Witty raconteur

Engineer, exercise nut, family man loved nothing more than a good conversation

By: AV Kitching

Roy Read could strike up a conversation with anyone. Well-travelled, articulate and entertaining, Read could regale a roomful of strangers with countless tales of growing up in England, raising a family in Nigeria and resettling in Canada with his wife and four young children.

The witty raconteur headed a household of six — wife Alicia, sons David, Peter (now deceased) and Michael and daughter Jane — who remember him as an adventurous, kind and intelligent man who loved company.

Athletic and sporty, Read encouraged his entire family to take up karate and remained a gym regular well into his 80s. As someone who represented England in his youth in lacrosse, running and hurdles, exercise was important to him.

“A few weeks before he died, when I would go over there he would be doing a plank,” says David, 63. “He’d say, ‘I can do a plank, I’m still strong.’ It was pretty funny at the time.”

Read died on May 9 at the age of 92.

Throughout his life, Read was someone you could count on.

“He was a good guy, an even-keel kind of guy — he was funny, he liked to talk, he knew a lot of stuff,” David says. “He was a fair person and he wanted the best for us kids.”

But he could be stern too, which earned him the nickname Evil Roy. He tolerated no nonsense from the brood of boys — his teenage sons and their friends — who would troop up and down the stairs to congregate in the basement.

It would fall on the “alpha male” to keep things under control and more often than not he would be stomping on the kitchen floor if the music was too loud or getting cross at them for sneaking in alcohol on a school night.

But that didn’t stop them from gathering in the Read family home and eventually they all held Evil Roy in great esteem.

“He was a father figure to several of the children’s friends,” says his wife Alicia, 90. “He taught by example. He was as proud of heck because they called him Evil Roy with the greatest respect.”

“They all loved him and for his 50th birthday they got him a personalized EVL ROY plate as a present to put on the car. At his celebration of life, many of the boys who congregated in our basement all those years ago came to celebrate and reminisce, to thank Roy for being there for them.”

To daughter Jane Patterson, 57, he was never Evil Roy.

“I was daddy’s little girl,” reminisces Jane, from Dunedin, New Zealand, where she’s lived with her family for the last 26 years.

“My dad really wanted a girl. They only had me because my dad wanted to try one more time. He wanted to buy me pretty dresses, but I wanted none of that.”

Not that Read was into pigeonholing any of his children.

“I was not stereotyped into a girl who will get married and have children. He taught the boys how to cook and he taught me how to mow the lawn. As soon as I got my driver’s licence he made me change a tire, check the oil and windshield washer fluid,” Patterson recalls.

He taught David how to drive — “he was a demon driver because he used to rally drive in his youth,” he says — and he taught Michael to paint and to carve.

“It seemed that he knew how to do everything,” says Michael, 61. “When you’re kid you think your dad can do all the stuff, and he did. He knew everything.”

“He was good at being a father. He really knew his children and treated us as individuals. He let us grow up to be who we were to be; he was good at guiding us.”

Roy Benjamin Bridgford Read was born in London, England, on June 25, 1932, to pub landlords Benjamin and Lilian Read, who ran the Elephant and Castle Pub on Old Kent Road.

His father died when he four and he was raised by his mother and grandmother Marion Mills.

“They were both very strong women and he was very sympathetic to women,” Alicia says. “He was a strong feminist.”

The couple, who would have celebrated 66 years of marriage last month, had known each other since childhood.

In the Second World War, Read was one of the 800,000 children who, as part of Operation Pied Piper, were evacuated from “urban target areas” in England to rural English communities. He landed in Farnham, Surrey, and swiftly made friends with the local children, including Peter Ralph and his little sister, Alicia.

When the war ended, Roy returned to London but remained in touch with his Farnham pals. He would bump into Alicia often on his weekend visits back to the countryside, but they were just friends for the longest time.

Then Read, a civil engineer, was posted to Onitsha, Nigeria. Whenever he returned to England on leave he would spend time with Alicia, who had moved to London by then to train as a midwife at Kings College Hospital, Denmark Hill.

The friendship blossomed into love and they were married on July 29, 1959, at the Holy Trinity Church, in Eastbourne, Sussex.

They lived in England for a while before returning to Nigeria with their oldest son David.

Nigeria suited Read. He enjoyed his work supervising the building of roads and bridges on the Niger Delta. The young family lived out in the bush, which could sometimes prove hairy.

“There was a time when I nearly got bit by a spitting cobra which had gone into the chicken coop,” David recalls. “My mum yelled ‘Roy’ and I guess he knew something was wrong just by her voice, because he turned up with a shotgun in his hand and he shot the snake.”

With the onset of the 1967 Biafran War the family — which had grown with the addition of sons Peter (who died in 2018) and Michael — left Nigeria for the U.K.

Daughter Jane was born that same year and life was ticking along, but Read experienced culture shock — he no longer felt at home in his place of birth.

“One of his skills was that he could make his decisions very quickly and correctly — if there was a problem, he could solve it,” Alicia says. “He was very good at his job. But he absolutely could not be in England. He had one bridge to look after and he had to ask everybody before he could even change a bucketful of sand in the mix of the concrete. Drove him crazy; he was used to making his own decisions. He began to get very depressed.”

A visit from a friend based in Nova Scotia, whom Read had first met in Nigeria, prompted the family’s move to Canada in 1968. They travelled west from Nova Scotia, to Calgary, eventually settling in Winnipeg.

“He arrived in Winnipeg and everything just fell into place,” Alicia says. “He went for a drink one lunchtime and started talking to a man who, when he found out Roy was looking for a job, told him he was quitting his job and that Roy should ask for it. And so he did and he got it. It was serendipity, we’ve had a life of serendipity.”

The job was working on the High Voltage direct current (HVdc) Bipole 1 transmission line — which carried power from the generating stations built on the Nelson River to the Dorsey converter station in the RM of Rosser.

“It was revolutionary,” Alicia says. “It was a very important job; he was supervising the foundation work on the pylons that would carry the lines of electricity.”

Read retired in 1994.

“He became a kept man,” Alicia laughs. “I went to work and he did the cooking. But he never did learn how to use the washing machine.”

After Alicia’s retirement, the couple contemplated moving abroad and even considered going back to England. But they couldn’t think of anywhere they liked better than Winnipeg.

Instead, they took up cruising and began travelling the world again, often visiting Jane and her family.

The couple’s last cruise together was to Alaska, where they celebrated their 64th anniversary.

Read was a supportive husband, an encouraging father and a devoted grandfather and great-grandfather.

“Since Roy passed, half of me is missing,” Alicia says. “My brain and my heart have big empty spaces. I miss him the most in bed because he always put his arm around me and it’s not there anymore.

“Sometimes I feel him beside me and I go back in my mind, a long, long way back to when we went to the beach on a date. He was prancing round like a gazelle. He was an athlete and he could run and jump… it was glorious. I thought he was the most handsome man that I had ever seen.”

av.kitching@freepress.mb.ca