It’s not difficult to provide key clients with a nice evening or a good meal. The real challenge of organizing a successful event is finding a way to give the function legs. But how to make that memory last longer than the night, especially with an elite guest who is entertained frequently throughout the year and over the course of a career?

That was the problem faced by the Atlantic Canada Cruise Association (ACCA). According to Dave Danskin, manager of Heritage Presentation at the Halifax Defence Complex, “The cruise industry association wanted something authentic to impress cruise line executives coming to the city for the annual Port Days conference.”

Halifax, Nova Scotia, is a military town, founded by the British in 1749 to protect their 13 colonies from the French. Later, the port played an important role as a gathering point for convoys taking supplies to the Allies in both World Wars. The centerpiece of the city’s defense network is the historic hilltop Halifax Citadel. Built in 1856 to protect the colony from a threat by republican forces in the breakaway former colonies, the Citadel has become the most visited National Historic Site in Canada. It is also home to the reenactors of the ceremonial 78th Highlands Regiment. For a decade, the group has hosted an internal Regimental Dinner, modeled after those held in the Victorian era, inside the fortress. ACCA decided to harness this history to provide an authentic, participatory event for the top executives attending the Port Days conference.

The Regimental Dinner worked so well that it has evolved into the hottest dinner date in town, used to not only entertain key cruise executives, but guests of companies as diverse as Ceres Corporation and Eddie Bauer. While other places let you observe the past, the folks in Halifax make guests part of the action by providing an evening of authentic, hands-on time travel.

Part of that memory-making wow comes from the explosive blast fired from a 12-pound cannon. The side effect of the cannon’s reverberation is a symphony of car alarms, which ring out from the streets below the Citadel. In Halifax, this serves as the dinner gong.

Michael Ronan, vice president with Royal Caribbean Inter-national and Celebrity Cruises, has attended several of the Citadel dinners. “They brought us in, got everyone dressed in period attire, and did everything they could to replicate how an evening might have been carried out in that era. The layout of the room, obviously, was very conducive because of being rightin the fortress, as were the protocols, the way the service was conducted, and, of course, the presentation of the different courses. I think their effort to describe the different things that were going on, without boring people with it, works really well. They did a nice job of integrating why we were doing certain things and how that might of been part of the lifestyle at the time. I think the evening goes by quite quickly when they’ve got that much going on, and doing it in that environment, of course, is unique.”

The evening starts once the fortress closes to the public. After reporting to a uniformed Highland officer, invited guests begin their time travel by crossing the drawbridge and passing through heavy gates to the cobblestoned parade square. Here men and women are separated to dress for dinner. The men are outfitted as Highland officers with red serge tunics, kilts, tartan knee socks, buckled shoes, and sporrans. Women are dressed in hooped Victorian ball gowns, with feather headdresses, lace gloves, and fans.

Guests receive cocktails in the parade square, then climb the granite steps to the parapets overlooking the twinkling lights of the city and ships in the harbor below. It is then that the cannon is fired. A piper leads the guests into the Soldiers Library in the fortress’ main building. Inside this whitewashed vaulted room, its walls lined in glass-fronted mahogany bookcases, guests are seated at tables laid with linen and regimental silver. Senior members of the regiment act as hosts to explain the evening.

Dinner is punctuated with toasts and traditions. An officer will lead the Loyal Toast to Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. Later, in Highland tradition, the haggis is piped into the library where the host will recite Burns’ Ode before plunging his dirk (the dagger Scots wear in their socks) into the dish, which is then served to the room with a good lashing of single malt whisky.

After dinner, the gentlemen toast the ladies. Highland regiments do this in a number of ways. In Halifax, the kilt-clad men offer their toast standing on their chair, with a foot on the table. The evening ends in the parade square dancing the Gay Gordons, a type of Scottish society square dance, to the strains of the bagpipe.

The challenge with using any type of historical theme is to keep an event from becoming a snooze-fest, with guests bombarded by so many facts they fear a pop quiz at evening’s end. Ronan says, “I think here they’ve succeeded in making it flow. They kept it going. Obviously, that little bit of single malt whisky doesn’t hurt, but I think that’s interwoven well as part of the evening’s activity and the way that’s all handled.”

The key is to work with what is authentic and real for your location. Standout events like the Regimental Dinner will involve guests in the activity, versus an evening of simply presenting history at a distance.

 Details

For details on organizing a Soldier’s Dinner at Halifax Citadel, contact Anne Marie Sime, Business Manager for the Halifax Citadel Regimental Association, at 902-426-7665.

For information on Halifax Citadel Regimental Association, visit www.regimental.com.  

For information about The Citadel National Historic Site, visit www.pc.gc.ca/lhn-nhs/ns/halifax.

Photographs courtesy of Alan Deveau/Parks Canada