Herbert James Spencer

They spent the next 54 years together, marrying at 21 at a civil ceremony at city hall on 16 January 1964, following career adventures in the nascent field of computer science that would take them first to Connecticut, USA and then to Quebec, and finally Vancouver, Canada where they settled and raised a family.

A son of a butcher (Bert Spencer) and a domestic servant (Betty Spencer née Curran), Herb was a scholarship boy who attended Bolton Boys’ Grammar and graduated with a PhD in Physics from Imperial College. His only sibling, Ian Spencer (of Durham), followed in his footsteps to Bolton Boys’ Grammar to become a medical doctor and an anaesthetist.

In the early 1970s, the move to Canada presented opportunities to invite extended family to migrate. Herb and Eileen bought a ten-acre hobby farm in Aldergrove in 1978 and extended the family house for Eileen’s Irish-Londoner father Mick and Kentish mother Bea Horrigan. Shortly after, Herb’s parents Bert and Betty Spencer arrived from Wales via Lancashire and Scotland to a mobile home on the property.

An original thinker, Herb was known by many as a maverick and a renegade. His ideas in particle physics—disputing Einstein’s theory of relativity and waves in favour of magnetic fields and Newtonian mechanics—were so heretical that he resorted to publishing his papers himself on Academia.Edu. An autodidact, Herb read widely in the fields of science, history, politics, philosophy, music, and religion and published his many book reviews, as well as his on biography, on this same site: https://herbspencer.academia.edu/

When Eileen and Herb retired to White Rock, British Columbia, they became leaders of the community, founding the White Rock Philosopher’s Café, the White Rock Social Justice Film Society, the anti-HST campaign, the White Rock History Club, and finally the Saturday Morning Breakfast Club which met at various locations across the years including Michael’s Artisan Bakery and Café, the ABC, and the Roadhouse.

A Camaro-driver, movie-aficionado, collector of wide 1970s’ butterfly ties, stimulating conversationalist, and prodigious lover of music with eclectic tastes (Sibelius, Rachmaninov, Pat Matheny, Vangelis, the Bee Gees, the Beatles, and more), Herb was a friend to many and a deeply loved father to Michael (and his daughter Charlotte), Claire, and Victoria (and her children Magnus, Felix, and Sophie). “Family is everything” he said many times, although he always knew that without his guide in the emotional life, his beloved wife Eileen whom he lost to a 4-year battle with pancreatic neuroendocrine cancer on October 17, 2015, he was unmoored.

Despite heart attacks throughout his life, in his characteristic way Herb refused to go under the knife for medically advised heart surgery. Heart disease finally caught up with him on 25 May 2021 when he had a stroke; this was followed by further strokes and complications that finally took his life on 8 November 2023.

Even as the family is now scattered across countries and continents, Eileen and Herb’s ashes are interred together at the Murrayville Cemetery in Langley, B.C, next to those of their parents. We hope that in some incredible, magical way science has never explained, Eileen and Herb have been, or may be, reunited again.

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” – William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5