Bette
27 May 1907 – 17 Jan 1992
The motherline broke after Bette went to Canada at age 19 and never saw her mother again. Thirty years unforgiven. It was not what she intended when she left.
Bette was christened Betsy May by her Methodist parents in Burslem, “mother” of the six North Staffordshire towns known collectively as The Potteries. Generations of her family had laboured in the pottery trade, their lungs getting clogged with the soot that coated every surface in the smoky, black towns.
At 15, Bette’s future was neatly mapped out: She’d be trained as a handler. Six days a week, she’d stick handles on teacups, hundreds each day. If she did a good job with the handles, she could expect to advance in time to be a gilder like her aunt Gladys, who painstakingly painted a thin line of gold around the rim of each cup.
Bette wanted none of it. Her out came when Aunt Gladys married a Canadian soldier after WWI and quit her job as a gilder to be a schoolteacher’s wife in British Columbia. Gladys and Percy offered Bette a job keeping house for them in the tiny, remote community of Arrow Park.
Arrow Park is where she met John MacCarther, who had eyes so blue you could swim in them, she said, and she did, and then he hightailed it home to his wife in England when Bette told him she was pregnant. Gladys and Percy sent her to Vancouver before her swelling belly could tarnish their status in the community. Bette named the baby Leonard, after her father, but always called him Bob because it hurt too much to be reminded of the man who never forgave her for disgracing him.
Vancouver in the 1920s was growing at the rate of a thousand people a month. Immigrants flooded the city and spilled its banks. In the harbour at False Creek, a shantytown of houseboats—floating slums, The Province called them—caught some of the overflow. Bette and her friend Dora, who washed dishes in the café where Bette found a job waiting tables, rented a houseboat there.