Cunniffe, Richard

Richard Cunniffe, 1905-1996, was born in Cork, Ireland, and came to Prince Edward Island in 1916, later moving to Alberta. He joined the 2nd Alberta Mounted Rifles at High River, Alberta in 1928, and in 1931 he joined Lord Strathcona's Horse in Calgary. During the Second World War he served as a sergeant and then as a warrant officer. He married Hilda L. Paterson, ?-1960, a Calgary nurse, in about 1942 and they had two children, Laura Mai and Keith. In 1951 he became regimental sergeant major, and in 1953 was posted as garrison sergeant-major in Oakville, Ontario. He was commissioned as cadet training officer for southern Alberta in 1958, and retired in 1960. He began gathering Lord Strathcona's Horse artifacts for a regimental museum in the early 1950s and was instrumental in the development of the collection which became the Lord Strathcona's Horse (Royal Canadians) Regimental Museum in Calgary (now part of the Museum of the Regiments). In the 1960s he wrote a number of manuscripts on the history of the Strathcona's Horse, Alberta militia regiments, and Calgary's sandstone buildings, and published a number of books. From 1966-1970 he was a Glenbow Museum guide, and from 1974-1975 a Riveredge Foundation cataloguer. He and his wife, Sylvia, whom he married in about 1970, moved to Greenwood, BC, ca. 1975 where he worked at the Greenwood Museum.