Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham BA'75 reflects on the life of her mother, Lydia Bramham BEd'74, the first president of the University of Regina Alumni Association who passed away in February 2022.
The letter is dated Nov. 14, 1951 and advises Miss Lydia Winkler that her leave of absence from Dec. 8 until Dec. 22 was not granted by the Regina School Board because she had not followed the secretary-treasurer’s advice and resigned.
She’d asked for the leave in order to get married and, once married, it was necessary that she resign “to conform to the regulations of the Board.” Only two years earlier, trustees had praised Miss Winkler for her “excellent work” and appointed her to the permanent staff.
Whether Miss Winkler had merely neglected to write the resignation letter or whether it was a small act of defiance, I’ll never know.
What I do know is that she complied. On a wickedly cold December day, she became the beautiful bride of a handsome chiropractor, Donald Bramham. Lydia would later become an extraordinary mother, an elementary school principal, a member of the University of Regina’s first graduating class, founding president of the University of Regina’s alumni association and a member of the University of Saskatchewan Senate.
Lydia Bramham on the U of R campus in the 1970s. Photo by Bruce Pendlebury
This year -- more than 70 years and only a few days after Mom died at age 93 – I found that 1951 letter signed by secretary-treasurer Z.H. Hamilton and three copies of it tucked in books and jumbled amid photos and other papers.
Although Lydia gave every indication of being a feminist, she never described herself that way. For her, it belied how much she had loved being a stay-at-home mother when my older brother, Jack, and I were little. Throughout her life, she argued that a child’s earliest experiences are crucial to their development.
The daughter of homesteaders, Lydia grew up on a hardscrabble, mixed farm during the Depression. Rosenfeld school – either two miles away or three depended on the telling -- had only one room with teachers barely older than some of the students.
“Children are a joy that never ends. Upon them and how they are taught rests the fate or fortune of tomorrow’s world,” she said at her retirement in 1993.
As for profession, “True teachers give not only of their wisdom, but also of their faith and lovingness.”
The daughter of homesteaders, Lydia grew up on a hardscrabble, mixed farm during the Depression. Rosenfeld school – either two miles away or three depended on the telling -- had only one room with teachers barely older than some of the students.
According to her daughter, Daphne Bramham, Lydia was a lioness – literally born under the sign of Leo.
She was described on her final Grade 7 report grade in 1941 as a “clever student” who was “sometimes selfish. . . but cooperative.” Frequently ill with pneumonia, Lydia had missed most of that school year and the year before.
My parents were each other’s best friend. They worked hard together with few gendered divisions about his job or hers. They supported each other in their careers, complemented each other.
High school was a combination of in-room teaching and correspondence classes, followed by “Normal School” in Moose Jaw.
Every lesson and every experience that she’d missed as a farm kid was something she wanted for all children. For us, childhood was flurry of lessons – a mix of sports and culture that included swimming, skating, tap dancing, ballet, French and music.
We learned to swing hammers and not fall off the roof at ages that now might be considered inappropriate, as we ‘helped’ Mom and Dad build the cottage at Katepwa.
My parents were each other’s best friend. They worked hard together with few gendered divisions about his job or hers. They supported each other in their careers, complemented each other. They revelled in the time they spent in Palm Springs after retirement. When Dad had a catastrophic stroke that left him paralyzed and unable to speak, Mom refused to leave his side. Although had never wanted to be a nurse, Lydia cared for him at home until the final days of his life in 2007.
Lydia surveys an Alaskan glacier during a June 2010 cruise to the northern state. It was her first helicopter ride.
My mother’s generation is the one that Betty Friedan wrote about in The Feminine Mystique, post-war women who set aside dreams to raise families only to wonder as they fed the laundry through the wringer washer whether this was all their lives would be.
I don’t know whether my Mom read Friedan, but by the time I was in school full days she needed more in her life that sewing sequins on costumes, modelling in local fashion shows, having tea parties, making ceramic figurines and learning to swim. (Her Red Cross Intermediate badge and certificate from 1964 were also among her papers when she died.)
In September 1974 – more than 25 years after she became the first among six siblings to go to post-secondary school -- the long-delayed letter arrived. Having completed her final requirements in August for a Bachelor of Education, Lydia Bramham was invited to receive her degree at the October convocation.
So, it was back to school first as a student taking correspondence classes through the University of Saskatchewan and later through what was then the Regina campus. We all did homework together at the dining room table.
Lydia also went back to work. By the 1960s, the Regina School Board was desperate for teachers to meet the demands of the Baby Boom generation.
In September 1974 – more than 25 years after she became the first among six siblings to go to post-secondary school -- the long-delayed letter arrived. Having completed her final requirements in August for a Bachelor of Education, Lydia Bramham was invited to receive her degree at the October convocation.
Lydia relaxing at home.
Her relief, excitement and pride in the accomplishment is unforgettable. So too is my own naivete and youthful conceit that day. She curtly rejected my suggestion that she wait until the spring convocation so that we could graduate together.
It is easy to sum up a person’s life by listing their accomplishments and affiliations. For our parents, it’s tempting to filter their lives mainly through that prism of our own relationship to them.
Lydia at Regina on Christmas Day 2019.
But lives are so much more than that as I’ve learned sifting through my mother’s boxes. She’d saved cards, letters and documents dating back more than 50 years. There were photos of her family that I’d never seen. And there were mementoes from hundreds of thousands of hours that I’m so grateful to have shared with her.
She was a lioness – literally born under the sign of Leo. She was fiercely protective and could also be fierce. She fought for me when my father didn’t want me to go to Germany to work for the summer under a university-sponsored program. It wasn’t the working time, he objected to, he feared for me travelling for six weeks alone on a continent he’d never visited and never really had much interest in seeing.
For the first time, Mom was often forced her to rely on me.
But Dad had no comeback when Mom said, “Fine, then I will go and travel with her.”
Despite her German ancestry, Mom had never travelled abroad before even though she’d longed to. Travelling through Europe, we became and remained best friends.
For the first time, Mom was often forced her to rely on me. It was partly because I could speak German and my French was better than hers. But after two months working as a chambermaid at a resort on the island of Foehr, I knew more about the differences between Europeans and us and how strange Canadians often seemed to them.
Lydia at Tofino, B.C. on Christmas Day 2012.
As a daughter, I knew little about her life in the classroom and as the voice of authority in the principal’s office. But I came to know more about it once she moved from home to independent living and, later, to long-term care.
With each more, her life was distilled even further to those boxes of saved cards, documents, photos, scrapbooks and photo albums. They were snippets of a life lived with joy from green-face in a witch costume while she was a school principal to doubled-over with laughter when Mom, Dad and I celebrated one New Year’s in Singapore to shrieking in terror at the monkeys in a Malaysian forest to walking on an Alaskan glacier after her first-ever helicopter ride.
There’s a drawing of her – almost a caricature of my Mom who was renowned for her beautiful clothes, her earrings and her long hair swept up in a bun. They remembered the Mexican lunches, but most of the kids described her as kind, fair and funny.
Every time, I visited we’d go through some of them and, inevitably, there were mementoes from the various schools she’d been at and notes from students. She had an incredible memory and it was only in her final few years that she couldn’t point to class photos from 30 or 40 years earlier and remember almost every child’s name.
There’s a scrapbook I’ve kept that was made by the teachers and students at McLeod School in 1981 when Mom was leaving her first posting as principal to go to a larger school. There’s a drawing of her – almost a caricature of my Mom who was renowned for her beautiful clothes, her earrings and her long hair swept up in a bun. They remembered the Mexican lunches, but most of the kids described her as kind, fair and funny.
In our family, Mom was never really thought of as funny – that was one of Dad’s strengths.
But I finally recognized that years later. Coincidentally, it was when the two of us were honoured to, together, be the masters (mistresses?) of ceremonies at the Alumni Crowning Achievement Awards.
For those of us blessed with wonderful parents, it is devastating when they die no matter what age we are.
Annoyingly, my mother had insisted us spending almost the entire day-of going over and over the script. And maybe it was that glass of wine that was talking, but once we got to the microphone, my Mom tossed it aside and was wonderfully funny as her unscripted self.
For those of us blessed with wonderful parents, it is devastating when they die no matter what age we are. My friend, Anne Giardini, was also deeply connected to her mother. She didn’t know my mother but when I told her, she recounted the day after her own had died.
Anne and her sister went to buy extra copies of the newspaper to send to friends and relatives. Ahead of them in line, another woman was also buying the newspaper. With tears in her eyese, she turned to Anne and her sister, ‘Did you know that Carol Shields has died.’
Lydia was a great Riders fan and she and her husband, Donald, had season tickets for close 60 years. Fandom is a family trait. This photo was taken July 25, 2009 – a day before her birthday – and the day of a Riders game that she went to with me, her grandson, Duncan (left) and son Jack. Both of whom are also UofR alumni.
Unlike Anne’s mother, mine wasn’t a Nobel Prize winner whose death was reported on the front page. And that was the point of Anne’s story.
She said the death of every mother should be front page news because one of the greatest comfort a child can have is knowing that they don’t grieve alone.
Daphne Bramham graduated from the University of Regina in 1975 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and German. She holds a Bachelor of Applied Arts in journalism from the now renamed Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), a Master of Arts degree in Liberal Studies from Simon Fraser University and an honorary doctor of letters from Capilano University. She is a past recipient of the Alumni Crowning Achievement Award for her work as a journalist.
In addition to Lydia’s longstanding association with the University of Regina, her husband Donald Bramham was a member of the University’s Senate and both their son, Jack, and grandson, Duncan, are alumni.
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