05-03 Berthia Devon

Grandmother Bulloch was named Berthia or Bertha, the middle child of seven children of George and Mary Devon. The Devons were large people and great-grandfather Devon was 6' 7" tall and our grandmother was 6' tall. One of her children, our uncle Leslie, weighed 15 pounds at birth, a Commonwealth record at the time.
George was a chemist and invented a calcium softening compound that he wanted to sell to the British Navy and Railway. His real name was Devine. It was well known that his mother was Mary McGregor, the granddaughter of Rob Roy McGregor, the Scottish nationalist. The British hated Rob Roy McGregor.
So, to disguise his Scottish roots, he changed his name from Devine to Devon. Over his lifetime, he built six factories in England and Northern Ireland and employed over a thousand workers making a range of chemicals, paints and lubricants.
His home in Belfast, on the Lisburn Road, is now a public library and can be seen in the photo from 1910. The tall man on the left is our great-grandfather.
Grandmother Bulloch was married to John M C Bulloch in an arranged married between the two wealthiest families in Belfast at the time. In the photo, she is seen with our grandfather and her first child, our father.
All seven children adored their mother and only tolerated their father who was mean-spirited. It was grandmother Bulloch who encouraged five of her children to emigrate to Canada to get away from their father's influence. Father said that when he apprenticed in the woollen trade and made 10 shillings a week, he had to give 9 shillings and sixpence to his father.
Father came to Canada in 1928 to work in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan before moving to Winnipeg and working for “Eatons” as a clothing salesman. He married in 1932 and in the photo, is shown with our mother and me as a baby.
There are wonderful memories of grandmother Bulloch visiting us in Canada, and on one occasion at a dinner at the Royal York Hotel. Father had the orchestra play, "And your mother comes from Ireland." It was such an emotional moment with tears running down the cheeks of our father and his four brothers.
Father wrote his mother every week while she was alive, and his handwriting was a work of art. While in Ireland in 1954, Grandmother showed me one of his letters that she had saved from 1930, where father called her, "The best mother in all the world."