Betty Bolton

Mom was born on November 6, 1926, to Richard and Agnes Davies in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales along with her elder sister Ena and younger brother Dick. When she was 10 years old, she sat the exam to enter the Cyfarthfa “Castle School”; an accomplishment which made her proud.

Her greatest joy in life was dancing which began in her latter teen years attending as many as 2-3 dances a week with her sister Ena in and around the County – often by rail. Those nights were retold many times over right down to a detailed description of the dress and shoes she was wearing. In more recent years, it was Abba’s “Dancing Queen” that she loved.

When the local men returned from War, Mom met our Dad who was also a regular darts partner of her brother Dick. They were married on June 26, 1948, starting a family soon after. With a shortage of housing and other factors, they decided to move to Canada with Dad enlisting in the Armed Forces. From Montreal we moved to France for 4 years, then back to Canada (Kingston), then Alberta (Okotoks and Edmonton), ending with a snowy winter’s drive over the Rockies in to Victoria in 1966.

Before leaving Wales, Mom held two jobs – one as a teen at a millinery store and later an administrative position at a materials plant. Once in Edmonton, Mom started working at Hudson’s Bay, transferring to the Victoria store where she worked until she was 65. She was honoured with “employee of the month” when that still meant something and was offered a management training course which women were seldom offered in those days, but she turned it down as it would mean moving again.

Move they did though, living in several different municipalities including 3 homes where they built new houses utilizing Dad’s carpentry & wallpapering skills and Mom’s interior decorating skills and amazing sewing skills making all the curtain and bedspreads. She could converse knowledgably on many topics, was an avid reader and crossword puzzles solver. a whiz at Jeopardy questions and travelled to many places including Costa Rica, Arizona, Türkiye, and Dominican Republic. Not bad for a shy little girl from a small coal-mining town.

After Dad passed, fate reunited Mom with her close friend Lois resulting in a new-found freedom of weekly shopping sprees and extended lunches where their closeness would cause strangers to mistake them for sisters. That friendship and those years were happy and carefree ones.

Mom was predeceased by our Dad in 1996 and by her son Steve in 2020. She is survived by her two other sons, Carl (Marilyn), Martin (Christine) and daughter Lisa (John). She also leaves behind her grandchildren Lance, Chris, Mike, Courtney, Ashleigh & Rhys as well as 13 great-grandchildren and 3 great-great-grandchildren. She was our guiding star.