship" Graf Spee during the 1939 Battle of the River Plate off the South American coast.

Except for their lamentable habit of calling every armed vessel larger than a tugboat a "battleship", this was an interesting article. (Sorry, a minor pet peeve of mine.)

Hat tip to Spotlight on Military News.